Shutter Sisters

overcoming your gear: let’s call it sharking (and, a giveaway!)

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I’ve stood there in shops, staring through glass at glass… coveted glass.

$1599.99. $989.99. $1249.99. Even if I did have the money, how would I ever choose? I need a macro as much as I need a wide-angle. Instead my camera bag is filled with hand-me-downs and compromises, an extremely limited selection of what are generally considered the most ineffective, inexpensive, kit-grade lenses Canon has ever produced.

The Canon EF 28-80mm f/3.5-5.6 II lens is a very inexpensive starter lens with a low build quality. As long as the person using the 28-80 knows its optical shortcomings, that designation may be fine. Otherwise, they may permanently be turned off by its performance. Its optics are mediocre at best, making it nearly impossible to get ultra-sharp pictures. The price is cheap, and so is the lens; the overall workmanship and quality is low.  ~ The Digital Picture

Lately, that’s the one I use most often for nature shots, including the one above.

Build quality of the 50mm f/1.8 is very cheap (as you might expect). This lens feels more like a toy than a piece of optics, with plastic contruction right down to the lens mount.

There is not much to this lens. There is no distance window or markings. There is barely even a focus ring – and the tiny ring that is there is barely usable. Only five non-rounded aperture blades are used in this lens, leading to poor bokeh (image quality of out of focus areas).  ~ The Digital Picture

That’s the one I use for portraits, though I’d give it a better review than that.

And that’s pretty much it. A lensbaby for play, as-yet unmastered. A 10-20mm wide angle that’s slow, tough to focus precisely, and distorting around the edges. All mounted to a camera body that’s widely considered to be the beginner point for SLRs. Except it’s been my starting point for years.

I have never used a good lens, let alone a great one. The same goes for a camera body. I’m afraid to even pick one up for the sake of mortgage payments.

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Our village is filling up with summer residents, rich folk from the States, England, all points in Europe. With the onslaught of Porsche SUVs comes an onslaught of boats that eat money, sails that literally sparkle, crews outfitted in matching gear.

We’ve got a 40-year-old Shark, adopted, a family of small boats not seen much around these parts. Justin’s spent years sandblasting the keel, replacing the bulkheads, poring the internet for used sails.

“It’s so demoralizing,” he said after yesterday’s race. “We came last. I can’t compete with those guys. They’re laughing at us. I don’t even have a roller furling for the jib. The rigging is from the 1960s. There’s no way I can race that boat. I don’t know why I bother.”

Later, when the race results came in, Justin was shocked to discover that he hadn’t actually come last. He’d beaten two boats of the fleet. Two better-equipped boats designed to go fast. He beat them because he’s a good sailor. Not because of his boat, but in spite of it.

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I feel the limitations of my gear every time I reach for my camera. Clunky, lightweight, noisy, imprecise. I see it when I download, my best-case focusing turning out about as well as I imagine others’ worst-cases.

But every now and then, someone who knows about cameras looks at my images and says, “What do you shoot with?” and I tell them. And in that moment, I get… props.

None of this is a competition, but indulge my metaphor: when it comes to light-bending and composition and storytelling with my camera, plenty of people are ahead of me. I’ll never catch them—not with this glass. But I’m not DFL, either (to borrow from the nautical, Dead F*cking Last).

And for now, I’m content with that. I’ll keep pushing, nudging, compensating, overcoming, until $1249.99 falls from the sky into my lap.

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Hello Giveaway!

It’s random giveaway time from our friends at Hello Canvas.

Leave a comment here between now and Tuesday at midnight, and you could win a 20×24 canvas of your photo of choice from Hello Canvas! The prompt: What’s your relationship to your gear? Does it define you? Delight you? Confine you? What are you most grateful for, and how do you see your stable of lenses and equipment evolving in the next year?

Also, winners from our Hello Gorgeous mini contest will be announced on Tuesday. Wheeee!

The winner of the Hello Canvas 20×24 canvas print is Bekkah of Through the Lens, our 68th commenter. Congratulations, Bekkah! And thanks so much to everyone for sharing your thoughts on gear, both today’s and tomorrow’s (and wishlists).


on doing something different

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Until now I’ve been fits-and-spurts with my camera. A hundred (or two, or three) at once. Every couple of weeks if even that, fifteen or twenty shared on flickr at the same time. A daily photo practice? Distant. Deluded. I figured I’d try just the same, starting with a photoblog that might, maybe, lend a little more accountability than flickr.

Daily practice on the mind and days later, we notice bright blue eggs in a robin’s nest tucked into a nearby cedar. And so we started with regular peeking. Three days ago they hatched. Three days ago I put my camera by the front door. Two days ago I saw this. Today I saw this.

In the spirit of today’s most excellent giveaway, I’d like to know: what have you done differently lately in your photography? Are you playing with ISO or white balance? Do you have some new actions, a coveted lens? Did you take a course, discover some new inspiration? Or are you just trying out a new practice?

