Joanna’s daughter Heather is doing great. Joanna’s daughter Heather delivered her 7 pound 6.9 oz, 19 inch long beautiful boy, yesterday, November 10th at 6:56pm. Isn’t Leo the cutest baby? And look at Grandma. I’ve never seen such unspoken love in the way Joanna is looking at and holding Leo.
(photo sent to me by Joanna)

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Our golf pro here at Mission Hills CC got married Sunday. Jim was so happy. Here is a photo of Ray and Jim.

At the reception, I knew no one. I felt weird. Ray started to feel sick and was in the bathroom. I didn’t know what to do with myself as all these way too young “beautiful” people were joyously mixing and mingling with each other. Then I remembered Katie telling me her friend Kenny would be playing at a wedding at Mission Hills CC. I went over to some band players beginning to set up and asked if there was a band player named Kenny here. They said, “Yes.” They pointed me in the direction of where Kenny was playing the piano for the wedding guests.
Ahhhh. I felt ok when I saw Kenny seated at the piano, looking so professional and very handsome. (I later learned that Tami had cut his hair the day before.) Kenny looked great. Below is a black and white photo of Kenny at the piano. (I turned this color photo into a black and white as the color photo had too much noise since I had forgotten to turn the ISO back from 800 where I had turned it to shoot photos earlier in the dark church.)

Below is a 3 minute video of Kenny playing.

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Our online class is over. What’s going to keep me honest in my pursuit of learning photography?

Hopefully this blog.

Here is a portion of an email I just received from our photo teacher:

It’s been a wonderful ride, being with you the past two months. I’ve

created an online gallery of your work which you can see here:

<http://www.photoexplorations.com/Gallery052008/HTML/index.htm>

Your work looks good. And I think you’re going to be amazed at how

professional your photos look in the gallery.

If you visit this gallery, and you click on a photo the student’s name appears in the URL.

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1 CRITIQUE: Linda Jeffers

Walk Around the Block

COURSE LAKE VIEW



For a photo in which it appears

you did a lot of things “wrong,”

this looks pretty good!

The lighting is bright and sunny,

which is not surprising for the

desert, but it appears early/late

enough in the day that it’s not

overwhelmingly bright. There are

long shadows that make things

interesting rather than having the

sun straight up, creating a

shadow-free zone.

The horizon line is centered, dividing your picture in half. Normally this isn’t the best choice for

us, since putting the horizon line dead center tends to create a static composition, where our

eyes go right to the center of the frame and aren’t encouraged to go elsewhere. What you did to

create a composition with movement to it (versus a static composition) was put the willow tree

off to the far right, have it close, and have it create a sort of frame through which we look at the

scene. So yes, our eye goes to the middle of the photo (where the light-colored building can be

seen off in the distance), but then the tree moves our eye over toward the right; the overhanging

branches then encourage our eye upward and over toward the left, as does the water in the pond.

What also creates interest and movement in your photo are the reflections of the tall palm trees

in the water. Without those trees, we’d have just a blank expanse of water. The shadows create

up-down movement as well as texture. The only thing that’s definitely not working for you is

that green wooden stick coming up from the bottom of the frame. If you were to make a print of

this photo, I’d definitely clone it (and its reflection) out of the shot.

You created a very good shot despite challenging lighting. Well done.

2. LADY BACKLIT



You come close to greatness with this picture. First of all, let me commend you for spotting it to

begin with. And then let me commend you for exposing it as beautifully as you did. What’s killing it is the land/rock in the lower

right corner. Heavy sigh. The rest of

your photo is fantastic. Here’s why.

Moody, dramatic lighting. The dark

sculpture, the dark trees reflected in the

water, the deep blue of the water, the

golden glow in the upper right corner,

and the way the sculpture is sidelighted

— absolutely wonderful.

The earring. The way you seem to have

metered off the brightly colored earring

is great. As a result, it’s properly

exposed while everything else goes

dark. And that’s the perfect effect for

this picture. The way the earring echoes

the golden tones upper right is superb.

Without the earring, your photo would

still be good. But WITH the earring, it’s

cranked up a notch and becomes quite

mysterious and artistic.

The complementary colors of blue and

orange create a lot of drama.

And finally the angles of the sculpture as it swings into the photo create lots of movement and

encourage our eye to move along with those angles, running on a diagonal from lower left to

upper right. Wonderful.

If only there had been more blue water where that bit of land is on the right. Not only would

your sculpture stand out even more than it does, but it would simplify your photo considerably,

thereby creating more drama and tying everything together. The land blocks up the picture and

interrupts the feeling of movement. Alas.

