Shutter Sisters

Against Cheese!

By

“Make a face, J!” I called out, camera ready and aimed downwards.  He readily complied with the most ferocious look he could muster.  And so it went, for the next few minutes; every time the lens was fixed on him, he’d strike a fierce pose.  I couldn’t have been happier.

If you’re like me, you don’t ever ask anyone to say “cheeeeeese!” when you are photographing them.  If you’re REALLY like me, you try not to let your subject even see your camera as you shoot.  Sometimes, however, you’ll want to make contact between your subject’s eyes and your lens, and on those occasions, telling them to “Say Cheeeeese!” will probably not result in the authentic image you were hoping for.

By asking J simply to make a face, I gave him the freedom to express himself as he wished instead of trying to manufacture an image based on my own idea of how one should look in a photo.  I think the resulting image was much more satisfying than a big forced toothy grin.

Share with us today your most genuine faces, authenticity of the moment unencumbered by cheese.

Framing Tells Half The Story

By

I was late to a live acoustic music show at a little coffee shop, and I found a seat somewhat removed from the other patrons and the band.  During the performance, I happened to glance over to my left, and that’s when I saw her, absentmindedly playing with her hair, soaking in the music, with the late afternoon light from the window subtly illuminating her from behind.  Instantly smitten, I turned my lens towards her, carefully composed the shot and clicked.

I am a big fan of shooting from the hip, but for this photo, I was very intentional about the way I arranged the visual elements of the image.  I wanted the viewer to know that I was at a distance from the subject, that most likely she was a stranger, and by framing the shot within an actual environmental border (the dark outline of the wall on the left, the top of a chair below, and the gentleman on the right), there is a sense that I, the photographer, am looking in from the outside.

In post-processing, I actually considered cropping out the dark borders to zoom in more on the subject.  Doing so, however, didn’t tell the story I wanted to convey–namely, that this was one of those random encounters with beauty that I often observe admiringly from a distance, hesitant to get any closer for fear that detection of my presence would chase the moment away.  I was glad that I composed the shot as intentionally as I did, because in this case, the framing really does tell half the story, at least for me.

How have you used framing to tell your story?  Have you ever framed your subjects in borders already present in the environment?  Please share with us your images and any tips you may have for framing.

……….

And come back tomorrow when we announce the new word for our One Word Project for August!

sunday school: going slow

By

There is a time for going slow, and there is a time for moving fast.  And then there is a time for going slow when all around you is moving fast.  I recently realized this when I found myself in a crowd of downtown tourists whizzing by me on all sides from all directions.  I am not a fast walker.  I am a stroller, an ambler, a meanderer, a wanderer, a dilly-dally-er of the highest order.  This is especially true when I have a camera in my hands and music in my ears.

Instead of picking up my pace to keep up with the crowd, I decided to slow it waaaay down, and just stand around as everyone rushed past me.  It was a bright sunny day, and I could have easily snapped sharp images of people as they walked by, but I decided to capture the sense of being surrounded by motion by using a slower shutter speed.  To do this, I decreased my ISO to 100, narrowed my aperture to f/16 and was able to get the shutter down to 1/10 of a second, which was plenty slow to capture all the commotion of the moment. 

Sometimes (or always, in my case) it’s a good idea to slow down and let the whirlwind swirl on by.  Your life won’t pass you by because it’s not in that whirlwind.  It’s with you, however long you may dawdle, in this moment, in this place.

Do you like to slow down in the midst of a fast-paced world?  Show us how.  Guide us on a little stroll through your images.

vive la snail mail!

By

Dear Shutter Sisters,

Shortly after I posted here about wanting to get back into the habit of writing letters and using photography to facilitate that, I got a Facebook message from Mika, a member of the Shutter Sisters community, about something she was participating in called The 100 Postcard Project.  According to the website, it’s “a grassroots initiative to revive the art of personalized, material human connection through the writing of postcards and letters. Collaborators on this project aim to write 100 postcards or letters in 100 days, between May 22 and August 29, 2010, artistically rendered or otherwise.”  I got excited that other people were interested in snail mail, too!  And then a week or so later, a friend of the family began sending us  postcards.  I started sensing a revolution brewing…

I received my gorgeous photo/postcard from Mika last week, and it was such a lovely feeling to receive something with my name handwritten on it, knowing that it was meant just for me, not a mass message to an email list or a blogpost for an anonymous audience.  It made me wish that more people could experience this for themselves.  Then this week, when I read Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s Mission of the week–to pair up her readers as pen-less pals (e.g. the digital version of pen pals), it clicked…Snail Mail Shutter Pals for Shutter Sisters!

