A Tribute to Spring

This is a continuation of my "You Inspired Me" photography challenge. You can see the results of these challenges here.

This Week's Challenge:

For this week's challenge, my wife selected this picture as a tribute to spring:

By Matthew on Flickr.

What I liked most about this picture was its use of selective focus, with a strong diagonal composition in the background. Although the depth of field selective focus forces the flowers to be the focal point of the image, the path and grass are still important compositional elements, providing line, direction, and balance. I am excited to try my hand at these compositional ideas, and I am especially excited to get out and take my first shots of all the new life that is appearing everywhere as part of Spring.

I tried a lot of different things for this photo. I wanted to try selective focus through depth of field, and I wanted to find a picture that really represented spring, and I wanted to explore the concept of how the background line guides the focus of the eye to the central element. Three elements: spring, depth of field, and line.

I took pictures of flowers, I took pictures of my new shoots growing in my garden, etc. I believe that I ended up taking more pictures for this project than for any of the ones that came before. I really struggled to find a single picture that embodied both the concepts of spring AND the compositional ideas in the source photograph.

I ended up with this photograph:

The subject (apple blossoms) really is iconic of spring, so it fit that criteria. And the depth of field is shallow, blurring the background, and drawing the eye to the central focus (the foreground flowers). And there is even some lines guiding the eye to the flowers.

However, the background, blurred as it is, is very busy. I tried looking for a better angle, that would allow a more focused composition, and failed. The tree just wasn't cooperating, and I was at the most shallow depth of field I could create with my lens. So I decided to try something a little different. In this case, selective color to compensate for the busy background. This picture is the result. It doesn't exactly follow the compositional elements that originally inspired me, but that is part of the fun of this project. While trying to duplicate an effect, one ends up discovering unique ideas, completely different from the source. Which (after all) was the entire point of this project, to inspire my creativity.

Next week's project is still up for grabs, (I will edit this post to link to the next challenge after it is given). If you have an idea, by all means, email me.

Faith

This is a continuation of my "You Inspired Me" photography challenge. You can see the results of these challenges here.

This Week's Challenge:

This week, a friend challenged me with this photo from my favorites:

By Just Joe over on Flickr.

What I liked most about the source picture was the way they used a simple image of a simple item in order to represent a complex religious idea. I loved how the image uses the nature of the item to convey the message. In this case, the Bible is well worn and clearly well used, and thereby conveys the faith and dedication of its owner. I loved how clearly this complex idea is conveyed by this simple object. Nothing but the object in question was needed to convey the idea. It is this ability to apply the attributes of one object to another that is at the heart of religious symbolism. I wanted to find a single item that I could photograph that would have some attribute that would powerfully convey a religious idea.

As with all my "you inspired me" photographs, I didn't just want to duplicate the source photo exactly, so a simple picture of a well worn Bible was out. I started to rifle through my collection of religious items, and I found a plastic container full of mustard seeds that I purchased while in Israel. I was immediately excited by the idea. Mustard seeds already have a powerful and immediate religious significance for most people. This is due to Jesus' comparison of mustard seeds with both the "kingdom of God" and with "faith." Luke records that Jesus said: "Then said he, Unto what is the kingdom of God like? and whereunto shall I resemble it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and cast into his garden; and it grew, and waxed a great tree; and the fowls of the air lodged in the branches of it" (Luke 13:18-19); and "the apostles said unto the Lord, Increase our faith. And the Lord said, If ye had faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye might say unto this sycamine tree, Be thou plucked up by the root, and be thou planted in the sea; and it should obey you" (Luke 17:5-6).

However, it occurred to me that taking a picture of the idea behind the mustard seed wouldn't be as simple as taking a picture of a Bible on a white background. The attribute of interest with the Bible photograph was the worn and well used nature of the Bible. But the attribute of interest with the mustard seed is its small size. I had to find a way to take a picture of the mustard seed that made its size clear, and to do that, I knew that I would need something else in the background that would make the size of the mustard seed obvious. This presented a unique photographic challenge: how to create a composition that focused on the mustard seed, while including enough contextual clews to indicate their size.

My first idea was the clinical approach, simply photograph the seeds with a ruler in the background. This approach appealed to the scientist in me, and this is the result:

Mustard seeds grow in reasonably sized pods, while the seeds inside are smaller than a grain of sand. What I liked most about this picture is that I was able to include both the pod, and several of the very small seeds it contained. But while the clinical metric ruler conveys the size of the objects rather exactly, it doesn't do so very intuitively. For that I needed to try something else. This was what I came up with:

I really love how this picture immediately gives you an idea of the sizes involved. Unfortunately, this composition made it more difficult to include the pod in the picture, but I believe that this drawback was well worth it.

Next Week's Challenge:

For next week's challenge, my wife selected this picture as a tribute to spring:

By Matthew on Flickr.

What I liked most about this picture was its use of selective focus, with a strong diagonal composition in the background. Although the selective focus forces the flowers to be the focus of the image, the path and grass are still important compositional elements, providing line, direction, and balance. I am excited to try my hand at these compositional ideas, and I am especially excited to get out and take my first shots of all the new life that is appearing everywhere as part of Spring.

Bokeh and Lights

This is a continuation of my "You Inspired Me" photography challenge. You can see the results of these challenges here.

This week, a friend challenged me with this photo from my favorites:

By jegoble over on Flickr.

What I liked about the source picture was the Bokeh in the background, and the mysterious quality of the light in the foreground, especially the near translucent appearance of the candle. Those were the qualities that I tried to duplicate in this week's challenge.

Originally I planned to use a candle in the foreground and some Christmas-tree lights in the background. However, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to do something completely different but that captured the same lighting/bokeh magic. These pictures are what I ended up with:

There are several elements of these that I think turned out rather well. I love the bokeh in the background, and I thought that the lighting in the foreground is lovely. I also think that the composition turned out relatively well. I do wish that I had more of these flower lights to use, as that would have allowed for a slightly more complex composition, but all in all, I am happy at how the challenge turned out.

I will post next week's challenge shortly.

You Inspired Me Project

To all my photography friends:

This is a new project that I have been working on. The idea behind this set is to improve my creativity and technical abilities.

We all love to look at each other's pictures. That is why we are on Flickr in the first place, right? And we favorite those pictures that inspire us or move us in some way. But the idea is not to just admire other people's work, but to allow their creativity to inspire us.

I have decided that every week (or so) I will select one photo from my favorites (or allow one of you to challenge me by selecting one for me), and then attempt to duplicate what inspired me about that particular photo.

The idea is NOT to replicate other people's work exactly, but to attempt to create something original that duplicates the technique, idea, or emotion that caused me to favorite the photo in the first place.

I think that this is an excellent way of improving my abilities as a photographer, and I invite anyone who is interested in doing this challenge with me to drop me some flickrmail. I will select photos to challenge you from your favorites, and you can select photos from my favorites to challenge me, and we can write about our experiences. Doing this together can provide added motivation and inspiration. I will be writing about each week's challenges here.

You can see the results of these challenges here.

This week, a friend challenged me with this photo from my favorites:

By jegoble over on Flickr.

What I liked about this picture was the Bokeh in the background, and the mysterious quality of the light in the foreground, especially the near translucent appearance of the candle. Those will be the qualities that I will be attempting to duplicate in this week's challenge, and I will post the result here when it is finished.

Wish me luck.

Science opens our eyes to what.



Religion is a quest to understand why.



Art finds beauty along the way.



Love puts another's hand in ours to share in our journey.