More PTB

There are advantages to being a remote student for the class I am taking with Jonathan Worth in Coventry. One is that I don’t have to actually attend a session at a given time of day and on a certain day of the week. Yet, this is also a disadvantage, as I don’t benefit from working alongside a group of peers. An extensive dialogue, not only about my work but that of others and their thoughts about the photographic experience would be invaluable. In the end, I suspect, I would gladly attend in person if it were possible.

Despite my heralded hermitry, I seek colleagues, which is surely one of the reasons I started this blog. I get a lot of work done in my dungeon of a studio, yet I greatly enjoy the window that has been added to this subterranean room via the internet, and my world has grown larger and better for it.

Is it pathetic to thank a virtual world/audience/peer group for making life more fulfilling? I suppose it depends on one’s level of cynicism, or what one had available to them before venturing forth into any other aspect of the world outside of the voices in one’s head.

No, I’m not crazy. Never have been. That kind of thing tends to be rather permanent, medication or not. We all hear voices, the difference being the subject matter of the conversations and their amplitude in comparison to our own. In fact, we often seek out the tiny voices, the non-judgmental whispers, do we not?

It was one such voice that led me to write Mr. Worth and join his class. And with that, a few more photos:

I shot this shortly after I posted the last batch. I like the photo quite a bit as far as the composition is concerned. Yet, I cannot say that it speaks to the subject matter of aging. Even the adipose in the background, I dare say, can be found on people much younger than I. Perhaps the knuckles of the hands suggest an older, arthritic person, but that is it.

Of course, this is an attempt to duplicate the above and was shot today. I will play with this area of the body some more and try to make the image a bit more performative, as well as work on composition.

Note the absence of the warm tones. It ain't pretty, the edema that comes with getting older. I wonder how the old-timers can sit at a poker table for twelve or fourteen hours at a time and not suffer. As for the composition itself, I like the demarcation in the middle of the frame, the light and dark, and how my eye is drawn down to the wrinkles on the foot. Other than that, it lacks.  I have other photos that are similar to this one in that I hoped to catch the baldness of my calf against what hair remains a bit further up, but I fear a single calf is not enough to make any image work.

As I thought about shooting my legs and feet, I knew I should take the floor into consideration as well. I was not sure how I would handle the color and details in the floor tiles, and as I sat looking at them, I noticed a dust bunny composed of dog and cat hair, and whatever else that seems to accumulates overnight on the floor. I thought it might be a useful prop and provide some metaphoric effect. For the scale of the image as presented on this page, the detritus seems to get lost, which might be a good thing; yet, I encourage the reader to enlarge the photo to see if there is a different effect.

I am happy to have two weeks to take my time to work out issues in the assignment. Previous assignments seemed to come and go at such a pace that any thoughts on how to proceed had to occur before the photo session, and success had to be found within whatever had been shot in that session. This is not to say that lessons do not carry over from one photo study to another. After all, this is a learning process. Still, there is some comfort, almost a luxury to be able to put the above photos out there and know that tomorrow brings an opportunity to think about what works and what doesn't, so that by next Monday I can have a group of photos with which I am largely satisfied.