This week I have been really focused on participating in the workshop I am taking (Voice and Visual Intent). It has added a whole new level (of difficulty? intensity?) to my daily shooting process. Especially since my process before this was "just take some sort of photo within the span of the day that is reasonably ok in ok light and hopefully in focus". In using the concepts from the class, I am forced to be way more intentional about the photos I am taking, and am thinking about what I am trying to express with the photo. This is something I am still trying to wrap my mind around. Like with the photo this week of the pears, for example, I am illustrating lots of things, but as far as I know I am still just saying... pears. Pears are pretty? Pears are delicious? I don't know. And speaking of the pears, that brings me to the other thing I have been focusing on this week. I purchased a Lensbaby, and I am ashamed to admit this will be the THIRD TIME I have owned a Lensbaby. This time I purchased it with the new Edge 50 optic and with the intention of using it primarily with my Fuji XT-1. I bought it in a Nikon mount though, and just got an inexpensive Fuji adapter. I have forced myself to use it every day. On day one, Adam looked at my photos and said, "I don't get it. Isn't something supposed to be in focus?". Every day, I show him my results, and finally the last few days he has been acknowledging that he gets it. I don't know that he loves it, but he isn't necessarily my target audience with it (although, who is?). And he does say the resulting photos are "unique". I took the photo of the colored pencils using it with my Nikon, and found it surprisingly easy to manually focus. And the pear photo I took with my Fuji, thankful for the focus peaking features. I kind of love having it, as I have always liked the tilt-shift effect and this is a fairly inexpensive way to achieve that look.
Here are the photos for this week. I really wanted the Lego photo to be a diptych, and I know that I should be able to figure out how to use the Lightroom Print module to create collages and that kind of thing, but instead I purchased Blogstomp tonight. I was hoping it would just make the process easy, and it turns out that it is very, very easy. I haven't really done a lot of grouping photos together for storytelling purposes/posts, but this will give me the option to do that in the future.
