At the beginning of the year, like many other bloggers and people around the world, I chose a word. A word that would hopefully lead me, give me inspiration and guide me through the year. The word I chose was Capture. Six months on I think I've managed to capture all of the things I wanted to and more.
My reason for choosing the word capture was two-fold. The first thing I wanted capture to represent for me was...
"to gain control of or exert influence over my mindset in regards to organisation and exercise/weight-loss."
If I'm perfectly honest, I haven't been going great with the first part. I am a lot more organised thanks to Tafe, but the weight loss? Haven't even been thinking about it, my mind has been consumed with Tafe and everything that needs to be done to keep on top of things.
The second reason I chose capture though? I've been nailing that.
"In 2015 I want to capture as many moments and emotions through the lens of my camera as I can. I want to create images that are thought-provoking, that manipulate the viewer's emotions, that make them feel something, even if it's just a fleeting scent of happiness.
I want to capture my photographic ability in a measurable way so that I can see how much I really know and how much more there is to learn. Not that there is ever going to be a time when there isn't something I want/need to learn about photography!"
A few weeks after I wrote my One Word post I started my weekly
One Perfect Moment series. A post I write every Monday remembering something that has happened through the week that I'm thankful for. Big or small, perfect or imperfect, it's been a really good way to stop and think about the week just gone and appreciate what has been going on in my life. It's just about my favourite post to write now, and considering I even managed to find a One Perfect Moment post out of a
full-family bout of gastro, you know the attitude of gratitude has firmly set in my life now!
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| This is one of the photos we did in our first term, learning about high-key (white on white) still life photography |
I've also been taking a portrait a week, every week, of the girls so far this year, as part of the
52 week project. It's been really fun taking these photos each week, and trying to come up with new ways of photographing the girls, especially when we've been doing the same old thing and I haven't had anywhere new or interesting to take photographs of them.
The other thing I decided to do was to continue on from my preliminary Tafe course and go straight in to the Diploma of Photography. The original plan had been to wait until 2016 before undertaking the Diploma, but after enjoying Skill Set so much Dave and I decided it was best to just go for it, jump straight in to Diploma and get all of my study finished this year.
Best. Decision. Yet!
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| Practicing food photography |
Doing my Tafe course has really shown me what I do and don't know, how much there still is to learn, and has really confirmed for me that photography is want I desperately, passionately want to pursue. I've been loving it and I've learned so much in just a short amount of time.
So all in all, I'm pretty happy with how things have been going with relation to my one word for 2015, Capture. I'll leave this post here with some examples of the work we've been doing at Tafe this year and the things I've been learning.
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| Practicing glass photography. This type, with the white background is called Brightfield. The trick is to use black card held out of frame to give the glass definition |
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| Another example of brightfield glassware photography |
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| Some more practice of glass photography I did on my own. I had to use pieces of white foam to get rid of large reflections and dark areas on the glass, due to the facets of the glass. This was not easy to do by myself with only two hands, having to hold the foam in just the right spots and press the capture button at the same time |
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| One of our classes is called Concept Development and is all about taking a simple idea and expanind on it to come up with a concept for a photo. The starting point was the number seven, and from this my classmates and I brainstormed a series of images that represented 'seven'. We went with the age of seven being used in a self-portrait, a kind of then and now photo. I used a projector to project the image of my school photo from when I was seven years old on to the side of my face. |
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| For this exercise we were exploring still life and the use of bokeh |
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| This was another image we had to create for our Concept Development class. This one was a self-portrait entitled You + Hue that had to depict us and a dominant hue. I used a high resolution scanner to capture myself holding my glasses and then photoshopped in the hue and image of my in the glasses. |
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| This photograph was taken to try and replicate a low-key (dark or black on black) portrait |
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| This image was created in-camera (no photoshopping) for one of my assessments, the brief of which is to research a style of 20th or 21st century portrait photography and then produce our own version of it |
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This is probably one of my most favourite images and combines a couple of techniques, painting with light and HDR (merging photos with different exposures or dynamic ranges). This photo was created by merging 5 separate images, each one having a different part of the subject lit with nothing but a handheld torch. By using the torch and concentrating on different parts of the subject we're able to more closely control the areas of light and shade and create interesting lighting and texture.
How are you going with your One Word for 2015? Did you choose one? Or did you have another goal or something that you've been keeping in mind?
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