It’s been a slow couple of weeks for me. Not taking my camera to work has meant a significant slowdown in making new images. It’s almost felt like withdrawal from a drug. Luckily, I’ve had the class I’m taking to keep my spirits up some, as I’ve been looking at books by some photographers that I’ve been intrigued by recently, especially Jeff Wall and Gregory Crewdson. I may comment on these more some other time. What intrigues me is their sense of composition and mood and their use of lighting. It seems rather unlikely to me that I will ever get that elaborate in my own work. At any rate, the class has helped me use this down-time more productively.
As my class project, however, I was finally able to arrange a photoshoot with Eugenia, an old friend of my wife’s, who does mosaic as an increasingly serious avocation, although she’s a historian and teacher in her professional life. Several months ago, when I began to recognize that having people in my photographs (at least sometimes) is something that I like and want to pursue more, I conceived a couple of projects that I thought might be interesting; one of which is working with artists in their workspace, which is the one I concentrated on in this shoot.
This was my second shoot for this project, so I was a bit more intentional (that word again) going in than I was the first time. I took a few images from that first shoot to class last week for some critique and, although they were well received, one comment that I heard strongly was to get closer to the subject. So that was one of my aims in this shoot.
Doing the shots of Eugenia working went very well, so when I thought I had enough for my immediate project we tried a few portraits. The light and shadows coming through the windows were a bit strong, so I decided to play with that for a more dramatic effect. This one is one of the better ones, especially the catchlights, which I tried to be very conscious of.
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