Still, you handled the shooting challenges incredibly well and composed the photo perhaps as

well as you could given what you had to work with. It’s easy for me to say “lose the land” when

I wasn’t there to see what you had to deal with. In a perfect world there’d be nothing but

glorious water and reflections behind this sculpture. Ah well. You should still be pleased.

3 SPRINKLER RAINBOW (I lost this photo when my computer crashed. It wasn’t great anyway. Imagine a shot from the condo looking at the sprinklers watering the grass of the 15th fairway creating a rainbow in the water from the early morning sun hitting the water. Beyond the fairway is the lake, then far away condos that Carol refers to in her critique, then palm trees and San Jacinto.)

It’s these little miracles of light that, to me, make photography so

rewarding at times. Your rainbow is very pretty and I like the overall

scene. Your greens are good, the water’s a good color blue, and I like

the strong shadows you’ve got in among the trees as well as stretching

across the green in front of us.

What’s not working for you are

the brightly lighted houses and

mountains across the way. When

the picture first comes up, my eye

goes immediately to the lightcolored

houses and then up to the

background mountains. Only then

do I return to the rainbow. But

you took the photo BECAUSE of

the rainbow, and to have it

become the third-strongest

element in the photo means it

doesn’t quite work.

What could you have done

differently? Probably nothing! It

would have been great to maybe have nothing but trees across the way, or an expanse of

something really dark so that the rainbow would stand out very colorfully and strongly. So is

there a way in Photoshop that you could achieve this same look? Is there a way that you could

create a second layer and, on that second layer, darken down the mountains and darken down

the houses? I’m sure there is, but would it really be worth your time? Nah, I don’t think so.

Luckily, there will always be more rainbows in your life.

Thanks, Linda, for posting these shots. Your sculpture photo is by far the best of the bunch. It

might even be worth a re-do sometime to see if you can change your shooting angle somewhat

to get rid of that little piece of land on the right. The lighted earring? Brilliant.

Carol Leigh

November 7, 2008

In an email I wrote back to Carol:

Thanks for being so kind Carol. I was really afraid you were going to rip me a “new one”. I didn’t spend much time on taking these photos and regret that.

I love your around the block photos. Thanks for sharing them. Wish I’d seen them before though. I need help on ideas. I’m not very creative…..YET!

Great online class. You are the best teacher!

Linda

Then Carol wrote back to me:

You know what? I don’t really care if your photos are bad (well, I

sort of do, but bear with me). What I really care about is that YOU

know your photos are bad! Knowing when your pictures are less than

wonderful is a HUGE step in our photographic process. Sure, our

friends, our parents, etc. are going to tell us we’re wonderful, but

WE really need to know, down deep in ourselves, when our stuff’s good

and when it ain’t. And that comes with practice and with comparing our

work with excellent photography.

I could tell that you were rushed with the golf course shots . . .

Maybe you should take up butterfly photography — you seemed to do

really well with that!

Carol Leigh

In order to understand Carol’s reference to my taking up butterfly photography, there was a mixup. Carol thought she was critiquing my Around the Block photos when in fact they were another student’s Around the Block assignment containing a butterfly photo!

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I know this is gross but I felt it was only fair I post Stacy’s photos of me in the bathroom at the Getty. I was sitting there totally relaxed, blowing my nose, when Stacy’s camera and flash appeared under the stall partition and took me by surprise.

Stacy got this shot of me during our camera war. We hurt from how hard and long we laughed during this child play.

Just before leaving the Getty Museum I took this video with my blog in mind. Enjoy.

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We didn’t make it very far after leaving Palm Springs before we had to stop for lunch. Much laughter was had while Sandi and Stacy were obssessively trying to search cell phones for the closest In and Out.
Stacy, Sandi and Linda

This my was retaliation shot, after Stacy surprised me when her camera flash went off under the divider to my bathroom stall while I was sitting on the toilet, pants down, blowing my nose.

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I have inserted comments I recently received from my teacher for the Santa Fe Workshop photos I had posted previously. Here is the blog page link to view the comments: http://gottagolinda.blogspot.com/search/label/critiques After clicking on this link, scroll down to the blog entry dated September 28, 2008.

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Sandi, Stacy and I are headed in to the 1st Tuesday Baby Meeting tomorrow morning, earlier than usual, so we can visit the Getty Museum for about 3 hours.
I’m excited about seeing this exhibition in particular:
Dialogue among Giants: Carleton Watkins and the Rise of Photography in California
October 14, 2008–March 1, 2009

Hopefully I’ll get to take some photos of the landscape and architecture too.

