(Continued from previous post.  Don’t read this post first.  Read the previous post first and then read this one next.)

I turn around 180 degrees and this is what I see.  This is Ida from Winnipeg.  Ida is on a motorcycle.  Ida and her band are 3 minutes away from performing on the stage … but right now Ida wants pictures. 

Three minutes pass and the stage door opens and a hurried “we have to go on stage now” proclamation is made.

The shoot is done.  I head back to the truck.

None of what happened tonight would have materialized had I not had the assignment.  I easily could have stayed home.  There would have been no shots.  But it was “Don’t go out with preconceived notions …” that actually gave the right-side of my brain the permission to actually start shooting.

I did not want to go out to shoot tonight.  I did not.  But I drove up to Whyte Avenue anyways.  I drove around aimlessly.  There was a Turkish festival near the pagoda.  They had the pagoda turned into a hookah den.  I thought that was imaginative.  There were motorbikers at Tim Horton’s, doing what motorbikers do.  But, none of this was fueling my creative drive.

I had it in my mind that I was going to capture the essence of this “Midnight Summer Special Light”.  That was the assignment.  I thought perhaps a nice street shot with the 10 o’clock light might work.  Or maybe a nature shot bathed in golden backlight. 

But no.  Nothing that I was seeing was inspiring me, and my couch was calling me, like a siren to the rocks.  I don’t need to be out here with a camera right now.

So I drove home.  At the last possible minute I thought to myself “No.  I’m going to go and shoot.  I have to get this assignment done — tonight.”  I turned around and went back towards Whyte again.

It was something that Jay Maisel says.  It basically boils down to “Don’t go out shooting with preconceived notions about what you’re going to shoot.”  My problem was I had many notions, and not all of them good.  I was preventing myself from capturing anything.

So I parked at the first parking spot I found and I got out.  I shot a railway marker.  I shot a red door.  I shot a fire tower.  (The same tower incidentally that I shot in the winter.  Only in the winter I shot it at 4:00p to get the right light.  Tonight I shot it at 9:30p and got even better light.)  I shot a blue door.  I considered that this might be the first week that I’m skunked.  For a moment I considered giving up photography altogether. 

Then I looked down the alley, and everything fell into place. It was the light.  It was the freedom that “Don’t go out shooting with preconceived notions” gives you.  It was that I was shutting down my left-brain and giving in to my sub-conscious all-knowing right-brain.  My subject had fallen into my lap. 

These captures are the results of that effort.  They may look heavily manipulated, but they are not.  They haven’t even made it in to Photoshop.

At this point I am thrilled.  I am happy.  Everyting was good and then I did what all good photographers do … I quite literally turned my camera around 180 degrees.

(Continued in next post.)

I had the good fortune to attend a Jay Maisel seminar last year.  One of the burrs that attached itself to my brain was that if you want to improve your photography you’ve got to walk slower.  Also, that you have to free your mind and go out shooting without preconceived notions.  You have to instead react to what you see.

It was sort of an interesting experience for me today in that all of those Maisel-isms came into play.  First, my son wanted to go on the LRT ride today.  Fine enough.  Do I take my camera or not.  I’m not really in the mood for it but of course Maisel would say “take your camera with you everywhere you go”.  So I took my camera.

My son is 4 years old.  I like to hold his hand while we’re walking and listen as he reacts to everything he sees about him.  So, it really slowed down my walking speed. 

We rounded a corner down in the corridors and “bam” this hit me in the side of the head like a brick.  My initial reaction was excitement.  I could feel this photograph.  The light was exceptional, the composition revealed itself right in front of me.

An interesting application of a lesson from Jay Maisel.

This week’s subject was Nature.  I wasn’t sure what sort of angle to play on Nature.  I had thought about “Human Nature” or maybe “Nature vs. Man”, but in the end I let the rain decide.

Yes.  I think I’m going to crown this one a failure.  In the field I thought that I had something that was purple.  When I got it back it was much more magenta and a lot less purple. 

So I was pretty disappointed except for the fact that if I wasn’t out with the camera I wouldn’t have captured any of these images of this little guy here.  He is a bit camera shy.  Not at all like his big sister.  He’s a tough guy to get interested in an informal portrait shoot.   It really is amazing how having the camera in hand, or in use typically leads to other work beyond the weekly assignment. 

I called the assignment this week: “Green”.  I could have taken the easy route out and shot foliage.  A nice back-lit shot of a the new leaves would have been a logical subject.

But instead I sat at the dining table, directly across from a bowl of green apples and thought … there’s my subject.

And so it was.  I knew how I wanted them arranged.  All that remained was to take the shot.  Tonight, things slowed down enough to afford me the time to put this together.

Spent the past week shooting the Edmonton Poetry Festival.  For Sunday’s Cafe Readings I thought that rather than just throw up a bunch of images that I would put together a slide show to make things a bit more interesting.

Enjoy … don’t forget to watch the HD version!

Zack Arias recently blogged about his latest GOYA shootout idea where you go to a thrift shop and pick up an item for under $5 and then use it in a shoot.

So that’s how this week’s assignment came about.  I think that these doobies look rather sinister and I’m kind of smitten with them presently. 

It ends up that this is actually a close-up of the side of a small jewelry box decorated with shells.  I picked this up for $3.99 today.

The last time we did a “Signs of Spring” assignment it completely jinxed the weather.  It dropped 20 degrees overnight and we suffered through another spring snowfall.  So of course Robert calls for another “Signs of Spring” assignment this week and exactly the same thing happens … again.

Had a tough time deciding between these two images.  I like them both.  And, I guess in the end they’re quite similar.  I suppose I was just ‘feeling’ the purple a bit more today.

And so, in the end, this was exactly the image I was hoping to make.  We’re trained as photographers to set our exposures according to the f/16 rule.  For those unfamiliar with the rule, it states that if you are shooting in bright sun, then you should set your aperture to f/16 and your shutter speed to 1 over your ISO.  I was shooting at 200 ISO on this day, so I should have set my camera to f/16 at 1/250 second.  But not on this day.  No not this day.  This day the assignment was to shoot at f/4.  Shoot everything at f/4.  And so all week I did just that.  I kept the aperture at f/4 and I visited shutter speeds that I’ve never visited before: 1/3000sec 1/4000sec.  Phenomenal.  Why?  What is the reward for doing that?  In fact it is something that no point and shoot camera can do … blur out the background.  That’s the whole point of the exercise.  And on this day it yields a single Cholla Cactus and the remainder of them pleasantly blurred out.