Photography is… No. 2 stimulates imagination

Mary Jane Farmer | October 21, 2018 | Reply

What a difference black and white makes.

These are of the same barn. Color converted to black and white.

Click here, on this link, to see a few more of my “challenge” photos.

No. 2 — Photography requires imagination

Each year, lately, I have gone on my own photographic journey, calling it my “Challenge.” I’ll pick a topic and do what I can to photograph items, people, events, even faces if they show a chosen emotion. And they are actually not ‘journeys’ as such, more like short treks here and yonder. Still gotta work!

A musician with Alice Cooper band, framed in the stage ‘smoke’.

For instance, I may go on a quest in search of interesting items in colors of the rainbow. (Do you have any clue how hard it is to find indigo items?) Or study ‘framing’ the subject, or starting with the letters of the alphabet. Seasonal, such as budding flowers in the spring or lighted decorations at Christmas time; people loving one another- or not, such as the middle-school-age boys who broke into fisticuffs at an outdoor concert; black and white, sometimes working in color and converting to b/w, and sometimes using the monochrome setting. And there is a a difference in how the same photo can turn out.

I started in the 1980s, while at Kerrville Festivals, with inspiration from MerriLu Park and Brian Kanoff, who were always there. But then, it was pricey, well the film and development was costly, and so I didn’t really experiment much. Mostly pre-programmed settings, if I even had a camera with that option. Musicians gave way to exotic wildlife, since I was also surrounded by zebras, giraffes, cervidae and such in that Texas Hill Country. Nowadays, I’m lucky to get a good shot of an armadillo.

One challenge, in the 1980s, was to match all the wildflowers in Texas that were shown in the book of that name, “Wildflowers of Texas.” It divided flora by color, and told in which part of the state they were indigenous. Was raising a granddaughter then, a pre-schooler, and she and I would get in the pickup and hit the highways. Her job, once the roll of film was developed, was to go through the book and match them. She did a hot-dang good job of it.

Sunset through the trees.

I may just have to start over on that challenge. Springtime? Trip to the Texas Hill Country? The Panhandle? Have you ever seen cactus blooming after a rain in the El Paso area desert?

Sometimes the challenge is to find something new as a challenge.

Many, not all, of my “Challenge” photos are shown in this and other Flickr files.

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