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CRITIQUE: Linda Jeffers

Red, White, and Blue

BOAT BOW

You took something rather mundane, Linda, and

created a little jewel, which is kind of the point

of all my online classes — look around you, find

something, and compose it as best you can. In

this case, you isolated a part of a boat and filled

your frame with strong lines and bright color.

What was working against you (and I know,

because I was there) was harsh sunlight. From

the shadows it looks as though the sun was pretty

high in the sky, which is traditionally a tough

time for us to be

shooting. But in this case,

the bright sunlight and

the angle of the sun

created a relatively bold

shadow under the blue

crosspiece, which adds to

your composition in that

it echoes the stripe of

black paint in the lower

third of your picture.

Your shadow is dark

enough to be bold, yet light enough so that we still see the boat detail within it.

I like how you offset the vertical piece of wood — it’s over in the left third of the frame rather

than being centered. Nothing wrong with centering it, which would give a feeling of symmetry,

but I also like this offset look.

A large challenge here was metering. The lightest part of the image is the bit of white on the

right side. If your camera meters for the blue or for the left side of the boat, that bit of white on

the right is going to be very overexposed. I think that you came very close to having that

happen, but nope, we can still see some detail in the white, so all’s well. Good shot.

ART



Ha! “I don’t know anything about

ART, but I know it when I see it!”

This is a good example of red/

white/blue, with your clean, crisp

colors. But what happened here is

exactly what I was talking about

in your previous shot. Your

“ART” is perfectly exposed. But

because the red paint is darker

than the foreground mooring

lines, your camera exposed for

the dark red and the mooring lines

are blown out, way overexposed.

This happens to us all the time. Luckily, since most of us are shooting with digital cameras and

we have access to histograms and LCD screens that blink when we overexpose, we have superb

tools now at our disposal that we film shooters never dreamed of.

I know you know this, but it bears repeating. Whenever we encounter bright, sunny situations

and a lot of light colors, it behooves us to check our histogram after every shot. I’ve got my

camera set so that when I click the shutter, the histogram automatically comes up. I rarely look

at the image on my LCD screen, but I try to always check the histogram. If the graph is

touching the right side (the light side) of the histogram, I know I’ve overexposed. If I see

blinkies here and there — huge clue that I’ve overexposed. And then the solution is to use my

exposure compensation dial and take another shot, this time perhaps 1/3 or 2/3 stop under (-1/3,

-2/3). Check the histogram. No blinkies? The graph is backing away from the right? Then I’m

good to go. Oops, don’t forget to set my exposure compensation dial back to 0.

REFLECTION



I can see why you were attracted to this, and I

think I might have taken photos of this same

reflection. I, too, was taken by the red, white,

and blue colors. Did we succeed? I’m not

super-pleased with mine, and, in a second, I’ll

go find the shot, prep it, and will include it

here so you can see . . .

The tough part about photographing this

reflection was that first of all, it was

constantly in motion. So to try to focus AND

come up with a dynamic composition was the

real challenge. It was frustrating to focus on

what I thought looked good, only to have it

shape-shift away and lose the focus as well as

the design.

(I couldn’t copy and upload Carol’s shots she used as an example. Sorry.)

Well, no, my

photo is not of

the same

reflection as

yours. But it’s

still bad, as you

can see below.

Yes, the colors

are good, but

where’s the

design? Where’s

the line? Why

did I put the red

thing right in the middle? And, importantly,

why did I keep the darn thing?

Regarding your photo, there are two things

working against it. The first is the overall

dullness of the colors and the water. The red and the

blue is very good; the white is more of a cream and the

overall water looks sort of beige. This can be lightened

and brightened in Photoshop with relative ease.

But the other thing that’s not working is that there’s no

real pattern nor design, no focal point, no place where

we begin and end our visual journey around the frame.

As a result, we just sort of want to move on.

So, what’s the difference between an abstract reflection

that doesn’t work and one that does? I added a second

reflection shot of mine (below) that I like because the

reflections are bold and crisp, but there’s also a sort of

blocky design that I like — red lower left, dark block to

the right, darker block upper right, and lighter block

upper left. To emphasize this blocky look, I should crop

in from the left, getting rid of the blue color, as you can

see in the very bottom photo.

Thanks for posting these — very much appreciated.

Carol Leigh

November 1, 2008

Here I adjusted Levels in

Photoshop . . . (Again, sorry about not being able to show/upload Carol’s example.)

In response to Carol’s critique, I sent the following email to her:

Wow Carol. Did I get a lot from your critique.

First of all in my second shot “ART”, you are correct, I do know how to look at the histogram, but haven’t been looking at it I’ve been so concerned with focus. I forgot?

