What a great site...

nadi · October 19, 2004

I was just reviewing some of the great feedback I have gotten on my "time" photo and thinking what a fantastic website this is.

I'm a beginner at photography of any kind, and I know I have a lot to learn. It was actually pretty challenging for me just to put my photo out there for people to comment on. I didn't get the chance to make any changes to my entry before the challenge was up, but I am amazed at how much I learnt just from submitting one photo! I got some really nice suggestions and inspiration.

The landscape challenge is one I will need to push myself on. I feel like I'm suffering from a severe lack of subject matter - I simply don't live in a place with convenient access to sweeping plains, striking monuments, dramatic mountains or fall colours. But I know that's a cop-out. There's got to be potentially stunning landscapes all around me, I just have to learn to recognise them. Hmmm.......:scratch

This, I took on my last holiday.

Andy · October 19, 2004

lovely

nadi wrote:

I was just reviewing some of the great feedback I have gotten on my "time" photo and thinking what a fantastic website this is.

I'm a beginner at photography of any kind, and I know I have a lot to learn. It was actually pretty challenging for me just to put my photo out there for people to comment on. I didn't get the chance to make any changes to my entry before the challenge was up, but I am amazed at how much I learnt just from submitting one photo! I got some really nice suggestions and inspiration.

The landscape challenge is one I will need to push myself on. I feel like I'm suffering from a severe lack of subject matter - I simply don't live in a place with convenient access to sweeping plains, striking monuments, dramatic mountains or fall colours. But I know that's a cop-out. There's got to be potentially stunning landscapes all around me, I just have to learn to recognise them. Hmmm.......

This, I took on my last holiday.

wxwax · October 22, 2004

I'll say, that's a super shot. Where do you live, nadi? Not every landscape has to be beautiful. Just evocative in some way. Grim works just as well as happy, even better actually.

nadi · October 25, 2004

wxwax wrote:

I'll say, that's a super shot. Where do you live, nadi? Not every landscape has to be beautiful. Just evocative in some way. Grim works just as well as happy, even better actually.

Yeah.... still dunno where I'd find something grim tho. I live in Perth, Western Australia. Nothing wrong with it, its just a pretty dull-looking place to me. I think its partly cause I grew up in a country town in the northern part of the state (which is where that shot below was taken) and I really hated the city when I had to move here. People say its a beautiful city, but the things that make it "pretty" to others, I find pretty horrible (for example, my city photo in the challenge thread). This place just doesn't inspire me. Given the right light, I could try and convey how dark and oppressing the place is to me, but its spring here and I'm working nights lately so that's not likely to happen.

ginger_55 · October 25, 2004

Nadi, just read your post re living in the city and all. I hated Charleston when I first moved here, had a horrible time in school, straight A s, but almost lost my mind (no exagerration, I can't spell the minute I get on this thing). I came here to finish my school at the age of 45, BS in cytotechnology.

Then I moved down here a few months after leaving to go back with a man I loved, I moved back so that my daughter could finish high school here. She persuaded me by saying that it was so wonderful here that if I moved back, I would never leave. She was right on the never leaving, that was 1985, she left in 1989, I am still here, longest I have ever lived in one place.

Here it is flat and somewhat tropical (that does not mean it does not get cold). I grew up in the upper midwest with hills, winter and fall. This landscape, well, I hated it here. And I knew no one, still don't. I am almost deaf, so making friends is not as easy as it would be for someone who can hear, or even someone with a hearing problem but more of a sense of social skills.

Anyway, I did not photograph this place. It held no interest for me. There is a photographer whose work I enjoy, he lives here part of the year and in Vermont part of the year, and I forget his name. He holds book signings, I have talked to him about places he does his photography. He has access to boats and helocopters, etc. Well, I have copied his work in the mtns, and I could do it, but I just didn't care here.