So here’s how this will work.  If you would like to start exchanging a photo and/or letter/postcard/note with another Shutter Sister, leave a comment below with a functioning email address [in the email field of the comment form, not necessarily in the comment body itself].  Within the next week or so, I will play matchmaker and pair you up via email to exchange mailing addresses.  You will then send your Shutter Pal a photo and a short (or long) note about that photo and what it means to you, what it says about you, or whatever else you want to write about.  Or, if sending a photo is too much pressure, just a note or postcard will be great too.  And to help you along, I am giving away a packet of Photojojo’s mailable photo frames to two commentors.  They’ll instantly turn any 4×6 photo into a postcard!  Leave a comment by Monday night 10pm CDT to be entered to win.

Isn’t this the perfect way to say Hello to each other?  Who’s with me now?  Viva la snail mail!

Peace and Love,

Sarah-Ji

P.S. If you’re daunted by the idea of letterwriting, start out by simply writing a note on the back of a photo, like a postcard, or sending an actual postcard.  I think of postcards as the Twitter of the epistolary form, and that makes it much less intimidating.

P.P.S. If anyone wants to send me Postcards From Italy, feel free to do so!

You Or Your Memory

By

Digging through a multitude of miscellaneous boxes, attempting to separate wheat from chaff, I stumbled upon several photographs from almost a decade ago nestled amongst the chaos of junk mail and official documents.  These weren’t just any old snapshots; they held the keys to a bounty of some of my fondest memories that had somehow gotten misplaced with the busyness and clutter of every day life over the years.

Blasting Blink182 all the way down through Santa Cruz to Pebble Beach…finding out Pebble Beach is actually a Golf Course…climbing the big pile of boulders pretending we were on our Big Rock Candy Mountain…pretending we didn’t hear the maintenance staff yelling at us…watching the kite surfers soar over the bay as the sun dipped lower in the western horizon…wandering around for hours and hours with no need for either a plan or small talk…These are a few of the memories that come rushing back from one of my favorite vacations ever, visiting my dear friend Josh from high school.  And all it took was glancing at a couple photos…

++++++++++++++++++

Have you ever had a flood of reminiscence wash over you simply by looking at a photo?  Maybe now is a good time to take a stroll down memory lane; go ahead–dig up the old albums and photoboxes, or scroll back to your very first photos posted to Flickr.  And don’t forget to share with us your links to images and the memories they conjure up!

sunday school: a little tilt goes a long way

By

This is a picture of sheer exhaustion.  After a fun-filled birthday party complete with jumpy castle and a Darth Vader piñata, too little food and too much sweets, we slowed down at home by painting her nails.  So there she sat in her chair, carefully holding her hands just so to avoid smudging the fresh sparkly polish, when she just couldn’t keep her head up any longer and she fell into a much needed slumber.  After my initial response of a mother’s adoring “Awww, my poor, tired child,” I did what any sensible Shutter Sister would do and grabbed my camera.

It’s not often that my girl will hold still to have her photo taken, so it was quite a treat to have the freedom to shoot away.  I took about twenty pictures from different angles and distances, but none of the images stood out to me.  On the very last shot that I took, I decided to tilt the camera a tad bit to make the framing less rectangular, and that ended up being the shot that I felt captured best what I wanted to convey, namely the haphazard placement of her hands and arms and head in a chaotic configuration that only children can happily sleep in.

This little tilt of the camera that forces the horizon to be at an angle to the bottom of the image frame (as opposed to parallel to it) is sometimes called the Dutch angle or Dutch tilt.  I have found it quite useful in adding some visual appeal to an otherwise bland image.  I try to use it sparingly, but when I do, more often than not, I love the result. 

