Shutter Sisters

fashion over function

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Continuous shutter, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

But no, I thought, considering this post. This is not so much about a series of shots. This is more of the afterthought of presentation–this is about the much-adored diptych, or whatever you’d call it with more than two.

And so naturally, I hit flickr up for inspiration. And what I found there was far beyond my little ocean-going, baby-in-hand experiment–what I found there was thematic, conceptual. Diptych done not for the purpose of function (stringing the above together as a diptych is a big ol’ DUH) but done for fashion, for art.

And so I offer up this humble series with a plea: show me your less obvious diptychs. Show me relationships between subjects that are about more than just sequence–show me push-and-pull angles, colour contrast, echoing shapes, macro versus landscape, portrait-by-bodyparts. Or even a self-portrait. Now there’s an idea…

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Psst… want to see a real n-tych master (a.k.a. someone who knows what to call diptychs of two-plus)? Check out Tonya’s set here. Fashion gold.

 

on the internet

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The first words of hers I read are among her last—the blog post she’d written for her family to publish after she died. In her farewell post she writes:

…the small stuff is very small and not worth your time and attention. Gossip and resentments, worrying about things that never happen, fearing the unknown. Let it go my lovelies, breathe and just be good to each other. I realized not long after my diagnosis that life is too short to spend it hurting people and holding onto the anger we have for those around us.

It’s not the first time I wish that such fine clarity didn’t come at such a cost.

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Then I read this and it knocks my bloated, plain, aging self off the couch I spend too much time on, and I wonder why California has to be so damned Pacific and why the Alantics have to be so damned… Atlantic, and I wish the land in between would go POUF so that Elaine and I could, you know, get a little drunk together. Tonight.

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In this place the water rushes in a steady current, clean and fresh. The underside of the creek bridge brushes against my back as I crouch.

This is not a photo of a boy in a tunnel. It is of the black in there, the tar-black. And the light. And of how either the darkness or the lightness wraps around you depending on where you choose to stand.

What’s on your mind? Show us with your camera.


in need of practice

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Photographing kids is simply a matter of rapidfire optimism. I’m fine with kids, not self-conscious as a photographer because they’re not self-conscious of themselves. I don’t have to tell kids what to do with their hands.
 
But when it comes to adults—here I am, and you may take my picture, and please don’t make me regret it, and where do you want me to stand?—I’d rather shoot incognito from behind a bush. Pervy, I know. But otherwise, I clam up.

The gorgeously ripening Bon asked me to take maternity portraits of her at nearly 29 weeks (given her moody diva of a cervix, this is a fabulous accomplishment achieved thanks to many months of strict bedrest) and when she did, I balked a little.

Inside I was thinking GOD yes! I’d LOVE to! Every time I’m with you my trigger finger’s twitching for want of my camera, but I’m too shy to ask.

When the day came I knew what I wanted—more her than the belly, notsomuch the typical, something un-contrived and non-cutesy—but was amazed at how much it felt like juggling.

I’ve got to go all-manual instead of aperture priority because I need to trick the camera into over and underexposing because that’s what I want, but how do you do that again? I need to hold down the +/- button and click the clicker at the same time, then hang on, now that’s going to be too much, let me check… <click>

 

She says Oh, have we started? I think I blinked  and I stammer sorry, just checking my settings, you can sit for a bit… and then it occurs to me: adults need guidance, reassurance, chit-chat. When you look through your lens and think to yourself that’s perfect!  you need to say it, tell her how lovely she looks by the windowlight.

All that and I hadn’t yet considered composition. So busy thinking of rapport and focus and exposure, I cut off her arm for fifty frames in a row—visually speaking—and the angle of it draws energy straight off the edge. Her face, expression? The light? Dreamy. But the damn arm, the arm! GAH! How could I have not seen that? Even drastic cropping can’t seem to reinvent this creative stumble.

Fascinating, though, and I want to do more, much more.

Sisters, I need your help. What are your principles for taking great portraits—intentional ones, not candid—of adults? How do you keep all the balls in the air?

 

the nova scotia quilting mafia

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…and my mother? She’s the godfather. Teacher, retreat organizer, gallery star, historian, ball-busting unionized steveodore complete with warm-from-the-oven rhubarb swirl cake. All that and she’ll whip up a mobile in a weekend, ‘just a little something’ (or at least littler than a handpieced, handquilted 20-year warmth-giving work of art), and there it hangs at our front door, swinging and spinning with every arrival or screendoor breeze.

I know, I’m bragging. But she’s my mom. And she loves polka dots. And stripes. And she points to the little one all by himself at the very bottom, the blue one, and says that one’s for Liam, you see, there are his stars. I got the fabric from an old pair of flannel boxer shorts from Frenchy’s.

Memory box shmemory box. This is love, right now, that of a grandmother.

