Shutter Sisters

state of being, state of spring

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A longitudinal fissure separates the human brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres, connected by the corpus callosum. The sides resemble each other and each hemisphere’s structure is generally mirrored by the other side. Yet despite the strong similarities, the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different…

On the left side–the side of my head dominated by a cubicle farm–stuff’s getting lined up to get done. Woken up from what had to have been the worst case of cold-weather despair I’ve felt in years, my left brain is ready to kick some manuscript butt, some income butt, some tax butt, and some photographic butt. My left brain is tough-loving itself. My left brain is ready for stumps and puddles.

On the right side–the side of my head dominated by a grassy meadow–stuff’s getting let go. Stuff that was turning my green, sun-washed open space into a black-clouded tangle. All the self-inflicted agony and doubt and thumbtack shoes, as much a part of the human condition as capillaries and pancreas. Fear and shame and all those stories about how I’m fraudulent and no good. It’s irreconcilable stuff. And so rather than trying to convince it away I self-soothe, a mama to myself: Now, now, tangle. Sleep for a bit.

You know what happens when you let go? You make space. Space for the left side to organize the picnic, pitch the tents, and hang the paper lanterns. Space for new things to happen.

It’s spring. May as well abandon all that thinking in favour of some good, simple doing. Roses on cheeks.

What’s your state of mind? Patch together old or new photography to interpret your left and your right, right now.

 

still with life

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I’m still on this abstract kick. Waiting for spring, maybe. I’ll cop to that. In the meantime, inanimate things around the house speak to me, asking to be turned into something else. Or into an idea, an emotion, stripped of everything else until it becomes movement, colour, singularity.

Today, find something around the house, put it in pretty light, get close, and see what you can make of it. Try thinking beyond things that are already pretty, though this pop-up book comes close. Rather than reaching for a favourite memento or vase of flowers or a bowl of fruit, find a pile of lego or a coil of string or an empty glass bottle. Make it into more than itself, or show me some past moment where photography felt like that: the animation of inanimate things.

I spy

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I don’t want him to smile. Not like that. Not like HA HA CAMERA LOOK AT MY FUNNY FACE or OH ALRIGHT MOMMY BUT YOU OWE ME ANOTHER TOONIE. I want to catch him absorbed in something other than the act of having his picture taken, and so I skulk. My shutter tiptoes, hunting immersion. I want nothing else other than the moment of processing: taste. The love child of pink and red. Maraschino!

Today, show me photographer-as-skulk-artist. Show me what you peeked at.

 

out of hibernation

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A blizzard, then an ice storm. Then rain, then a cold snap, and everything freezes solid. Foliage is dead and buried, brittle or frozen. Everything hibernates.

Go ahead, says February. Find my beautiful. And I’m not talking about that salt-weathered barn in the middle of that field. No standing half a mile back. Get up close. Make something of nothing.

I’ve got a bit of a plan now. A wide-open aperture, a deliberate shoving through of foreground, a focusing on the middle. Lying in snow, stalks tangled up in my camera strap. It makes camera into brush, composition into canvas.

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It doesn’t matter what you think you’re shooting. What’s in front of you is not your photographic subject. Your photographic subject is whatever that thing or person or scene evokes. Your subject is the feeling, the story, or the questions you raise by capturing that thing or person or scene one way versus another. Let’s strip this down and test it. Here’s a bunch of stuff.
I looked at the table in front of me. A coil of wire, some reflective paper, a pad of steel wool, some bolts, unraveled wool, crumpled paper and too much else to make sense of. I looked back up at the instructor.

Take whatever looks interesting, and photograph any of these subjects. She pushed a paper across the table to the group of us.

Loneliness
Love
Cold
Warm
Fear
Safety

It doesn’t matter what materials you use. What matters is your creative intention in arranging and capturing them.

I choose ‘cold’ and photographed it. And I forgot it until now, or at least forgot the connection between that abstract photography course and what I’m looking for when I’m outdoors in February. I’m not looking for pretty subjects. I’m looking for shape and line, company and loneliness.

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The first time I did it, it was an experiment, an exercise in blurring eyes and looking to see what else I’d found other than a withered, mid-winter hosta. I’ve been on hiatus from Shutter Sisters for a while, and now I’m back at the very peak of my photographic dry season (which I write about every year without fail, each time with that whiny, northeastern lilt). And so I remembered the basics.

