a little bit of tweak-age

It would seem like my weeks have been running together lately.  Life has been quite hectic and trying to make time to squeeze in shoots in all of the craziness has proved harder now than ever.  At the same time, since I’m part of the LeahAndMark.com internship, I’ve never actually really tried to work my schedule all smushed like this until this internship….but that’s actually a good thing.  In the past I’ve always had artistic “passions” but it always seemed like I’d have excuses to keep those passions as just hobbies.  I’ve always thought that I couldn’t make a real living doing what I had a desire to do, but I have started to realize I can.  It just takes time, and it takes a lot of drive.

Work got a little chaotic over the past three weeks with school starting back up, so I had to miss several of the other interns shoots.  Sadly they were all packed into the span of about a week and a half and in the mornings.  Those mornings had been my prime working hours due to the sunlight conditions as well as the availability of the cars I photograph being fully ready.  I’ve been super bummed about missing so many great opportunities to shoot and kicking myself along the way.  However, having missed these, I’ve spent a lot of time going through my stuff, looking back over all of my photos as well as doing some home research.

In the span of these few weeks we also had an intern critique and editing night.  I was able to make it, hooray for afternoon things!  I have to admit, going into the workshop I was less than thrilled about the possible outcome.  I told myself I was going into it with an open mind and going to take the positive criticism and run with it.  I generally take a lot of things personally, but if a passion of mine is ever going to be a full-tim “job” I can’t let things hurt my feelings.  I learned a lot that night in general, and about my own photography.  I learned some things I wasn’t aware of and some things I just wasn’t proud of after the night was over.  Though, this is all a learning experience.  I’m thankful to be in a group with this many people who actually KNOW facits of photography to give me feedback.  It’s all fine and great to have your family say your photos look great and stuff, but I need to know the good and bad on technique and composition.

Speaking of all of this, Raven had posted about a week ago that she wanted new head shots so I jumped on board since it was going to be in the afternoon and I would be able to make it.  At this point I had been thinking a lot about the editing workshop/critique and I wanted to try to NOT do what I had been told I do too much of.  I wasn’t so aware while shooting before that I tended to crop hands, fingers, toes, feet in awkward ways.  I was also not really aware of how busy some of the backgrounds I had put people against were.  Also, and this one hit home the most was trying too hard to make a not good photograph good just by making people pose.

Raven is simply awesome.  She wanted to go to this park type place in Flowery Branch…but uhhh it doesn’t exist.  Thankfully she knew about this field type place about a mile down the road so we wound up shooting there.  Intern Kelly and I suited up to shoot +Raven‘s new shots and I wanted to try a few new things.

I’m bad with composition, I’m really not to the point of picturing the shot in my head before I take it.  Right now I’m still kind of spur of the moment, at least when it comes to people.  I don’t have any explanation for this.  I think that’s how I wound up forcing odd poses with objects/backgrounds that aren’t really necessary.

Raven gave me a good tip during the shoot about starting out with a pose and changing little things instead of a whole body position change.  Change where the hands are, where they look, smile/no smile, weight shift, etc.  Very helpful I would say since I didn’t really push lots of “poses” during this session.

I also tried to avoid weird cropping.  I think I was pretty successful and any of those photos that I DID do this to, I have noted, pulled them out, and am going to try and be more proactive about that.  It really is a shame when I go back and see a shot I like, minus the floating limb that has no foot

I’m generally happy with the shots I got, I have some that I’m not so happy with, but you won’t be seeing those this time around, those are mine to hold FOREVER!  ha.

Raven was a lot of fun to shoot with, so was Kelly.  It was interesting to do a shoot with just one other intern and one model vs. some of our big pow-wow type get togethers where we swarm in like we are taking over.

Lastly, I wanted to try to move around more.  I got told that I tend to get those “straight on” shots primarily, and it’s true.  BLAH.  I don’t want to be a sub-par photographer so I’m working on these new findings.  I still had a lot of straight on shots just because I was shooting FOR Raven, but I think I have accomplished some things I wanted to and I’m happy with my growth.  Now to hunker down and bust some more buns and shoot!  Thanks to Raven for trusting me to photograph her and Kelly for hiking around with me!