Comment here between now and midnight Thursday 5/ 20 for a chance to win a 16×24″ fine art print of one of YOUR images on the famed watercolour cotton rag paper by Hahnemuhle, courtesy the wonderful (and internationally-shipping) Atlantic Photo Supply, one of the oldest and most reputable labs in Canada. This is the paper I use. It’s beyond gorgeous. You’ll see your photography in a whole new way, with one of these prints.

The only question: will you keep it for bragging rights, or will you gift it to some lucky loved one? Go!

Congratulations to Erika, our 93rd commenter! You’ve won the fine art print. Atlantic Photo Supply will be in touch to make it happen — can’t wait to hear how it goes. Anyone who is interested in the cotton rag paper of Hahnemuhle — the favourite of the printing artists at Atlantic Photo Supply — can go here to order any print you like and have it internationally shipped. Thanks everyone for playing along!

receiving line

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I’m still hungover. The wedding was Saturday. It’s Monday morning. And it wasn’t even so much the wine, despite me being a human champagne composter (waste not, want not). It was the truffles and the cream cheese tarts and the bruscetta and the cake and the cheeks sore from smiling. Everyone’s cheeks were sore, I bet. An abundance of happiness to the point of facial cramp.

With a pro photographer to take care of a short burst of family portraits, my lovely cousin asked me to be the candid sneak throughout the day, and so I was. I’m so carried away with editing that I’d entirely forgotten my Shutter Sisters turn, and so I rifled through the ones I’ve done so far to share one with you.

I love it because it is so very her. Quick to laugh, generous of spirit. Which is infectious. Which is why I’ve still got a headache, but happily so.

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Today, share with us your captures of weddings and other special events, and tell us a little of how it felt to be behind the camera on that day.

on the virtues of nerve

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There’s a lot happening right now.

The kind of happening that involves an audience that might witness me and think what’s she doing up there? and I don’t get it. That’s what I imagine, anyway, when I can’t sleep. Or maybe it’s that I can’t sleep because of what I’m imagining. I’m not sure what comes first.

In early April life presses through the earth speculatively, a front line subject to nature’s yea or nay. We see wick green budding among brown and marvel could it be? and the smart ones among us throw salt over left shoulders and knock on wood, because the universe counters brash optimism with unexpected snowfalls.

There’s a respect due for that front line. For how bold yet how delicate it is. For how it emerges into a chill, into a lack of guarantees. But it emerges anyway, ready to be noted.

That in itself makes a statement.

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Today, show me your spring as well as your nerve.

pop!

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Maddie turned one and gave me a gift: exactly the photograph I wanted.

Has this happened to you lately? You’ve got a vision, simple or elaborate. You can see the shot in your head. The subject is malleable, the light is good, and click. And click click click click, all the while fearing to breathe in case you jinx the moment. You end up with several of the same composition, from which you choose between subtle tweaks of expression, angle, framing.

And there it is. Exactly what you wanted.

Today, share a recent victory with us. Not the spontaneous or the happenstance, as much as we love those. Show us the shots that you designed and created, and that came off just as you hoped they would — the photographs that make you feel like a storyteller.

a moment of dubious confidence, but I know this much to be true.

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I’ve been thinking lately about what makes a ‘real’ photographer, a ‘real’ artful photo.

You’ve seen it as much as I have. Photography that’s technically proficient but uninspired. Motivational poster-style. A black border and all-caps Times New Roman underneath: REACH FOR THE STARS. Generic landscapes. Posed studio portraits. Stiffness and contrivance. Photographs so self-consciously weighted with the photographer’s interjection that you pause and wonder who wants this stuff?

Somebody does. I guess. People who need to be reminded to AIM HIGH.

Plenty among us are ‘real’ photographers. Educated, paid. Plenty more are learning as we go, halfway through courses, paid on occasion. Plenty more are simply prolific. No matter what you are, you roll in sand with hand-me-down lenses. You chase the flare of a low-hanging sun. You relish the chance to photowalk. All of it because you’re passionate about capturing souls — and it’s that passion that makes you fresh. Your photographs — so unselfconscious, so spontaneous — make me smile. You evoke. You play and follow rather than dominate and stage.

All of you are proof.

It’s not the photographer’s credentials or gear that make a photograph interesting. It’s the story she tells. Never mind ‘real’. This community is authentic. And that makes me proud to be here, with you.

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Today, share with us a shutter sister that inspires you — a woman photographer either known to us, or someone new. I’ve got two. Lauren Peralta‘s portraits are unspeakably beautiful, sexy, dignified. I’d never considered getting a tattoo — or experimenting more with self-portraits — until I saw hers. Sheye Rosemeyer bends light. It does as she bids it. Her photos taste like marshmallow bananas and strawberry cream. While both are vastly different from one another and from me — in method, style, setting, and subjects (and sheer skill) — both make me lean in to my screen and gasp how does she do that?

