13 | February | 2015 | Expressing my vision

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“Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love it.

But above all, know light.

Know it for all you are worth, and you will know the key to photography.”

– George Eastman

The unclimbable stairs

I have a few New Year’s resolutions for 2015 and beyond, the usual get fit to improve my health and go on a diet, both of which I am doing well at so far. A few that are photography related are:

To write at least once each week on my blogs (one is history and photo related and the other is this one!)
To organise my photography kit and sort out my Lightroom library with tags etc
Learn photoshop properly so that I am not just merely using it to watermark!
Print more photos
Take more photos of ME with my family – learn to take GOOD self portraits and not hate seeing them (a hard one I know, but I have to give it a go!)
Shoot for my personal projects

My final aim this year is to shoot for ME, I often try and please others but for once I plan to be selfish and shoot just for me.

Patience is a virtue

I had a little “happy dance” moment a few weeks ago when I stumbled across an interesting collaborative website called Who We Become which is a group of photographers who use themes each week to grow their photographic talent and creativity. The first year of their project 52 started by concentrating on playing with light and learning to master its many dynamic forms, so I thought I would do the same to try and kick my photographic hiatus into touch.

For the next four weeks I will be concentrating on Shadows. I hope tthat by doing these projects for myself and spending several weeks at at time exploring a common overarching themes I will be able to really dig in deep, have fun, and take creative risks.

So what is a shadow? It can be defined as: a dark area or shape produced by a body coming between rays of light and a surface.

The Characteristics of a shadow are:

A shadow can be deep in tone and have a hard defined edge.
A shadow can also be broad, soft, and with a feathered almost imperceptible edge.
A shadow can be twisted and manipulated by changing the shape of the object casting the shadow.
A shadow can be almost translucent.
A shadow can be coloured!
You can do a lot of cool things with a shadow.