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.
“The heart doth recognise thee,
Alone, alone! The heart doth smell thee sweet,
Doth view thee fair, doth judge thee most complete,-
Though seeing now those changes that disguise thee.”
Excerpt from A Dead Rose by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Model credit: Astrid Kallsen
