Assignment #2:  Set your camera to black & white, look for strong form instead of color.

When I think of strong form, Edward Weston’s Pepper #30 comes to mind: http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/14685    I love the simplicity, the sensuousness.  I can feel the fleshy texture of the pepper in my fingers.

I did not have the pepper in mind when I shot for this assignment, but nature was on the agenda.   A friend and I went to a cemetery in Brooklyn to join a photography meet-up group.   We never found the group and instead wandered amongst the trees and tombstones, making images of whatever took our fancy.   The trees quickly captured my attention for their quirky and sensuous forms.   I had to improvise a little though.    I couldn’t figure out how to put my camera in B&W mode, so I took images in color and converted to B&W in Aperture later.

 My Favorites

Here are my favorites.

At the time, I felt a little obsessive-compulsive, walking around the same few trees, snapping one image after the other.  I thought I was capturing a lot of images with a wide variety of subjects.

But in hindsight, out of 45 images of these trees, there were only 7 distinctly different photographs.    Many were more-or-less duplicates (as much as 15 in one case), with the main difference among them being the exposure.  I tend to over-expose but wanted sufficient contrast for the B&W conversion, so I snapped many small-step changes in exposure just in case.

An interesting thing about Pepper #30 is . . . Weston must have taken 29 other pepper images before he produced this one.   Whether they were 29 variations of the same pepper or several peppers, I don’t know.  So maybe 15 of the same subject isn’t too many – maybe it’s not enough – but whatever the number, I need something more than exposure to differentiate one from the other.

 Initially Liked, Now Don’t

Here is an image I first liked, but now don’t.    Initially I titled it “tree bosom”, for obvious reasons, and mentally placed it in a ‘sensuous trees’ category.   (Google ‘sensuous trees’, and you’ll be amazed at the number of hits, including a half-baked sensuoustrees.com website.)

Later, though, while looking at this image, the face of Gilligan (from 70’s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island”) popped in my head.   http://forums.nyyfans.com/showthread.php/131078-Gilligan’-star-Bob-Denver-dies    It’s like getting an annoying song stuck in the brain.   Now I can’t look at this image without thinking of goofy bug-eyed sailor wearing jaunty sailor hat.

Now, for me, this image is cartoonish, garish.   I debated not posting it at all, but that defeats the purpose of the blog, does it not?

 Runners Up

I did try my hand at capturing other forms.  Two images of man-made metal forms appear below.  The first comes from a door to a crypt at the cemetery.

This second one I found in the sidewalk at the Central Park Zoo – increased the contrast for more dramatic effect.

Key Take-Aways

1. Use my camera’s bracketing feature to automatically capture different exposures.

2. Devote more attention to composition; experiment with perspective.

3. Look for – photograph – the light.

4. Cremation is the way to go.  Not now, please, but when my time is up, hopefully in the distant future.