A Place Therein

Winter... it sometimes drags.  Yucky days and cold weather leave me inside much more than I desire.  It can be difficult to grow photography skills when you feel trapped.  Then I began to shoot still life photography. My little dog snuck into this photo because she wanted to lay on the blanket. I am a visual person.  I used to work in a retail shop.  Creating displays was something I did weekly.  I learned to make the displays eye-catching and attractive.  I was able to take those skills and apply them to creating still life photos. With the announcement that I have two new grandbabies on the way, I was in a baby mood. They aren't the photos that get the most likes on social media.  Honestly, I think most photographers think of still life photography as silly.  Unless you are making a mint in advertising, photos of random items don't pay.  However, this is an area that has taught me a lot about lighting and ...

What scene does God have for me to discover?  What light shines for me to capture?  What is out there, waiting to entrance me, to calm the chaos in my mind and bring peace to my heart?  This is what shooting landscapes does for me.  I didn't intend to capture a heart, but when I went to edit the sun behind the clouds, I smiled at the heart that was there for me. It's one of my favorite moments... when I press the shutter and capture a moment of God's beauty.  He paints the skies with such brilliance that I am compelled to capture the moment for eternity. I have become a cloud chaser.  Big skies with gorgeous puffs of cumulus that add such depth the the photos draw me.  The colors of the dried-up winter fields show a hopeful beauty under the big skies. We live in a world where there is much to see, and we forget it easily.  We are distracted by the immediate; the phones, the to-do list, the noise, and the problems. We forget t...

(First published Friday, January 11, 2018 in https://unconventionalcatherine.blogspot.com/2019/01/candid.html) I am learning more and more.  One of the things I always did when I was younger, from the time I was fifteen, was to take my camera with me nearly everywhere.  Today, we do that with our smartphones.  Everyone always has a camera with them, and the cameras in smartphones have improved immensely over the last several years.  There are a few fun videos on YouTube that show shoot-outs of a professional, expensive camera versus an iPhone camera.  The results vary, depending on the video, but the truth is that even the best iPhone camera is limited in its specs.   I can take some awesome pics on my iPhone that look marvelous when uploaded to Instagram, but if I were to enlarge the photo to an 8 x 10 or larger, the photo might not look so sharp. iPhone photo But... I still want to have my camera with me.  When t...

(First published on December 21, 2018 on https://unconventionalcatherine.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-storyteller.html) "We are all storytellers, photojournalists of lives that are rich with tears, bruises, tenderness, strangeness, and humor."  George Lange in The Unforgettable Photograph When I was fifteen I received my first point and shoot camera.  Even before that moment, I loved to take pictures.  I remember using someone’s camera (probably my mom’s) to take photos of my Barbie dolls. Through the years I must have taken hundreds of rolls of film.  (Yes, film.  That probably makes me old.) I would take photos of daily life.  I wasn’t ever super great at the posed stuff, but I captured candid moments often.  They were my favorite, perhaps because they tell a story and reflect people. I was often teased for my photo obsession, especially in the moment when I always had a camera in my hand.  My husband would groan at the boxe...