Secondly, I never even noticed the mooring lines being overblown! Hmmm. Don’t know where I was while prepping this photo.

And the 3rd shot of the color in the water, I looked for a design, a pattern etc and knew the composition was lacking something. I tried cropping this way and that but never felt anything looked right. So I see I need asking these questions you posed and posted on my critique using your photo as an example: “Yes, the colors

are good, but

where’s the

design? Where’s

the line? Why

did I put the red

thing right in the middle? “

I remember you repeatedly saying to take time, slow down (in Santa Fe). I think my new rule before taking a shot is to keep looking and asking myself questions before I ever take the shot. A little restraint. Yes, restraint has worked in other areas of my life big time, so why not in photography.

It was interesting yesterday. I hadn’t lately taken any photos for my Daily blog. The cloud formations and backlighting on the clouds over the San Jacinto mountains was breathtaking. I went out and shot off a few photos without thought before a phone call interrupted me and then the light had gone. The phone call was about possibly going to the Getty Museum to see a photography exhibit. So I went online and found an example of some of the photos at the exhibit. Here is the link to the blog photos I posted of the clouds I took on 11/1 …and the questions I asked myself secretly about why this guy’s cloud photo is featured in a photo show at the Getty. The “guy” is Alfred Stieglitz!!!!

Now I see there is no pattern to my cloud composition. That’s what had been bothering me. I hadn’t stopped to think about the composition. I liked the lighting but didn’t go further.

Long story short, you helped me answer a big question not only with the photos you critiqued but with why I initially began taking classes……..TO SEE! And I can’t see if I’m not slowed down enough to ask myself: What am I seeing, does it have design value or am I doing what I’ve done my entire life….recording/taking the photo for memory sake.

I think I may have had a mini psychic change. I hope so.

Thanks Carol. You always get me seeing, a little more, what I can’t see.

Linda

A couple hours later I received this email response to my email from Carol:

You know what’s interesting, Linda, is that when you signed up for

your very first online class and you gave me your website address, I

could tell IMMEDIATELY from your pictures that you needed to slow

down, to take a deep breath and think before clicking the shutter.

Knowing that when I did, so early in the game, I feel I’ve been remiss

in not pointing it out to you often enough throughout the online

classes and in the two in-the-field workshops you’ve taken. Better

late than never, I guess, but yeah, I can remember the “this woman

needs to slow down” flash going through my brain from the very beginning.

This doesn’t just apply to you, however. We ALL need to slow down and

think before we shoot. Why are we taking this shot? What do we like

about the scene? What’s the light doing? Are there weird things in the

background? Are there ugly hot spots that will ruin the picture?

Where’s the movement in this scene? Am I including too much? Not

enough? Would this be better as a vertical? What’s my ISO? Is my

exposure compensation dial accidentally still set to 3 stops

underexposed from the last shot? And much, much, more . . . Sometimes

I’m amazed we ever get around to clicking the shutter!

Carol Leigh

I’m still taken back by how much Carol opened my eyes to how my character/personality traits are everywhere, even in my photos. I feel like I’m wearing a new pair of glasses today. This is Good!

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An hour ago, I was drawn outside with my camera and tripod by the vision of billowing, backlit, cumulus clouds over the San Jacinto Mountain range. A phone call distracted me from taking more than 3 photos.

Moments ago I went online to see what exhibitions were at the J. Paul Getty Museum, hoping Sandi and I could catch the end of a photography showing while in LA Tuesday. Online checking out the exhibitions now at the Getty site I found a photo from the Landscape photo exhibition named “Songs of the Sky”. (shown here)

Alfred Stieglitz was a great promoter of Modernism in America and an advocate of photography as art. He began pointing his camera skyward in 1922. His images of evanescent clouds were meant to express his own fleeting emotional states and reflect the dynamism of a world in constant flux.

Originally Stieglitz titled these cloudscapes “Songs of the Sky,” but he later came to call them “equivalents of my most profound life experience.” The works focus on abstract qualities of proportion, rhythm, and harmony, presenting pure form as music for the eye.

Now lookie here at two of the photos I snapped off around 5pm tonight.

And here you have my “pure form as music for the eye”.

p.s.
syn·chro·nic·i·ty Listen to the pronunciation of synchronicity
Pronunciation:
\?si?-kr?-?ni-s?-t?, ?sin-\
Function:
noun

The coincidental occurrence of events and especially psychic events (as similar thoughts in widely separated persons or a mental image of an unexpected event before it happens) that seem related but are not explained by conventional mechanisms of causality —used especially in the psychology of C. G. Jung

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