I discovered a few years ago that the Charleston area had a feeling of "home" to me now. Not that I won't always be a person who grew up with cider mills, trees changing color in the fall, a totally different experience. Totally different opportunities. Some of my family, two of my four children, live a four hour drive from here in country in the middle of the state type place. Terrain more like I grew up with. Driving home a few years ago, I realized that I never wanted to leave Charleston, that my love/hate relationship with it had settled into the fact that this is now a part of me, too.

Still, I saw no real reason to photograph it. One, I have never really been a landscape photographer, I have photographed my family and friends, none of which I have/had here, and two, a flat landscape was just totally not inspiring to me.

It is the challenges here that have taken me out. I am photographing where I live now. I will be 65 next month, I have been to the beach many times this summer, had not been in years, I have been lots of places I had not been in years. I spent my time playing tennis with a group of women, nice enough, but I can't hear them, and I read, and I saw therapists (still do). But now, I am appreciating where I live.

I may have to leave here, if my husband were to die, no reason to think he will, but financially I am downwardly mobile, I could not live here without Bill and his job, so one day I may have to move.

I not only don't want to move now, I have enjoyed photographing my surroundings............. I am on a more intimate basis with this place, a place I had barely tolerated for years.

(I am a bit worried as it is getting colder, I do not do "cold" well, especially not here, no cold weather sports, lol, and I never have done the beach in the cold, don't know about my sunrise/sunset photos, I will have to see how things go.)

You will probably be able to move away from the place you are unhappy in now, but I would bet that you could photograph the misery and ugliness you see, for whatever it is worth, that is what I would do. I cannot see you suddenly finding joy where you are, but feelings are feelings, and conveying them, good or bad, with a camera, well.......... it can make for good photography.

I know someone in my dog club, online, I have Corgis, she lives on your side of Australia. I have not listened that well. I do not think she lives in a city. But she does travel. I will get around to posting to her to ask where she actually lives: I have just been too slack to pay attention, besides I don't know either side of Australia, I could never relate to anything she said. It does sound like she is happy where she is.......I will try to find out where that is.

ginger

ginger_55 · October 25, 2004

You know there is a landscape I wanted to take while in DC. I could probably find it here, but I thought it would go better with some hills. I don't know, but it does show that outside the box is not done, or duplicated as often.

I wanted to take a photo of a newly minted housing development. Everything brand new, no real "landscaping", just new......... I could not decide whether I wanted to incorporate a sunset or something. Then I discovered that my daughter who I was visiting, well, she was not as into getting this photo as getting her kids, my grandkids, to where they needed to be.

I have an entry. I have worked on it, and other people have advised me. I do not like newly minted housing areas: not that ........no I like where I live, but I would like to fix it up. Anyway there are things that are not being done. Probably things that only you could do, or that you know where to access. All landscapes are not inherently beautiful, your sunrise/set is, but some landscapes can be beautiful, though the subject is not, if that makes any sense. I know new housing developments can be made beautiful in their sameness, their actual ugliness, I have seen it done.

I would work like that, go to a corner, an anywhere, get out of the car and take a photo, I think just about any place can be interpreted in different ways. Think of how you want to present it: actually for here I would want to present it with some of the rules of photography, people here seem to like their "rules". I know that was a nasty statement on my part, but it is what I have observed.

So, especially if you are beginning, I would take something like the rule of thirds, and I would go around shooting everything that way. Shoot a wall 2/3s of the way across the frame, with another wall beyond 1/3 of the way across the frame. Do it across as practice, do it up and down as practice. Then put the subject in one corner, then another, never in the middle (I like the middle, pet peeve here), but you have to know the rules to break them, theoretically. It certainly would be an interesting way to approach everything. Not as a subject, but as a rule of thirds.

Just trying to help, that would be good for me, too. Would loosen me up.

Except in the next challenge, that will be difficult for me. Have you voted on it? I can't imagine either of us wanting to do it, but there it will be. I have even thought the only way I could do it would to go sit somewhere that people go.............. I actually don't know how to do it?

ginger

What a great site...

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