Stardate 20170920. Lesson one of nineteen of the Compelling Frame. And 1/7th of that.

So, I’m taking this online course called the Compelling Frame.  My first homework assignment is to choose 7 of my favorite photographs and answer a bunch of questions about them.  
 

Now, I’m 50 years old. I’ve been taking photos for some time now.  I have 57,657 fifty seven thousand six hundred and fifty seven photos on Flickr.  I even like some of them.  

Now I’m guessing that I just need to find 7 photos that I like and learn something from them.  I don’t actually need to find the bestest most fucking favoritest seven photos that I have taken my entire life.   I don’t need to AGONIZE about it.  

I also need to print them, so I need to take some time to print them. Also, this notebook isn’t large enough to glue 5x7 prints so I need to rip this page out and paste it into a larger notebook.

prickly rasp fern @ the UCSC arboretum.  17 April 2016 with the Leica Q.

1.   This is an example of the sort of photo that I try to make that I call a “quirky out-of-focus landscape” It’s dreamy. It’s like something out of a dream. Even if you’re lucid dreaming, if you try to focus on any one thing, then everything dissolves into nothingness. This is the moment before that happens.
   2.       It’s a landscape, so it’s a landscape orientation.  That seems kind of stupid, but choices must be made.  This photo was made away from my eye. The way I made this photo was to take it (away from my eye), and look at the photo, and try again maybe aiming the camera a little different or hope AF found something in focus.  I kept the same aspect ratio the same – because?
   3.       I’m not sure if this photo has lines.  It has regions. The top 1/3 suggests “sky.”  The middle third features brightly lit out-of-focus ferns.  The bottom third has a few in-focus ferns.   I think the in-focus parts of the frame capture the eye 1st – then the eye explores the rest of the frame.
   4.       The light here is amazing.  It’s also high contrast. The mood is all about the light.  If the light were different – I may not have taken the photo.
   5.       My eye wasn’t at the camera when I took the photo, I was above the scene without the benefit of a screen that pivots to the eye. With this perspective, I’m in the fern forest. If I were taking the photo from my eye--- I would be above the fern forest.
   6.       There is not “moment” with this photograph as it’s a totally static subject matter. The only moment is in answer one. The moment before your dream scene fades away.
   7.       The in-focus ferns are the pattern that echoes each other as well as the out-of-focus fern shapes that echo the in-focus shapes.  There’s lots of contrast – there are a couple of dark areas w/o fern shapes in them.
   8.       For this particular image, I think everything in the frame counts.
   9.       The red/green and the blue/orange complement each other, the red in-focus fern against the out-of-focus bright green background draws the eye there.
   10.   The image is “balanced” in a dynamic full of energy sort of way. Or it is out of balance as only the bottom ¼ has any in-focus elements or the framing could be a little less extreme --- put the frame down a bit—1/3 focus instead of ¼.