In the summer of 2016 we spent a wonderful ten days roaming around Provence in the South of France. The food, the wine and the people were nothing short of magnificent. I was attracted to the doors and windows of many of the old buildings. Yes, some of these buildings are older than our country. Doors and windows are fascinating as they allow us to imagine what may be held on the inside.
I’m honored to have two of my pieces selected for inclusion in the permanent online gallery at PhotoPlace as a part of the 2018 Open Call. Juror Douglas Beasley curated a wonderful exhibit. The full gallery and online selections can be seen here.
Model credit: Astrid Kallsen
Don’t Settle, add soul to your pictures. Go deeper, forget the gear and focus on the light, subject and composition, give the picture your soul, the soul it deserves. This is hard which is why the world is full of soulless pictures. I don’t subscribe to any theories that quantity will produce quality or one will get “lucky” if they shoot enough pictures. You may experience luck from time to time but I will tell you that “luck is the residue of design”. Luck did not produce the stronger of these two portraits, hard work and persistence by both me and my subject did. More so me than Stephanie as it’s my job to get her to the point where the photographs grow in strength. Both of these are strong but clearly one is much stronger than the other. The strength is not in the lighting or composition, it’s in the eyes. The eyes offer both the most and the least opportunity for success in portrait work. Everything in the portrait can be perfect and beautiful but if the eyes lack strength and soul it fails. We didn’t settle until we got the strong picture that we wanted. Photograph One (top) was my choice.
