Kia ora tatou:

As part of my mentoring programme, students are asked to carry out three assignments in which they look at their place in the pantheon of the medium. Jenny has submitted this essay , and an amazing piece of scholarship it is…

Pour a glass of whatever you fancy, sit back, and read….

MENTORING: FINDING ONESELF 101                     March 2010

“Chart your own journey through photography… see which marker peg you are standing next to”

• Connections
• Expression
• Recording
• Technical knowledge
• Camera Club
• The gospel according to Camera Club judging
• Breaking Free
• Expression
• Connections

It could be seen as a circle, but someone wiser than myself refers to it as a spiral, this journey that drives me.  And drive me it does, whether one believes in predestiny or other philosophical concepts, there is a growing sense that my journey is not a dusty, rock strewn path, but a river winding and looping around and over itself, sometimes rushing headlong into narrow ravines deep and swift, others tumbling headfirst at breakneck speed over bold rapids, others sluggishly drifting seawards, wide and slow with the odd eddy to provide some light relief, and then there’s the boundary with the ocean, the mixing and dispersion into another vast body.  Again and again I come across a familiar landscape although at each point the wind is from a different quarter and the light is illuminating scenes that had passed unnoticed before.

“Lets start at the very beginning; it’s a very good place to start…”

(more…)

Envy Me

Kia ora tatou:

From time to time people send me images to comment upon (my apologies if i do take some time to respond; it will improve when they introduce DLT aka Daylight Lengthening Time), and I love it when it happens. Sometimes i must be polite, but most of the time I am stunned by what comes my way. Of late there has been rather a flood of these. Woohoo!  Many thanks.

It would be easy to bundle them up into a single post , but I am going to sprinkle them into the blog over the next few weeks and honour them individually, as they deserve to be.

First up is Charlene Koh, who contacted me a wee while ago to help her boost her skills before she leaves on the Big OE. Right from the start was amazed by her eye and her sense of colour and design. She has a self-confidence and an openeness to ideas and approaches which is truly wonderful.

She saw this image of a reflection on a car bonnet  ( it was a Stingray) and made it with her D5000 ( she only has one lens). She has strong  PhotoShop skills ( she has been teaching herself in isolation) and an innate ability to integrate them seamlessly into her idea-and workflow. and she is not afraid of the computer…

Charlene, this would make a fantastic framed wallprint. If you can do this now, where will you be in a few years?

Check out her work  here.

Ka kite

Kia ora tatou:

Time for a Sermon on the Mount.

On Monday night I had the singular honour of being asked to judge the Canterbury Roundup, an interclub battle for projected Images, along with Ian Smith (ex-Photo Access) and Linda Lee, a Fine Art photography teacher from Christchurch. Nice to see clubs looking for input from people outside the system. Widening the range of inputs can only be good for photography as a whole and for enlarging our awareness of the possibilities the medium can offer. CPS came first (again), followed by Rangiora (YAAY!- No, I am not being parochial-much) and then Kaiapoi. Congratulations.

On that subject, I want to raise (and hopefully dispel) a common fallacy: that professionals are better photographers  than amateurs.

Wrong. They are the same, only different. I have seen work from amateur photographers that had a long way to go. And I have been asked to explain ” this depth-of-field thing” to a professional who was making $80k a year, shooting families, weddings and children. A professional makes his/her living from photography. As such, he/she is driven by client expectations. An amateur photographs for the love of it. We are all amateurs. Or we should be. (more…)

Kia ora tatou:

Continuing the theme of Christmas on the Ezine…

Garry sent in this image, shot at the Christchurch Santa Parade on 2 Dec.

This guy is really enjoying himself…..

Somehow this image brings a few words to mind…

Every Who
Down in Who-ville
Liked Christmas a lot…

But the Grinch,
Who lived just North of Who-ville,
Did NOT!

The Grinch hated Christmas! The whole Christmas season!
Now, please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
It could be that his head wasn’t screwed on quite right.
It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.
But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

You can read the rest here

Kia ora tatou:

I will shortly remove the Your Images page. There are a number of treasons for this (no, not a typo!):

1. I am about to (hopefully) replace it with a dialogue, along the lines of Letter to Marthinus
2. Leaving the images in the main body of the post allows you to make comments on it more easily

To that end, I have created a new category, Your images.

And what better way to kick it off than this one….

Alan Blacklock, an enormously-talented and skilled photographer for NIWA in Wellington and a contributor to the Ezine under various pseudonyms, was sitting in his backyard, dreaming of a gift-wrapped haggis, a new sporran and a bottle of Johnny Walker Red, when he looked up and spotted this cloud passing by. He has obviously been a good boy in 2007!

And No, he did not PhotoShop it (see previous post). He is a purist….

Editorial Correction:

BTW It was deep fried haggis, a velveteen sporran and Laphroiag that was going through my mind at the time.