#creativecameratip: give yourself a project There is a corner of London that has its own annual festival - in the run up to the festival start and to the performance of Imperfection at The Haberdashery in Crouch End - I am making a virtual 'advent' calendar. |
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People on Facebook are nominating each other to post an image a day for 5 days from our performing past. The 'people 'being performers and theatre makers. fascinating poet and Urban Shaman, John Crow nominated me. And the reason I am talking about this is that I posted an image from a show I performed in 2011/12 and people are responding to the image even more strongly than they did at the time it was used to promote the show.
Do photographs become more see-able with time? Sometimes I trawl back through my picture folders and am surprised by an image that didn't grab me at the time. This is one - a staircase in sunlight. Finished two batches of assessment work on Sunday and in the late afternoon took a walk to remember that I am human with a life beyond the keyboard.
I found this. A message on my phone saying storage is full. I'm looking back through the album to delete. It was September 2011 when I started the hydrangea series. And in the same month, I took this shot of cracked paint. ...and now the journey has started with iPhone 6. I feel lost and nostalgic. I am taking sharper pictures, but still able to find texture and patina by shooting through cellophane or glass. I've been playing with collage at home over the Easter break - Pritt stick and paper. One day I'll get a programme so I can play with overlaying photographs.
Can I still celebrate imperfection when the image is more resolved? First photo using iPhone 6.
A carpet viewed through a glass bottle. Kandinsky candy colours. Welcome to the the new. The camera has an option to take square frames - Instagram ready I guess. You can find me there now, by the way: https://instagram.com/petalily/ So this is how we go forward. It won't always be square, I love portrait too, but it's fun to remember my old Ricohmatic format. When a touch screen doesn't respond, it's a helpless feeling. Switch the phone off and on, of course. It's happened a few times lately and the other morning I found myself ordering an iPhone 6.
Needs must. And the billboards around town are showing stunning shots taken on iPhone 6, so this has got to be a good thing, right? And now it's here, fresh from it's snazzy white box, doing it's first charge in the hallway. Yay. Now, if I bought a new camera, I'd still have the old one, right? But as soon as I put the new simcard in the new phone, old phone will become inert, blind, its own little tombstone. So a moment to mourn. I'll probably feel stupid tomorrow having written this, but I feel a strange small fear that the intuitive relationship I had with my phone camera contained a magic that may evaporate. The best way to mourn and move on is to celebrate, so I have read. For the last 3 years my constant companion has shown me magic, has helped me dare, has transformed lonely moments into vibrant totems. We together have honoured the lost and the broken, marvelled at texture and form, made a virtue of working close in and seeing the small. And here I go into the future. A larger glossy machine. A wider, longer screen that might change the way I look and what I frame. That is less surreptitious in the hand. Loss and gain. Let go and trust. Needs must. I've been mentioning the Hipstamatic app that got me started. So thought it might be good to revisit the past. Is it easy to take a good picture of a flower?
This is the photo I mentioned in my previous post. My friend's camera is broken and the effect is creative. Glorious, huh?
Even the striations in the sky are lovely - like the sky is made of fabric. I've just mentioned Chi Kung in my #creativecameratips on twitter. Breathing from the Hara or lower tantien (energy centre), brings a huge number of benefits - extra mental clarity, enhanced spatial orientation and more resourceful breathing...to name only three. I practiced chi gung or Chi Kung (or Qi Gong!) daily for a period of a year and a half. I look back now and can see it was a period of inner strengthening and settling - not that I really noticed overtly at the time. And things changed in that period, quite dramatically. One might even say practicing chi gung enhances your 'destiny path' or 'makes you more you'. Anyway I mention all this because my friend Kevin practices it - you can see his blog Chi Kung Life where he's making daily Chi Kung practice possible in an easily assimilated way. He also tweets if you want your tips even more bite sized! I guess the shadow on the right is probably Kevin holding his camera up - but it could be him doing 'the Great Tai Chi circle'.... Breathe and enjoy. Beauty is more findable than you knew. My father loved his Leica, my first boyfriend had a Hasselblad. Same boyfriend, a photographer, got me to buy a Ricohmatic (with the Hasselblad's '2¼sq' format) and I took it to Europe (I'm Australian born) and I guess I did what I am doing now - I worked in black and white then, and I took pictures of a wall of dolls in Amsterdam, a frozen spiderweb in the cloisters of Mont St Michel, a window full of dachshund shaped biscuits in Berlin, a snake of hose pipe in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. Yes, readers, I once knew what to do with an F stop.
And now I work with my iPhone. My iPhone 4 with its chipped case. pros 1 it's always there 2 it's no heavier than a phone - whoops, it is my phone, so it weighs nothing 3 it takes darn good shots close up cons 1 you can get delicious 8x10 prints from it - but can't get the ginormous prints that Wolfgang Tillmans can 2 shots of, say, a view from Hungerford Bridge, are not going to thrill you with their devastating depth of field 3 people might not take you seriously As, ever, let me champion imperfection (see post 8/12/2014), as something not just to celebrate but to work with. Limitations are gifts to creativity. I have a friend whose camera phone is broken - he has been taking amazing transcendental shots through that cracked lens! Some cool things I have discovered that can happen with iPhone: ● if you angle it you get some of the shot in focus and some not - can give a dreamy effect, or a thrusting effect (or it can look just wrong!) ● if you shoot in low light, the grain can add mystery to the shot ● get in tight and things look heroic No matter what camera you are working with - learn to love its limitations, lean on them. If you watch Breaking Bad (the commentary on, I think, the final season), you can hear someone loving the way the DOP will allow for flares of light in a shot (it's Jesse holding the lighter, BB fans). I am tempted to say that the approach I advocate might be described as 50% courage and 50% not caring. That sounds perhaps swaggering, perhaps stupid. Really I work from feeling. My cardinal rule - if something draws me, I shoot. It's either good or bad but there's often something to discover. Today's photo shows the joy of working with the grain: I'm listening to TED talks each morning as I do my yoga. This morning Richard Seymour, designer, was talking about how, rather than being an act of pure cognition; beauty is felt.
Once I got in to the habit of uploading my daily cache of shots on to the computer and looking through them to choose and sometimes to crop, I noticed that something in my torso would change. There would be a quickening, an excitement on one shot that wasn't there on its near twin neighbour. Later I began to see how in the exciting shot, a diagonal might pierce the top right corner, or sudden light had flared at that moment. Take time, when you are viewing your shots to be open to this sense. They often talking about someone developing their eye, or having a good eye. Maybe we can also develop a good heart and gut. |
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Performer and theatremaker Peta Lily has been taking photographs for the last five years. Her aesthetic has been to use her iPhone camera to capture the world close up and with an immediacy that is both surprising and moving. Categories
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