Getting Personal

Model: John Burke
Photo taken during shoot for his latest album, Reverie.

I used to hate taking pictures of people. I realize now that it was because I didn’t know how. I’ve never liked posed photography, so I always tried for candid shots, which would work sometimes, but the likelihood of getting good shots reliably were pretty slim. I was always so displeased with the results that I avoided photographing people all together. It wasn’t until I discovered Jane Brown that I realized that people weren’t the problem; it was me and the terrifying piece of equipment that hung from my neck.

Cameras are everywhere. People have developed a sort of sixth sense where cameras are concerned and typically have one of two reactions: They hide or they pose. It happens every time someone pulls out a device because we are trained to expect it. (I’ve always been a hider, ironically enough) What’s a girl to do? I want those in the moment, genuine reactions, but the camera senses won’t let me have them! I want to capture those priceless moments when all that hidden personality dances across a person’s face while he tells you a story, or is lost in a quiet thought, but if my subject is hidden, either from the camera or behind his “camera smile”, all of that life is lost to me and my lens.

That’s when I realized that I had answered my own question. Those moments that I want to capture only happen when someone is comfortable and willing to share. Candid isn’t about the subject not seeing the camera, it’s about them not minding the camera. I just had to make people forget that the camera exists. The results were exactly what I had wanted my photography to be.

Portraiture is still a work in progress for me, as are all things, but it has become one of my favorite things to do. These are some of my favorite images — I was lucky enough to really capture my subjects’ personalities in these. Hope you enjoy.

Model: Caroline T.
“Interview”

Model: John Burke

Model: Ryan B.
“Interview”

Model: Krystal K.
“Interview”

Model: Victoria P.
“Interview”

You just can’t pose this!

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A huge thank you to the models from the “Interview” series and John Burke for allowing me to show off your beautiful faces!

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Thanks for reading! As always, critiques are an artist’s best friend.

DH

P.S. If you are in the Atlanta area and would like to work with me, feel free to drop me a line :)

“Create something great. Also make things that suck and learn from them.”

It’s funny how sometimes the things we love most are the hardest to do. That can be especially true of artists. For whatever reason it is suddenly difficult to create, and while waiting for inspiration we get distracted. Or we wait for inspiration for so long that we no longer feel that we can be inspired. Both of these are issues that I struggle with, especially the second one. If I go too long without creating something, I second guess any urge I have when I should just act on it, for better or worse.

Sometimes, too, it is because we get bogged down by using our creative skills for other reasons. Work does this to me. I write and research all day long, and then when I have the time to write what truly matters to me, I feel tired and restless and want nothing more than to do something, anything else. In my two and a half months of blog silence, many lovely plans has gone to waste because of this.

It’s a difficult balance to strike, but ultimately it comes down to deciding what is really important.

I must remember that my creations are important.

I must remember that creating is one of the best things that I can do for myself.

I must remember that creating is a huge part of who I am and who I want to be.

I must remember that I am important.

I guess you could say that these are my extremely belated New Year’s resolutions. I’ve been working on these ideas, though they were not yet articulated, since the beginning of the year, mostly trying to change my mindset. It’s slowly working, as evidenced by the existence of this post, but it is time for me to be more proactive about it. Which will include writing even when I do not know what I want to say.

I had no idea that this post would end up being what it is when I started it.

I have to let the process of creating inspire me and not wait for something that may never come to strike out of the blue. I have to inspire myself.

I am not going to make any lofty statements about starting a specific schedule for my posts — I already have that for work — but I will try to always share when I have something to talk about, rather than allowing myself to think it is not good enough to publish, or not the right time, or whatever other ridiculous excuse the evil parts of my brain try to throw at me.

Thanks to those of you who read the blog and my awesome followers who were hooked when the posts were as thick as thieves but still came back to read this post after my long silence. I hope you all keep coming back. I’ll do my best to have something new for you when you do :)

<3
DH

Found Photo Friday: Festival of Lights

Lighting lamps for Diwali, the festival of lights.

