March 20, 2009 – A Half Hour a Day

The conversion of my yellow daffodil to black and white gave Shrew an idea that I’d like to pursue here! The text of her comment can be found in this thread, but I copy it here:

Both are a great shot…flowers are interesting in B&W especially when they are known for such a specific color like the daffodil you have captured.

Removing the expected color from the bloom draws the viewer’s eye to the lines and texture variation within the flower. I know I marked the color version as a favorite on flickr because it is a terrific color macro with lovely DOF. I wonder if you tried to force a more shallow DOF on B&W compositions of flowers what kind of series you would have. Truly, the color is the common thing amongst all daffodils, but each one has it’s own unique line and texture…even a rip in a petal becomes the stamp of individuality.

Hmmmmm….you gave me an idea friend…How about a mini-challenge? A series of unique character sketches of flowers. They must be the same type of flower within each series, so you could do daffoldils or roses, I could do tulips or carnations. ALL must be done as B&W to look for the unique character in the structure of the flowers. And we post them here like Monday-ish.

WHAT do you think?

What do I think??? I think it’s a GREAT idea!!!! So, to that end, a mini-challenge begins NOW!

As we do over at Scott’s, please post a link to your photos in the comment section of this post by Monday, Midnight Eastern time, and I will do a recap midweek. The more the merrier, so please join us in the challenge! I would love to see some work from some of our “silent” readers. 🙂

So, I was doing some organizing over at Flickr…went into my Flowers set, and the whole “snapshot” vs. “photograph” discussion hit me square in the face while looking through my set. I think it comes down to deliberateness. If that isn’t a word, it should be. I looked at some of my older photos. I distinctly remember taking most of them. “Oooh, pretty!” *SNAP* “Ooooh, that’s pretty too!” *SNAP* “Oooo! I like that color!” *SNAP* The change has been gradual, but now I look at something and I think, “Oooh, pretty! How can I best capture the beauty of this?” And I look, and go around the subject once or twice, and I look through my viewfinder, and I change my framing, and I go in closer, and I move back farther, and I go down low, and I climb up high. Most of all, I pay attention to my background, literally moving anything out of the way that is distracting, or I move the subject itself if that’s possible. Deliberateness.

You tell me, which are snapshots, and which are photographs?

Even this photo, though deliberate, had a distracting background that just bugged me.

Thus the crop…

If nothing else, I am learning to be deliberate in my “snapping.” I take fewer photos, but the ones I do take are intentionally taken the way they were taken. Biggest lesson, watch those backgrounds, or a beautiful flower looks like this:

I could have easily bent this flower over a bit and changed my position in order to use the sky as a background. All I see when I look at this is a missed opportunity. Dang it.