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This week, I’d love to see your creative shots of creativity—funky weekend projects, canvases, fabric creations, sketches, cakes—yours, or someone else’s. Tell us about it—where did the idea come from? Did it turn out as you’d hoped? Nothing against utilitarian snapshots, but can you capture it with the verve it deserves?

‘Cause the more we see each other retreating to create art that’s not needed but wanted, the more likely we’re apt to postpone vaccuming that can wait. And that, my friends, is time finely spent.

to honour and protect

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They only live for ten hours, you know, or three days, or barely a week, or something like that, said Justin to me gently, puzzled as to why I stood there with the ailing butterfly in my hand. And I thought well then that’s a lifetime, and a whole new way to think about ten hours or three days or barely a week.

You are good and beautiful and perfect, I whispered to the butterfly as he wriggled faintly, beaten by a broken wing. He seemed to be listening. You go on to be an elephant or a brook trout or a tiny baby boy, and have fantastic adventures of a whole new kind. You take your glorious yellow with you, thread it into your next soul so we all can admire it forever.

This morning I went back to the hosta and he’d been blown by the wind into its stem forest. I righted him, delicate as he was, already having lost the moisture and suppleness of life, and spoke to him again but this time he was elsewhere, and all that seemed left was just his shell.

But I know better.

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Today, share with us a vision of something that’s moved you deeply – no matter how small. 

quoteable photable

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Children are born true scientists. They spontaneously experiment and experience and reexperience again. They select, combine, and test, seeking to find order – “which is the mostest? which is the leastest?” They smell, taste, bite, and touch-test for hardness, softness, springiness, roughness, smoothness, coldness, warmness: they heft, shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub, and try to pull things apart.

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983)

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Let’s see some photographs that interpret this gem—show us the scientists in front of your lens.

through the looking glass

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ALICE

she ate from a plate called EAT ME
and she grew up so tall.
she drank from a cup called DRINK ME
and down she shrank so small.

and so she changed
while other folk
never tried nothin’ at all.

Shel Silverstein

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Got any photos that demand accompaniment–a poem, song lyrics, a quotation from some long-passed soul?

the sparkling fifth

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Sarah Jessica Parker has said of the characters in Sex and the City: There’s not just the four of us girls. There’s a fifth, and she’s New York City, and she sparkles.

Here, there’s not just the one subject—a boy, for his first birthday—there are two. The boy and the light.

A photo is a snapshot when light is absent—there, obviously, but not playing an active role. That’s alright sometimes. For when you grab the camera to snap cookie dough on a cheek, candles on a cake.

For me, snapshots become more conscious when that special sort of light plays to my favour by chance—inches from a windowpane on a cloudy day, all diffused and wistful, or a burst of beloved flare that bounces off the water, glowing like some watchful spirit.

Specialness in light can be summoned, too, by calling it on stage: tracks on the kitchen ceiling, for instance, thrown out of focus for just what I wanted—the feel of a vintage wonder wheel, a circus, stars for my birthday boy and his spirit-brother.

I need it today. Show me light that’s conscious and manipulated, or discovered by chance, featured as that sparkling ‘fifth character’. Send some my way, will you?

bits and bobs

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When he’s in his highchair I can’t resist: my hands find their way underneath to squeeze his legs, my nose to his nose as he wracks in giggles, squeals in my ear.

Three months premature and just two pounds when he was born, his first shoes are a size three, newborn-sized. He’s two weeks shy of his first birthday.

As adorable as they may be, full-term babies are comically enormous to me now, linebackers. Under the cuff of these pants I can feel his calf between forefinger and thumb, his skin chilly there as it always is, skin soft, mine. I could look at this photo in fifty years and have that sensation as clear as today.

Someday he’ll be a man, hardened and fuzzy all over, muscled and definitive both in personality and stride. And I’ll remember him as he was, lying in humid incubation next to his mirror-brother, waiting for life to begin.

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Baby-feet, lover-torso, sisters holding hands. Show us piecemeal photography today, will you?

my kinda truthiness

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This is something to own, to make clear: the day we went to Ross Farm I took 300 pictures in two hours.

I’m a ruthless deleter, and proud of it—the final tally was 60 barely acceptable shots, 12 flickrable.

Early on the learning curve my goal was to improve my shooting ratio—to be happy with one in five shots instead of one in twenty (or thirty, or forty). Admirable, sure.

But then I had kids.

And then there were the mid-frame tackles and the naked streaking and the radioactive snot (we won a Boogitzer for the above, and now we’re rich) and the blur, the constant, unintentional, tasmanian-devil blur.

So now I must fess up to worshipping the continuous shutter, to being in the market for extra storage, to being shamelessly, unapologetically devoted to the Why Take One Frame When You Can Take Fifteen?  school of photographic thought. To be creatively fulfilled (and not demoralized) simply by bettering my odds.

That’s my truth. What’s yours?

What’s exploded in your life that’s flipped your philosophy, changed how you take pictures?