Always learning

Got slammed by a bad cold last weekend, but life provided me a great remedy - a FREE 3 day webinar with Zach Arias thanks to CreativeLIVE.com. I only chanced upon this opportunity because a BFF photographer posted it on FB and I am so glad she did! It was an awesome, creative way to spend a beautiful weekend while I felt like crap. Arias is a good teacher, repeating mantras like "head in a clean spot, head in a clean spot, head in a clean spot" and "know your equipment!" "KNOW KNOW KNOW  your camera," and "don't do what other's do - find your own way." Great inspiration. But now I'm left with wanting to change up everything I've been doing. He showed examples of his own work where his compositions were filled with triangles, repeating lines, great use of negative space.

A former catalogue artist, he told of how he hated the job of putting transparencies over images for cover shoots but how he now realizes what a great learning experience that was in developing his own vision.  He and his wife Meg critiqued portfolio's of 6 participating class members and, as painful as it may have been for them, it made me want to re-do my main web. 

Thankfully, though, I have been busily at work creating a new site for myself that focuses on my landscape photography and I just launched it last Friday. www.HudsonValleyScenes.com is a place where I hope to showcase stunning landscapes that might sell to businesses or folks that would just like some nice images on their walls. At least I've selected a smaller body of work and presented it in a clean, easy to navigate fashion.

Even though I'd like to focus on landscapes, I still do enjoy shooting portraits. This is Aiden and Austin who, despite colic and chilly weather, managed to pose for me last Friday.
As Arias said, I love my job. Not only do I get to constantly learn, but I get to spend time with nice people and see some terrific scenery and occasionally I get to be a little creative myself.


Happy shooting!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day Trip with my Daughter

Image
Between Covid 19 and moving from Texas to Maryland, I really haven't seen much of the world this year and that is hard on this travel-loving girl.  Here I am living an hour away from Baltimore and Washington, DC and we are stuck in an unending state of quarantine.  I needed to break out so I asked my daughter if she'd take an early morning trip to Annapolis with me. "How early?" she wanted to know. She is not normally a photographer and, with two young children, unaccustomed to our "pre-dawn" starts.  "As early as you can," I tried and she and the kids showed up slightly after 7 am.  Popsie stayed with the kids who grumbled that they just wanted to go back to sleep, but Nova was game for a new adventure and we happily drove 35 minute southeast to the beautiful city of Annapolis.  Court house showed some signs of life. Mask covered guards stood at the door. Maryland's capital city, located on the Chesapeake Bay is a lovely, his...
Read more

Visiting Switzerland - Zurich

Image
My husband and I recently had the opportunity to join a group of photographers, led by Joe Brady and his wife, Diane Bollen , to visit five different cities in Switzerland - Zurich, St. Moritz, Zermatt, Grindelwald and Lucern.  Despite never hearing of these places before now, we had such an enjoyable trip that I want to share this experience with you. I plan to write 5 blogs, one for each city, to show some of the beauty we encountered and remember this wonderful trip. We arrived in Zurich very early on a Saturday morning in June. We chose to go straight to sleep in an airport hotel, to ward off jet lag. When we woke in early afternoon, we were right near the trains which were in a giant "mall" building with all kinds of shops. We asked which stop we needed to get off, and proceeded to navigate the train system to see some of Zurich's sites.  The streets were festive with vendors and people shopping.  After walking around and trying to figure out where we needed to meet...
Read more

Doing my best to capture Austin's weirdness

Image
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. I discovered an awesome PhotoWalk yesterday thanks to Photographers Adventure Group and Trover . The concept of Trover was brand new to me - it's a phone app that helps you share life's hidden gems, through photography, with others, and it is evidently very popular in other places in the world and is becoming a hit around here. So, the walk encouraged me to use my iphone as a camera way more than I would normally use it. That didn't stop me from taking close to 300 images with my camera - but it did open my eyes to the social networking capabilities of iphone photography and one of my fellow walkers also showed me some outrageous editing capabilites it has as well. We were instructed to upload our photos as we took them, giving a bit of a description and posting them to the Trover site. This was a technological challenge for me, but I love a good challenge and, at the end of the day I actually won a pretty cool p...
Read more