How about you? Share with us someone we know, or someone we don’t. Tell me how they inspire you to try something different. Today, I feel like basking in righteous female clicks. Pass ’em on.

 

monochrome

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Around here they call the ocean a meat-grinder. Chews up, spits out. Nor’easter storms hit my parents’ house head-on and rip off shingles, drench the house in angry spray.

In a spitting rain I wander through a bramble, blackberry thorns tugging at my pants, and the whole of everything I see feels tired and cranky. I capture drips on the old apple tree, the twist of disintegrating rope that holds the wooden swing by a thread. The ground littered with dead leaves that sink back into earth. The old shed, weathered, the window blown out two decades ago.

But somehow the poetry of it escapes me. It’s just grey. And then I see: that is the poetry. That we endure this winter, that we wait, all of us shuffling, dreaming of fruit.

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Today, share with us your unexpected poetry — and the status of your season.

imperfect love

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Some are happy accidents, and some the reward of patient study. Others are entirely improper, theoretically speaking. But there’s a place in our photographic lives for satisfaction of all stripes.

Internal heckler: The foreground’s out of focus.

Creative voice: True, but…

Internal heckler: When am I ever going to learn to tighten up a couple of stops on the wide-open aperture? It’s not always appropriate.

Creative voice: Yeah, but…

…

Creative voice: Lemme run this through some processing anyway. See what I can make of it.

(ZING)

Internal heckler: Oh… a different skin. Look! They’re a crowd. They’ve gathered. It’s not just a blundered foreground. It’s a part of the story. It is their depth.

Creative voice: I could have told you that.

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Today, share with us a capture that is, technically, a bit of a photographic fumble — but that speaks to you, regardless. 

 

the beauty of backbone: nurturing for Haiti

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It doesn’t unfurl like silk, release a scent, flutter in breeze. A stem draws moisture, a channel of nourishment as well as fortitude. A stem feeds something beautiful. A stem is a backbone.

Nurturing isn’t just about hope or prayer, as welcome as those gestures are. It’s about resources and food and water and shelter. Literal, tangible, everyday caring — the very same we do as mothers. Picking up and putting away. Wiping and lifting and stirring supper with one hand while tussling a scruffy, three-foot head with the other. This is the nurturing that keeps souls safe, keeps bellies from rumbling. It is plain and often unseen and unrecorded and yet it keeps whole families straight up and down, growing taller.

For a while, until we need not be, we can be Haiti’s stem.

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Bright and early this morning, the virtual doors opened at To Haiti with Love, an auction and gathering of creative spirits and many of our own beloved shutter sisters.

René came up with the idea about a week ago — literally. She emailed me, and responded by cannonballing into it, landing on top of her head. Within hours, emails were fast and furious and our community of artistic friends responded without hesitation.

With all proceeds going to the St. Joseph’s family of homes for children in Port au Prince, Haiti, we’re selling a Mondo Beyondo pass from the lovely Jen Lemen and Andrea Scher, a parade of beautiful (and many familiar, in these parts) photographic prints, original artwork, clothing, a coveted Shutter Sisters flash bulb necklace, my mother’s unspeakably wonderful bird mobile, homemade maple marshmallows, and a weekend ski getaway in a historic cabin in Telluride, Colorado that comes complete with a small, blonde, Maritime female hobo-skier camped out on your front porch. And that’s just to name just a few of the treasures up for bidding. More items will be added every day, so visit often throughout the week — we’ve got such fabulous items waiting in the wings I can hardly keep my grinning mouth shut.

As photographers and authors and painters and toymakers and quilters, we offer what we know. Useful things, beautiful things. All tangible. Perhaps it’s not the same as being able to pick up, dust off, offer embraces and warmth as motherhood would compel us. Perhaps it’s much, much better. It’s the means and the resources from which self-nurturing springs.

St. Joseph’s nurtures Haiti’s future innovators and artists and leaders. It creates family where there was none. Let’s nurture them in the endeavour.

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At the heart of all things good, there is a stem of love and caring, support and nurturing. Whether it’s over the miles, giving to perfect strangers or to our own children, we outstretch our arms and hold those who need to be held. We are women. It’s what we do.

This month we’re celebrating how we love with our One Word Project for the month: Nurture. If you’re new to the One Word Project we invite you to read more about it on our OWP about page.

What does the act of nurturing look like in your everyday? What does nurturing look like when it’s an extraordinary act?

love on a teaspoon

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He’d never been so sick. Scorching to the touch, dripping, lethargic, coughing uncontrollably, waking up through the night in delirious discomfort. The kind of sick that you watch the clock for, to keep ahead of symptoms with proactive teaspoons of relief. The kind of sick that gets him whatever his listless whine requests: a fourth episode of Backyardigans, a bubble bath at lunchtime, marshmallows in his alpha bits. 

Today, show us candid quietness and caring and neediness. Show us exhaustion and pajama days. Show us unposed, unglittery, unbuoyant love.