Photo Genres
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quantum heart murmurs
a few yesterdays ago
in the hours between the deepest of night
and the rising warmth of the sun,
when i was feeling how heavy
the weight of forgetting is,
i wrote you a letter.it holds all of the secrets
i wanted you to know about my heart,
and the way that you left things
like the scattering of leaves
after a storm that never
showed up on anyone’s radar.it tells the story of how many nights
i held your shape in the dark with my soul,
waiting,
and the way that i could make my breath
actually say your name even when i held it.i wrote about the way that the moon
reminds me of the shiniest part inside of me
that you found and then stole
but that somehow still lights my way home
when i feel alone.when i was done with the damp pages,
i folded it into a tiny, star-shaped heart
and carefully postmarked it
to a future you, who may or may not
someday care.To license commercially, please email.
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The Beauty of Change
We collected a rather large batch of caterpillars that were threatening to skeletonize my sunflower garden recently. I housed them in a small plastic container with slots for air designed to hold buggies and fed them sunflower leaf rations (they turned their noses up at other types of leaves) saving most of my garden from destruction while still feeding them. After several days, they all suited up in their respective chrysalises and made with the metamorphosing. We dug witnessing this, and awaited the unfolding of their wings as they became Bordered Patch Butterflies (Chlosyne lacinia).
For the past couple of days, they’ve been greeting the world anew, and as they do, we open the hatch on the container and set them free into my (flower filled, butterfly orgasmic) back yard. It is an incredibly joyous feeling to watch one of them lift out of the housing and ascend into the air and off to freedom, somehow making my heart more buoyant even though it is my lungs that fill with air while I breathe in and watch them float.
This little flapper needed some extra time to dry its wings and visit with another creature who has been rapidly changing right before my eyes lately.
I have a tender love that floats on wings of expectation and wonder for them both.
To license commercially, please email.
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how to: silhouette photography / self portraiture
Sometimes you can say just as much, or even more, with the suggestion of a thing as you can with all of its details. This is true of silhouette photography – a genre that can be alarmingly beautiful and expressive. If you’ve never shot silhouettes, you may be wondering how to achieve this look. It’s fairly simple to get the basics down. From there, you can let your creativity run wild.
The Basics:
The most important thing to remember is that your subject should not be well lit from the front. In addition, there should be a significant light source in the background.
The subject is whatever you want forming the silhouette. In the case of self portraiture, this subject is you. We want to reduce lighting from the front because we want to obscure most of the detail – this is what creates an outline, or silhouette.
There are many ways to obtain this, from studio lighting to sunlight. Sunsets provide an amazing backdrop for silhouettes. They are pure, simple, and beautiful. Play around to see what you can achieve.
Once you’ve identified a subject and have a backlight, attend to camera settings. Expose the image for the backlight, rather than the subject. This way, your subject will be very dark, creating an outline with little detail from the front.
Voila! This is the basic formula for silhouette photography.
A few things to remember:
- create distinct, clean shapes with your silhouette subject(s)
- try to reduce excessive clutter or multiple other confusing shapes in the image unless they add to the “story” you want it to tell
- avoid foreground lighting
- identify or set up a significant source of back lighting
- no one formula for camera settings is perfect. the strength of your light will dictate what you’ll need, so experiment
- don’t forget to pay careful attention to scene setting and composition, as with all photos, once you get the technique down
- for self portrait silhouette photography, you will find the following tools incredibly helpful: remote/intervalometer, tripod
Here are some examples of silhouette self portraits I’ve created, with some basic information you can review.
Of course, rules are meant to be broken, and you can play around with the basic setup and then go beyond it, tweaking things in so many ways to create different kinds of photos.
Here, there is obviously a lot going on, so the silhouette is clean, and there is “clutter.” But it’s interesting clutter, and adds to the mood:
You can also adjust lighting on the subject to create “near-silhouette” images. Some details of the subject are lit and visible, while others are dark, as with the following self portrait.
Go forth, find the light, and create silhouettes.
To license images or text commercially, please email.
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She Used To Sit And Sing To The Birds, He Whispered
This work by Lotus Carroll is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
To license commercially, please email. -
In These Quiet Moments Love Speaks Loudest
My little 3 person family took a few trips to the beach last summer. On one of those trips we drove almost all the way there and then stopped in a hotel for the night before heading out for beach frolicking fun the next morning. This is a candid monochrome from that hotel. John is looking over at Braden, our (then) 6 year old, in the other bed. His expression speaks volumes. I love moments like this. Capturing them feels like being able to work real magic, the kind that will allow you to travel through time later, or the kind that lets you see inside of someone’s heart. -
His Ever Changing Face
Every day he looks a little different. He grins up at me now with this lopsided, crazy toothed smile. Him, squinting into the sun and my lens and blowing my heart with his innocence and love.
Every day he is a little bigger, some tiny bit older, somehow new in his growing-boy-changeling ways.
He is what all children are – a person becoming something amazing in deceptively tiny steps that are really so, so big on their insides.They feel big to me, and as they go by, I feel a weight turn and shift inside me. It is both a feeling of joy and sorrow, the disparity between which is one of life’s greatest gifts to experience.
Change on, my love.
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All That’s Left Undone
Eyes that are gray
Can’t see behind the stains
Of blurring stars
And bleeding sunI wish I could stay
Or silence the rain
The solid bars
Of all that’s left undone -
Meal Ticket In Swim Trunks