Photo of the Week #5

Okay, I'm a little late on this one! Forgive me, my tiny readership!

This is a picture of my aunt and uncle's dog, Jake, that I took over the Thanksgiving weekend. As long as they've had this dog, he has come along with this hilarious "flinger" contraption which allows you to exert max laziness while interacting with your overly active Schnoodle. And he can chase those goddamn tennis balls FOR. EVER. I swear that if we didn't stop him, he would cheerfully expend all the calories in his body and die playing fetch. To die in your arms, tennis ball, is such a lovely way to die. Oh and that's my brother's knee, clad in his silly homemade pants. That's a story for another day.

Anyways, how bout dis shot?! I'm realizing more and more that as an ex-painter (that's depressing, let's call me a painter on hiatus) and art history enthusiast, I enjoy composing photos a lot more than thinking about how I can use the mechanics of the machine to produce cool pictures. It's just where my mind tends to go, so I'm kinda embracing that. I love the composition of this photo because all the lines of the image direct your focus to Jake's superexcitedOMGface even though he's not at the center of the photo, which is where our eyes usually migrate to. The horizon of the shot perfectly lines up with his eye height, naturally guiding your eye there, and the way the sun was setting happened to produce a shadow that creates a line from the bottom left corner directly to our lovely doggie as well. Finally, the bright orange tennis ball flinger points right at him and is a nice touch because we know exactly what he's thinking about!

It's fun how I wasn't even thinking about all these compositional elements at the time of taking the photo, but when I was scrolling through my photos for the day they jumped out at me and really made this the best photo of the day! This is also probably the last sunkissed photo on the blog for a while, since winter is descending here in E-Town. (I recently learned another Edmonton nickname is Edmonchuck...definitely doesn't roll off the tongue, in my opinion!) Excited to take some winter piccsxxcscsssccss though!

See you next (hopefully SNOWY) time!

Sarah

Photo of the Week #4

Another backyard shot, because who can resist the poignance of a leaf falling into your glass of water in an oh-so-artistic way? I was actually finished with my camera at this point and I'd put it aside to get started on some real work (gross) when I went to take a sip of water and saw that it looked pretty neat. So Mr. X-A1 had to be turned back on for a little while. I really like the composition of this shot. If I were to make it look real nice I'd probably crop out the right side of it because I can see a gecko stepping stone foot in the top right there which is bothering me a tad, but if I had done that it would make the two regions of the photo (the wooden surface of the bench and the ground beneath it) equal in size, which also would bother me - like splitting the whole thing down the middle. Compositionally I like the ground taking up more space in the photo. So I'm gonna leave it that way! Hope this photo reminds you of quiet moments in your backyard, avoiding work to enjoy the space around you instead.

- Pondering Sarah

Photo of the Week #3

A multiple exposure shot of the shadows on the deck in my backyard. Yes, because technology has taken us far enough that you can put one picture on top of another WHILE SHOOTING, not even editing afterwards! I personally was shocked and amazed when I discovered this and did a small bowing ritual to my camera before continuing on. I like how this image creates a couple different kinds of grids depending on where you overlay the lines, and that the shadows get darker where they bisect! You can even get a bit of that optical illusion where dots disappear and reappear if you try to focus on one set of intersecting lines where I've crossed the deck at right angles. What I don't like (and now you're going to notice it and be like AHH so bothersome) is that I didn't get the shots perfectly centred on top of each other (mainly because I was trying to avoid including my shoe...) and you can really see that because of the wedge where the lines aren't right-angled at the bottom! Alas, ear wax. Anyways, kinda more geometric, hope y'all enjoy!

Happy Thanksgiving

SENsational

Photo of the Week #2

Yo kids!

So I actually committed enough to this idea to go out with my camera on an odd pajama'd foray in my alleyway for a lil' snapshot creativity. I actually was hoping to get a photo that I'd been picturing in my head for literally years, featuring this tree on the grass strip dividing the street that intersects the alleyway. It lines up perfectly with the view down my alleyway and looks pretty cool, lit up by the streetlight and framed by the dark alleyway. So to precede the sloppy weirdness that follows this paragraph, I did have a plan. I would like to claim that, in my defense.

Once I found myself intrepidly positioned in the centre of the alleyway, clad in my stripey pajamas (because my original plans for the evening had involved falling asleep and didn't take into account a restless itch to art something), I raised my chalice of photography, the ol' FUJI X-A1, in a toast to me and my artistic vision. "Tonight, we feast on film-et mignon, my friends," I said to my many and varied friends, gathered in the Great Hall. The candles were doing that cool thing where they float above us and everyone was beaming at me, because I was standing where Dumbledore usually stands. Except one thing: the tree of destiny could not even slightly be detected by my chalice. My ornate goblet, how could it fail me! I mumbled a few awkward words about failure and lost dreams to conclude my toast, and sat back down. The crowd gathered along the long, wooden dinner tables supped their mead in silence. Or I guess butter beer. I don't know, my motivation to keep the Harry Potter reference going died along with my artistic aspirations.

Yes, alas, all my camera could pick up was, well, nothing. Just darkness. Amazing what the eye can see and the camera cannot! Once again, biology is superior to machine. Man cannot hope to mimic what evolution has perfected. Thinking vague thoughts about blind watchmakers and the fact that I didn't have my phone on me, I wandered further and further down the alleyway until my camera could pick up some light, which it then could not focus. Night shooting: it's almost like objects need to have light upon them to bounce off of them and then be received by some sort of light-receiving device like a retina or some shit so that it can then be visually perceived. Like perhaps vision is necessary to see things, I guess is what I'm saying.

Anyways, finally I reduced my artistic pursuits to blurring the street lights by fiddling around with my aperture settings and I got this bad boy:

Because when you don't have a tripod, embrace the chaos. Whoa, so arty! I actually am oddly fond of this because it's one of the first ones I took, so I super fucked it up because I didn't realize what would happen when I set the f stop to 22. I was very surprised that it took ages for my camera to process what was happening in front of it, and I was actually worried that I'd caused it some irreparable damage by challenging it too much (c'mon, you know the feeling when you have 20 tabs open on Chrome and then you try to open Powerpoint too and you're like shit, I've really done it this time), but turns out it was just doing what I had asked it to. Problem was I didn't realize what that was until I took a look-see! Anyways, I like that this photo was both born of and appears to be sheer randomness. There is no intentional composition or technique to it. In a sense, it sums up my entire approach to photography, which is to twiddle knobs in an uninformed fashion and then press down the button at the top and see what happens. Because honestly, I feel like I try too hard to do everything else the "right" way - arranging my future plans responsibly, studying diligently, handling my working roles professionally - and this is just fun to totally mess up and do weirdly!

So be ready for more purposeless, unintelligent and generally misguided photography pursuits in the future. For that is all I shall give ye! Hear hear!