Have you ever abstracted subjects to their elements? Have you set out with the intention to construct a photograph of colour – just colour – or line, shape, texture, or space? I’d love to see. Either that, or just tell me how you’re doing and what you’re shooting. It’s been too long.

placekeepers: another bel kai necklace for the capture collection (giveaway!)

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There’s almost nothing quite so steadfast as beachgrass. It digs in deep to keep beaches from washing away, holding its place through hurricanes, blizzards, and seasonal sleep. On its own a blade of beachgrass is unspectacular but together, in vast schools, they glimmer like a thousand mackerel, swishing through salt air just the same — as one entity.

We don’t pay these things enough thanks — these proud and plain and useful elements of ourselves that keep life from washing away. They are placekeepers. They do the humble work of rooting magical things.

I’m delighted to share with you my Bel Kai Designs necklace, the newest treat added to the Capture Collection of Shutter Sisters photographic jewelery. To celebrate, we’re giving one away today. Comment here by midnight PST to be eligible. Tell me this: what helps you keep your place in this life?

space for space

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At the MOMA in New York City, my attention was divided.

There was art, sure. It stares right back at you. But more than what hangs on the walls, it was the building — and watching people and light move through it — that was masterpiece.

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.” ~ Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947), Dialogues (1954)

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Today, share with us some unexpected art. Lines found in nature, pleasing shape, abstracts, spaces, or the literal — a capture of something created. Tell us about your own experience in absorbing the world as art — intended, or not.

a face in the pell-mell

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Hey, said Tracey. Can you do a post tomorrow for the OWP? The word is ‘faces’.

Sure! I flipped through the images I’ve taken in the past couple of weeks, a blur of family gatherings and trips and cottages and beaches that’s created a processing backlog of epic proportions. But I couldn’t find much in the way of faces. Which is strange, really… or maybe not. My subjects of late don’t tend to oblige or do anything other than tug on their eyelids or stick out tongues or run away or pull the Inglis family dash ‘n giggle and so, to capture them, I have to be willing to *not* particularly capture faces, but scenes and action and stories instead.

But every now and then, aided by the momentary daze of exhaustion, I’m granted stillness. And in those dazey moments, if my camera is within reach, I get near-frantic with wanting to do something epic or unique or just really really really sharp. Because look. It’s a FACE. Just a face. But when you only have 3.2 seconds, you can only want so much.

I try though it slips through my fingers, the portrait already running away from me before he does. I click two relatively straightforward shots. Then, in the last one I’m allowed, I try a little more abstraction, an unusual framing, an adjustment in position to create a more interesting background. One shot of quirk and then he’s as gone as the pokey little puppy of our favourite book, running pell-mell.

I’m happy to capture the pell-mell, too. But when I get a face — even for 3.2 seconds — ahh. What a gift.

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Today, share with us your unscripted portraits. Those rare gifts of a face that’s genuinely unaware of the camera, immersed in life, and true to a soul.

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Note from Tracey:

We are thrilled to be partnering up this month for the One Word Project with the amazing and inspiring photo community of I Heart Faces. What better word than faces to inspire you to shoot and share photos of the amazing faces in your life?  Check out our OWP about page for the scoop on how it all goes down each month.

And if you’re going to be in NYC for BlogHer weekend, be sure to sign up for the I Heart Faces Photo Walk (Thursday, Aug 5th). You’ll find all the details as well as how to sign up over on their site!

I am thinking it’s a sign

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The colours diametrically opposed to each other… are those which reciprocally evoke each other in the eye. ~ Goethe, Theory of Colours, 1810

Goethe’s talking about the colour wheel, and about how blues and orangey-yellows go together because they face one another on a psychological spectrum of how our eyes process light. I’m imagining how he might have said that, in the German-born way of 1810: reciprocally evoke. It strikes me as extraordinarily un-1810-ish. It makes me wonder what Goethe might have thought of synth-pop.

I am thinking it’s a sign that the freckles
In our eyes are mirror images and when
We kiss they’re perfectly aligned
And I have to speculate that God himself
Did make us into corresponding shapes like
Puzzle pieces from the clay

~ Such Great Heights, The Postal Service

Could be the wet bokeh. Could be the light play of crystal. Could be that I’m thirsty, and that Justin’s mom makes the best iced tea anywhere, and that’s coming from someone who pretty much, more or less, thinks ‘iced’ plus ‘tea’ spells ‘sacrilege’.

