|
A Different Month:
April, 2013
This is the fifth year that I’ve given myself
the assignment to pick one month and take a
picture each day of that month. I usually
picked February (probably because it is the
shortest month), but this time I selected April,
thinking the weather would be better. I
forgot about the wind... As in the past,
these images could not just be
“snapshots” – I had to actually try to get a
decent image. In addition, if I came up
with more than one good image on one day, I
could not carry it forward to another day.
In previous years, I restricted myself to using
only certain kinds of lenses (last year I could
use only an ultra-wide angle lens (24mm and
wider). This time I left the choice of
lenses wide open, but added some restrictions
that were, in some ways, harder. A picture
tells you what it wants to be: and that’s
not always the type of toned image that has
become my “style”. Sometimes it requires
black and white. That’s what I had to do -
if the image “said” it needed to be black and
white, then that’s what I had to do. At
times, I used shallow depth of field
(something I normally do not do), just to force
myself out of my comfort zone a bit. I
also occasionally used high contrast
(gasp!). The second condition, however,
was to still try to do images that would fit in
with the work that I show in
galleries. The combination was not always
doable, but I tried. One change from
previous years, however, was that I included two
images for two different days. I just
wasn’t able to pick which one I liked better -
which accounts for the fact that there are
thirty two pictures, instead of thirty!
All the same problems that I experienced in past
years were present again: many days the weather
and/or light was such that I really would have
liked to use one of the photos from a prior
day. As always, there were times that I
had trouble coming up with a destination, or
just the subject matter, to photograph - and
went out with only a vague idea of what I was
going to shoot.
All that having been said, here are this year’s
results - once again, quite different from
previous years’. Some pictures achieve
what I was trying to do, and some miss the
mark. I think as a group, however, they
are interesting (even if they are a little
weighted toward old buildings). Without
question, however, the project was rewarding,
frequently in ways that I did not expect.
As in the past, you be the judge...
My Previous
Years' Projects can be viewed here:
-= Home
=-
|
|
