April 2008 Archives

I officially started my quest to make a photo book as part of SoFoBoMo last weekend. I've decided that my theme will be "Architectural Abstracts" - inspired by photographer Amanda George as I mentioned in my last post. This photo is one of the first images I took.

I must admit that the theme was partially chosen due to my time constraints. Taking photos of parts of buildings that I find interesting is something I can do while going about a normal weekend. It's not something I have to plan a lot for... I don't really need to schedule in an entire day or even half a day for a specific location. In fact, most of the photos I have so far were just taken while on a trip with the family to buy some new clothes at an outdoor shopping mall.

At first I was feeling frustrated that I wasn't going to have time to plan this all out more - to produce a real book that other people would be interested in. However, I really had a lot of fun taking photos over the weekend and have realized that my personal satisfaction is what's important.

It has also been interesting trying something different. I've never really looked so closely at buildings before - or the shadows they produce. You really can find beauty anywhere, if you just take the time to look.

I've discovered that I love my Canon G7 for taking photos like this. It's small, unobtrusive and versatile. I can't exactly say the same thing for my DSLR kit. The style of photos I'm taking requires that everything be in focus, which suits the Canon G7 well. To get the same results with a DSLR I'd probably either need a tripod (so I could stop down to f/11 - f/16 or so), or an expensive lens with image stabilization. The G7 gains points since it has image stabilization built in. The obvious downside is that the G7's images can be a bit noisy, but I'm shooting everything at ISO 80 so it's not very noticeable... and I don't think it will show up in the small prints that will be in the book.

Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be adding some of the more interesting photos to this new "Architectural Abstracts" section of the gallery.

SoFoBoMo officially kicked off on April 1 - and I had hoped to at least have a theme for my book chosen by then, but other priorities got in the way. So, I'll be delaying my start for at least another day or two.

Here are the ideas I have so far:

• Make a series of abstract photos with large areas of solid color, that you might think were paintings at first glance. There are a few photos by Amanda George in the book "How To Look At Photographs" that inspired this idea. I'd love to see more of her work, but unfortunately can't find anything she's done online. This is the closest thing I could find in my photo library as an example, but it's not quite abstract enough:

• There are no expansive landscapes where I live - only far too many strip malls, billboards and gas stations. I could produce a series of photos that are a commentary on the visual clutter we're bombarded with in our cities.

• Make a series of photos of naturally occurring letters of the alphabet. Not letters that appear on a sign, but instead are formed by other objects - such as the branches of a tree forming the shape of the letter "A", or an "H" that's part of a chair. I'd also add in the numbers 0 - 9, for a total of 36 photos. I had read about a photography instructor giving this as an assignment to his students, and it seems like an interesting (but time consuming) challenge.
• Buy some film for the Voigtlander Vitomatic IIb camera a relative gave to me as a gift and use it to take a series of photos around town. It would be my first time using film since I became seriously interested in photography, and I'd like to see what kind of pictures come out of that old thing.

Of course, while I'm out and about I could very well end up working on two or more of those ideas at the same time - depending on what I see and how I feel about it.