Photography 1O2: Stay in the Shade and Pay Attention to the Line

A part of me is a firm believer that "true greatness" comes with time and lots and lots of practice and hard work, but the other half of me is an obsessive overachiever that wants EVERYTHING I attempt to do to come to me as naturally as breathing, but then I have to stand back and ponder to myself, "what is the fun in that?"...So bear that in mind as I try to explain this journey I have undertaken of learning photography from one of the BEST of the best.

I LOVE this career, so much so that I NEED one day to end so that I can get up and do it all over again. I love everything about it from working with clients, which is my most favorite, to editing, to coming up with ideas for the next event, and I have the coolest partner and mentor around, but...I have so much to learn when it comes to being behind the camera that it literally hurts my brain. When I first started playing with a camera, you would not believe how hard it was to get that sucker to just focus. Here I'm shooting on a $600 to $700 camera, which has all but x-ray vision it seems in its automatic settings, but in manual, I couldn't get the darn thing to focus to save my life. It took me months to figure out this one simple little task, and it wasn't until Ramone came into my life that I was convinced I had finally gotten down my first teaching principal.

With that being said, my mentor decided it was time to work on "outdoor" lighting, which is probably one of the most beautiful aspects of photography, but yet, to me, the scariest, so if focus took me months, lighting may take me years! lol We started plugging away a few weeks ago ingraining in me the direction of light, where the light is in retrospect to the client, the different light at different times of day and such, and this week she decided to take me out and put it to practice, so I brought my little mini-me along to be my model and Ramone in hand, ready to soak in the day's lessons she would teach me.

After trying to figure out my settings from point A to point B, finding the best shade in each spot, her asking me where I would put mini-me in each location, taking too long to shoot cause mini-me's attention has far drifted from what I'm doing, as well as her pointing out everything I don't want in my back ground and the angles at which I should stand, I was really missing our studio and felt like I was going to have a mini meltdown. I went home and cried it out a little, disappointed I hadn't come as far along in the last few weeks as I thought I had, and pulled the pictures I had taken up on my computer. After sifting through them, I decided I didn't do quite as bad as I felt I did, but bear in mind, I want greatness when no one is looking, and she was there holding my hand! The information that day was a complete overhaul but I learned a lot, and after talking it out with my Besty, we decided the sun was too much for me right now, and that I needed to stay in the shade and pay attention to the line, which is basically how things are arranged in the background of a picture, so this will be my focus point until I have lined my pictures into submission and my mentor browbeats me into moving onto the next thing that will move me to greatness.

SO WACHAAA!! Look out world! I'm bringing shaded lines to a frame near you..coming soon - Love Angie ;)