on photography

Hello Everyone,

What are you up to this weekend? If you happen to be living in Belgium and interested in photography, I have an idea 😉

This weekend it is exhibition time! At the Academy where I follow photography, at the end of each year, you get the chance to display what you have been working on.

“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”

Ansel Adams

I already told you what the assignments for this year were.

They were all a challenge to me. I changed my mind several times on what to do for each subject.

Animals – see picture on top – were tough. It took me some time to find an original point-of-view. I am happy I decided on putting them in a kind of still life.

I already decided quickly on which piece of art I wanted as example: Girl with the Pearl Earring, from Johannes Vermeer. But making the copy was quite a challenge too.

If you want to see my other photos and what the other students made, you are very welcome to visit the exhibition at the Academy,  ABK Mol.

Have a great weekend, Sophie

PS: I will certainly be there on Saturday 16h-20h and Sunday 13h30-17h30

Our painter was ill, so no wallpaper so far…

Do you love taking pictures?

I am now in my second year in the photography course, and it continues to be quite challenging. But I love it!

This year we have to work on five subjects:

1. Choose a known piece of art. Try to copy it in a photo. Make your own interpretation.
2. Documentary: make a book of all photos you made.
3. Animals
4. Landscape
5. Self-portrait, this comes back each year, unfortunately

Have you got an idea of which piece of art you’d choose?

Well I have struggled. The piece of art I was quite sure from the start — Guess what I chose 😉 — but the copying and interpretation…   I am still working on it.

As a documentary, I chose Amnesty International, because I worked for this beautiful organization. I started at a time when there was hope: the Arab Spring.

Now, it looks like this hope has left us, and the world gets madder each day. But we need to keep on fighting for human rights all over the world.

Animals! Getting our two cats before my lens wouldn’t be too original. So something quite creepier came into my mind: dead animals, in fact the consumption of animals. A still life, not alive anymore… To make a point: consume less. Daughter is already on a veggie menu, but I didn’t get the male part of the family to join so far.

I changed my mind so many times on landscape. I tested out different things: several subjects and playing with the shutter time of the camera. First I thought of industrial landscape, then I changed my mind to “bridges”, here underneath.

I like the symbolic significance of it, building bridges is what we need. Then “Bridges of Madison County” popped up in my mind, I read the book and saw the movie, such a captivating story.

On a freezing cold evening last week, I took the picture above:  a reddish sunset over the water, some trees on the shore of the lake. When moving my camera, I came to something more abstract. The result you can see in the picture on top of this post. Do you recognize the colors of the first photo? I guess I will stick to this one. But I need to take a few more alike. Maybe with more greenish colors this time. Wait till spring! What do you think?

To be continued.
As from now, I will be posting on Saturdays.

PS: Part one

What is your favorite hobby?

Since September I have been taking a photography course – I think it lasts six or seven years – at an Academy nearby.  What I find most difficult at this point is the lighting: finding the right balance of the shutter and/or aperture.

As with most forms of art, what you think of as beautiful is personal. Our assignment this year is taking pictures, analog and digital, and adjusting them in Photoshop. We need to work around a list of subjects: depth, light, texture, animals, captivity, freedom, documentary, still-life, decline, portrait.

I worked this way. I just took my camera whenever I could, just when I went for a walk, paid a visit to a city. And while in Puglia, I took my camera with me in the car, wherever I went. Searching for the place to deposit my rubbish, I got lost but ended on the following spot. Catalog it under “decline.”

And of course Dori was again happy to pose before my camera.

I adore the work of Eve Arnold and Man Ray. Man Ray was a very versatile artist, he was a painter and filmmaker too. And of course all Magnum photographers are so talented. I am often in awe of contemporary pictures in newspapers and magazines. How one image make you wonder what tragedy lies behind it?  How can it tell so much with so little information?

Picture on top is Lee Miller photographed by Man Ray