Photography and the Creative Process

“I sketch with my camera”

At an impromptu jam session, someone handed me a sketchpad and invited me to draw.  I replied, “I sketch with my camera.”

The resulting image, Pete Plays the Blues, will be exhibited at the Laurel Art Guild’s 39th Annual Open Juried Exhibition at the Montpelier Arts Center in Laurel, Maryland, March 9 through March 30, 2008.

This image was created in camera on 35mm black and white film.

Capturing Motion

I was first exposed to photography in college in 1982 when I took a beginning photography course. Once school let out, I headed out to California to roam around. In Oakland, I chanced upon a group of drummers and starting taking pictures.

I love the way my camera captured the motion, and dare I say emotion, inherent in the players’ activity. I call this image “Drumming”.

Drumming is the latest addition to the Street Photography gallery at www.wmgphoto.com.

Serendipity and Social Commentary

I came across this statue of Jesus’s face, rent asunder, in a shop selling Christian religious iconography in Los Angeles. Schism, the photograph’s title was inspired by the crack in the statue’s face, but the more I looked at the image, the more it occured to me that the other elements of the image convey the sense of schism as well.

The right side of the image is dominated by Jesus on the cross. A brother holds a child in his arms, and the child looks lovingly up at the Christ on the Cross.

The left side of the rent image of Christ is a different story altogether. On the left, higher and larger than the crucifix is a statue of a person whose arms echo the arms of Jesus on the cross, but this person’s gaze is directed not on the Lord himself, but rather on the images above, highly iconographic images of the Virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. Also on the left are various statues of Mary in the different forms in which she has been depicted, including a dark-skinned virgin in the background.

Kneeling on the floor in the left foreground are two children in prayerful pose looking up. Are they looking to the statue of Jesus before them, or are they instead praying to the various images of Mary, the face of one being surrounded by a halo’s glow, and both of which seem to have been placed just ahead of the Jesus statue, and thus, closer to the praying children.

So, while the crack in the face of Jesus brought to my mind the word “schism”, the rest of the composition speaks volumes about what that word might mean in the context suggested by the religious icons on display.

Focus on Religion

Alpha and Omega, the image in this post, is my latest addition to the Focus on Religion gallery at my online Photo Gallery. I invite you to visit the photo gallery and look at the other images as well.

A matter of taste

On November 11, I wrote an article on Depth of Field in a Digital World and illustrated the post with two photographs. One of those photos, Renaissance Acrobat is a color image of a young woman in a ring suspended in midair. I was working on that picture to submit it to the Maryland Renaissance Festival 2007 photo contest, not because I thought that the photo was a particularly moving image, but because I thought it was a good fit for one of their categories. I have not, however, posted the image to my online Photo Gallery.

The reason I used Renaissance Acrobat in the article is that it served to illustrate my point about the limitations of digital cameras with respect to one’s ability to create an image with a short depth of field. I find Country Store, the other image in that article to be a much more compelling photograph.

I write this post because I am ambivalent about Renaissance Acrobat. I strive to show only my best work on this website and in my online Photo Gallery. I endeavor to create photographs that are emotionally compelling. I feel that Renaissance Acrobat falls short of this ideal. Nevertheless, I will retain the Renaissance Acrobat image on the overflow page of the post as an example of the point I was making.