If you’ve never tried the Dutch angle, I highly recommend it the next time you’re shooting portraits or even a still object.  Play around with how your frame the shot (i.e., direction of the angle in relation to the subject, where the subject is placed in the composition, etc.), and you just might be pleasantly surprised.  For some great examples, you need look no further than our own Shutter Sisters Flickr pool!

Are there any other camera tilters out there?  Please share with us your favorite off-kilter shots!

Snapped, Stamped and Sealed

By

When I was just about to turn six, my family moved half way around the world from Seoul, Korea to Chicago.  In those days, the primary mode of communication with our family back in the motherland was through letters.  Ever since, I’ve had a soft spot for the epistolary form.  There’s just something about the physical act of writing a letter, seeing your words in your own handwriting, the thrill of sealing and stamping a letter, the finality of slipping that envelope into the mailbox, the anticipation of receiving a response.

Living in the digital age, I admit that my letters–stamped and sealed–have become few and far between.  I find that really sad because when I first became serious about photography, it was this very discipline of writing letters that helped to shape my narrative style of documenting the world around me.  So now, I would like to get back into the habit of sharing the stories of my life with one person at a time, and with a pen and on paper.  However, photography has become such an important part of my life that I would like to include that as well, and I think I know just what to do.  I will begin my letters with an image that I’ve captured and start the story there.  This will be the perfect combination of the two practices that I hope to integrate into my everyday life.

If any of you would like to get started on a similar project of combining images and words snail-mail style, I’ve got a giveaway that may help you along.  To celebrate Giveaway May, I am offering up a dozen different photo postcards to be chosen from this Flickr set.  Just leave a comment before Monday at midnight (Chicago time) with a link to an image (your own or other’s) that you think would be a great intro to a letter, and you’ll be entered to win.

Sunday School: Props!

By

 

I can’t tell you how thrilled I was when I showed up to my friends Kim and Andy’s house for a photoshoot and found a HUGE bouquet of red balloons in their living room!  Kim thought it would be fun for the photos, and she was right.  That big splash of red was just the right accessory for a colorful shoot, and not to mention the perfect match for Kim’s boots.  I don’t shoot portraits often, so it was a good lesson for future reference.

So what are some of your favorite props to use on photoshoots?  Please share your tips and links to images in the comments below.  And since it’s Giveaway May, leave a comment (by Monday night at midnight Central Time) to be entered for a chance to win a set of 12 fine art photo cards, yours to choose from this collection. 

+++++++++++++++++++++

Congrats to Marcy of The Glamorous Life Association!  She wins a dozen photo cards!

Déjà Vu

By

My daughter is now just over 5 1/2, which is about how old I was as my family was preparing to move from Seoul, Korea to Chicago, and I have vivid memories of this age.  Lately, I often find myself trying to recall who I was in those days, to remember what I thought about, what I liked to do, how I saw the world through my five-and-a-half year old eyes.  In doing so, I hope to better understand and empathise with my often feisty and saucy girl.

These days, when I sometimes look through my photos of her, I’ll suddenly see myself thirty-something years ago.  I remember how much I liked to walk on balance-beam lines, or to swing way up high, or to make funny faces at the camera, or to wear dresses that twirl.  It has been a gift to me, transporting myself back to the happy moments of my own childhood.  And it has reminded me how quickly childhood passes, which motivates me to be a tad more patient of a mother.

Please share with us today those images that harken back to your own childhood, and if you have actual photos of yourself as a child to share as well, even better. I could look through vintage photos all day!

Family Traditions

By

If there’s one family tradition that has not changed since my daughter was born, it’s Easter dinner with my in-laws.  My daughter has been asking every day for the past month when it will be Easter, and I can’t tell you how relieved I am finally to be able to tell her, “TODAY!”

Documenting family traditions as they happen every year is a great way to take stock of our lives’ journeys–how far we’ve come, where we are now, how much the kids have changed and grown, how much WE’VE changed and grown.  No matter what traditions you may incorporate into your lives, there is something sacred and meaningful about them, and as photographers, it is a gift to our loved ones and to ourselves to capture these images year after year.

Please share with us today glimpses into your own family or personal traditions, whether it’s something as simple as cooking together, unique to your culture or a lovely childhood memory.