Opening my eyes as I explored the coast of Maine

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” – Marcel Proust

So I thought I would share a couple more images from a workshop I immersed myself into a little while ago. I blogged about it here and here as well as chatting a bit about the artist John Paul Caponagro that taught the class several times before.

As Seth Godin talks about in his book The Icarus Deception, we are all artists. We are born that way. The challenge as Picasso is known to have quoted, is how to remain one.

There are of course a million ways to express your creativity and share that artist that is deep down inside you, and one of those for me (as well as many of you) is with the camera. To keep that passion flowing inside me, from time to time I like to surround myself with others that are on that same journey of discovery and curiosity. A workshop is the perfect place to share that passion!

Of course (if you have followed this blog for any length of time now), you probably know that my passion for the art included a pretty heavy dive into the world of HDR or High Dynamic Range photography. The shot below is an example of that. It has waited patiently on the hard drive for its chance to make it to the blog for a while now, but a few technical flaws have prevented me from sharing it until now. Ill chat more about that in a minute though. It does help me tell the story about seeing the landscape with a new set of eyes though, so Ill let it fly out into the world finally……

My plan (as I mentioned in a similar post to this) was to “see” the world before me with a set of eyes, perhaps a new set of eyes, that was inspired by the artists and teachers around me. I wanted to give the HDR process a rest for a while to see what other scenes would unfold before my eyes. There are of course many ways to tell a story, and I was in a personal search to find some of those.

The word I put into my mind as I danced about the coastal rocks of Maine that late afternoon was “Framing”. How to frame the scenes before me in a way to give scale and a sense of place to the images. Not exactly something that is easy to find as the saltly air is slapping you on the back and your feet are slipping and sliding around on the slick rocks at the waters edge, but I was on a mission!

I of course forgot all about my wish to escape the HDR bracket process once I was set up for the shot, so I fired off a sequence or 2 (hey, I was there and the light was pretty harsh…why not!)

Slapping, slipping, and sliding?…..I wonder if you should reword that…

Naaaaa.

Anyway……..

I then decided to get a little more serious and get back to my challenge, my own personal challenge to not rely on the process that I could enhance the image with later in post, but to look for the content within the frame. What story could I tell with the frame in mind.

Well, I’ll admit its not much of a story, but for me it was at least worth the process of exploring the world a bit…..to see the world with perhaps a fresh perspective.

In what ways do you challenge yourself? Share it here in the comments. I’d love to here!

 

Oh, one more thing….

I mentioned that I was not too happy with a few things in the top image. During the workshop, we were running and gunning at a pretty fast clip. My older laptop was beginning to choke up a bit with the HUGE D800 files (that was one of the reasons I was looking to take a break from the HDR process as well by the way), and I decided to adapt a bit of a work around to my normal workflow. I decided to export the image brackets as smaller files before dragging them into the HDR software I was using as this would allow the wait to be somewhat bearable.

Of course, if you are not technical and aware of what I am taking about now, I am sure I have lost you by now! Perhaps I should have given you a warning! Anyway, the final edits were a lot smaller in size and resolution as well as processed in a pretty rushed fashion as there was a lot to learn, explore, and create in such a short time in the workshop!

Perhaps I’ll go back to the raw files someday and see what I can create in my creative time…..under candle light, with green tea, and the jazz playing in the back ground…..

As always, thanks for stopping by…

More on ALL of this later 🙂