But it’s none of that. It’s the hunches of Goethe.

Blue, to me, is the shocking depth of everything we don’t know. It is that feeling you get when you’re treading water and can’t see the bottom, both enveloped and exposed. It has an overwhelming way about it, blue. It says so much. It is a constant reminder of depth.

If blue is all that, orangey-yellow is the sproing of a trampoline. It is stimulation, energy, ideas. It feels much less complex, with less layers, though it’s not as simple as happiness or optimism. It’s an unspoilt leaning-forward into wind.

Put together, these colours feel like what my insides are. Not that I’m saying I’m all those things. I’d never presume to personify anything other than Kate, and when asked, I can’t name my favourite colour. But these two never fail to make me opt out of conversation and immerse through the lens, chasing the why of why this particular combination plucks the basest of my strings.

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Today, I’d love to see your state of seeing — that prime condition of light or colour or scenery that, every time it springs up, inexplicably compels you to geek out with your camera. How does this prime condition reflect who you are? Why do you think you seek it out — why does it resonate?

 

little miss muffet

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I could hardly breathe.

The good kind of hardly-breathing.

I felt invited, somehow. The spider was translucent, moist, new. Busy, but she tolerated my company as well as my lens. A few times I got too close to her web’s anchoring points and made her world shake and she skittered to safety, annoyed.

Sorry, I whispered. Sorry.

I imagined her glaring at me as she made her way neatly back to the centre. She was right to glare. Her web is her craft, her life source. She does us the favour of finding blackflies and mosquitoes and houseflies delicious. In return, we do her the favour of admiring her and her kind.

Thank you, little spider. I think this every time I see one, even about the plain ones, the ones not nearly so pretty as she. Thank you for being so delightfully hungry, so hungrily industrious.

This hardly-breathing moment is brought to you courtesy of the spider, but only partly. Also responsible is the light. It shone at an angle that morning, low in the sky still. Seeing how it draped lazily across the spider’s art, I laid down on the grass and shot up, from underneath, and into that light. It made diamonds for her.

Today, share with us your hardly-breathing moments. Those during which every press of the shutter is a prayer. Please be properly exposed and focused and clean oh please oh please oh please oh my gosh look at this. Magic. <click>

good morning, summer

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Another flash of lightning illuminated the night outside his window, and he startled.

“Do you know what it is, Evan, when the lightning comes?”

“No,” he whispered, sinking into his bed.

“It’s mother nature squirting a flash of sky soap onto her brush. Then the thunder comes just after, and that’s mother nature scrubbing the sky clean. It takes a lot of work, you know, to scrub the sky clean. It’s a big sky. It’s all over the world. And she doesn’t just give it a rinse, when it thunders. She scrubs it until it squeaks. There’s no cleaner sky than the sky after a storm, sweetie. Clean like sapphires.”

“And the plants like that, mommy?”

“They do. A scrubbing storm gives them plenty to drink, and sunshine that’s all crisp and delicious. When it’s thundering and raining all the trees and all the flowers and the grass and the zucchinis and basils and peppers and blackberries stretch like this — AAAHHHHHH! — and they gulp and gulp and gulp and you’ll never see anything so happy.”

“Did mother nature make the earth?”

“She did. It was a lot of work but she’s a good worker.”

“Where did people live, before mother nature did her work? Did they live on Mars?”

(Because when you’re five-and-a-half, every story must end with SPACEMEN.)

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This morning at 7:38 AM, spring gave a deep, gentlemanly bow to summer. Poor spring. He’s earnest and lovely but really, he’s the prep cook. He’s in charge of underground awakenings. Then everything bursts up all full of pride and summer swishes in trailing the scent of wild roses and peonies.

This morning, I’m gulping the work of mother nature and her seasonal children. You should, too. Celebrate it with me today. Show me their scrubbing and tidying and birthing from where you are.

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Congratulations to the winners of the Hello You contest:

The Grand Hello goes to Leslie/Emerson Simone Photography’s Pondering.

And the 2 runners up are Casie’s Me and Spencercasa’s Me too.

Thank you everyone for sharing yourselves with us…you are all beautiful! And thanks to Hello Canvas for the fab prizes!