#NPmonthlyWord - May
Hello and welcome to another NathanPhoto musing, as it’s the end of the mnonth I’ll be mainly talking about the #NPMonthlyWord, which was Mindful…
Think Mindful is quite a word at the moment, so always good to return to what it actually means, to aid how to interpret it, dictionary states that mindful means:
‘Conscious or aware of something
and/or
focusing one's awareness on the present moment, especially as part of a therapeutic or meditative technique.’
Actually think that the definition reenforces it’s usage today, which is nice. So taking the meaning of the word, how do you express this in an image? What would the final output be…representational? Or would it be abstract? How this will work… Just recently I’ve seen many articles (believe Canon published a great one recently) about the idea of going out and making images to aid mindfulness, which is an interesting idea and thinking on, something I’ve always done, the sheer act of creation can be a therapeutic one but be careful not to listen to the sarky narky ‘Photography 101’ comments though…
With that in mind that’s what I did, I went for a walk, not one that was taking me somewhere but an amble with no direction and no purpose (apart from counting my steps that is) and on this walk I made some images.
Here they are:
A series of six images of geese on a call, a tree with bark in an urban setting, some daisies, a floating handbag in the canal, some wet cobble stones and a series of footprints on a dry section of pavement.
Couple of nice ones, possibly, but then I wondered if you could see mindful in the image tho? Do they communicate the word?
Possibly not.
So as a counteraction to this I thought about returning back to my editorial roots I thought I’d photograph something very cliché but easily recognised as illustrating the word,
Can you guess?
It’s Stacked Pebbles of course!!!
Think we’ve all seen the shot of stacked pebbles, possibly on a beach or in sunnier climes or possibly made in a studio. Think I’ve seen them in every therapy place, Ikea and beyond. As I haven’t done anything like this for a while, thought it may make for a different exercise, of course this is NathanPhoto we’re talking from here, so we always need to do a different take on the classics, this time the difference is in the choice of stones. I didn’t want polished and traditional representation of stones, oh no, no. I wanted them to be raw and found, these were all found on the side of the road. As you can see from the shot it consists of a bit of tarmac that was uprooted after an accident, section of an old wall that had been spray painted then chipped off, an old bit of flint out of a garden and two dubious coloured stones that are very small.
I decided to make this image with natural light (at first) and I quite liked it, used the window light and exposure to capture the detail with a darker background a la local press shots of people shot a zillion times..
5 ‘stones’ stacked on top of each other to convey a sense of mind full ness.
Then I thought, I’m not sure I’m capturing the qualities that I wanted in the image, so I returned to an old technique that I’ve used many times in the studio, technique I’ve called ‘top down’ lighting usually used with a honeycomb to create a very pleasing pool of light, dark background and looks great for some stuff. The main exception here is that I needed to create this type of image at home with a few speedlite’s, ok sometimes doing actions like these can be very mindful, anyway that’s the tech side of things, now what about the images? Well here are the ‘studio’ attempt:
Series of five “stones” stacked on top of each other to convey a feeling.
What do we think?
As this blog was setup with the value of being honest so I’ll go with this critique. there’s not much to them is there really…Think the idea of found materials shot in nice ways is a tired one, think the image lacks a little quality and that it could have been done differently to better affect but that all said, I actually sort of like the image, not love but like..
Hmm interesting…so what have we learnt then? Well the mindful exercise of stacking these up and then recreating them to be shot with flash was ‘fun’ and by fun, I mean deeply annoying and frustrating much like an unruly toddler is fun. And that’s it ok to like an image as well as dislike one for differing qualities.
Lovely.
As we’ve talked about images for most of this blog, and what a lot of them there are in this blog, might be a record. I thought I’d leave you with some words that have taken a hold this month they are from Emily Ratajkowski’s book My Body and they are as follows on page 86:
“I'm still addicted to the sensation I get watching a post go crazy with comments and likes on Instagram. Casually snapping a picture and uploading it for 28 million people provides a pretty serious high.”
I love the honesty of this book and I love this sentiment, even though I felt the need to cut the next 2 lines for fear of an isolated comment tainting the overall and yes possibly because some would call her conceited but is she not allowed to show herself some love? Think many will say no and if you don’t see the patriarchy and misogynistic in that then maybe look it up, I’ll stand with Emily in this statement. Quite a controversial one to end on.
As ever let me know any thoughts, feeling or feedback through the usual channels.
Thank you for reading and see you next time.