You should check out this photo-article on Diwali. Diwali is a festival of lights, celebrated by Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, and Sikhs. November thirteenth was the first day of the five day festival, in which lamps are lit to celebrate the triumph of good over evil, fireworks ward off evil spirits, and prayers are offered to deities of prosperity.

Here are some of the images that I thought were particularly striking:

Do you have a favorite image from the article? What makes it speak to you?

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Have a lovely weekend!

DH

October Favorites

Happy November everyone! How about some of last month’s greatest hits?

– Desperately want two (or ten!) of these darlings! They are so cute, and I’d be able to spin my own yarn! I just need a house where I can have a fenced yard…

Olde English Babydoll Southdown Sheep. Yes, that is actual, adult size!

– This recipe. Also, I just really love this blog. So funny, and sweet, and home-y. It’s a joy to read. And I love the dogs.

– Halloween was brilliant, as always. I made some awesome Star Trek costumes for The Boy and myself. Here’s a really terrible picture of me to prove it!

Looking into the stars! Apparently they are really funny.

– And speaking of Halloween, I want to throw this party next year!

– Also this. Hands down, the BEST family Halloween costumes in the history of EVER.

I think I can still recite most of Where the Wild Things Are. I want to be this family when I grow up :)

–The other exciting event of October what The Boy’s birthday! We had a lovely time. The celebration started as soon as he woke up with a scavenger hunt for his presents and ended with an awesome party and a rather sharp-looking cake!

Battlestar Galacticake!

– And I’ll leave you with a little bit of music: The Corries – Twa Corbies. A Scottish tune sung by some Scottish gents. Points if you know what the song is about without looking it up!

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That’s what was important to me this month! How was your October?

<3
DH

Found Photo Friday: Zoom

I have a cool thing for you today!

Neat, huh? This is an image by Jean-François Rauzier, a Paris-based photographer who creates hyper photos. What’s a hyperphoto? Well, it’s a image made of a lot of little images and put together to create a work of art that is ten thousand times the resolution of a normal photograph. Why do this? So that you can make a photograph that is the size of two school buses and retain perfect crispness.

Seem too fantastical to be true? Check out this link. Here you will find more of his images, but if you click on them you can zoom in to look at the detail. And then you can zoom in again. And again. Did you see the two people walking through the door to the left of the left-most statue at the bottom of this picture? No? Zoom in.

A screenshot to prove it!

How cool is that?

These are awesome on a technical level, but they are also beautiful. I love the surrealist quality of the images. They are beautifully haunting and I want to crawl inside them and explore!

For more images, visit Rauzier’s website. It’s in French, but Chrome translates it pretty well, and if your browser doesn’t translate, the pictures speak for themselves.

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Which image is your favorite? Did you find any cool stuff while you were zooming around?

Have a happy, happy weekend!

<3
DH

Found Photo Friday: SCIENCE!

When The Boy and I go to trivia, there is almost always at least one science-related question. This is always fun, partly because those questions are interesting, but also because it gives everyone in the restaurant an excuse to yell at the Trivia Guy. Not in a mean way, of course. More in an audience participation sort of way. It goes something like this:

Trivia Guy: “Your categories for this round are sports, television shows, and science.”

The Entire Restaurant: “SCIENCE!”

We always do that. I’m not really sure why, but it’s a thing that happens. Maybe it is because objectively, one might even venture empirically, science is awesome.

So, today I bring you SCIENCE! Well, really scientists, but without them we wouldn’t have science, so it all works out.

This is possibly the coolest thing. So many legendary minds in one photograph — Einstein, Bohr, Marie Curie, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, Planck — I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at this conference just to listen to them talk to each other. Even the mundane must be more interesting when seen through the eyes of such genius.

This is probably the most famous of the Solvay Conferences, which began in 1911. This first conference lead Ernest Solvay, a Belgian industrialist, to found the International Solvay Institutes for Physics and Chemistry in Brussels the following year. The conferences were called to discuss outstanding issues in chemistry and physics. The 1927 conference was called for the world’s greatest physicists to discuss quantum theory, which at that time was brand-spanking new. Also, at this conference one of the funniest Einstein related quotes I’ve ever come across was said. Apparently, Einstein didn’t care for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and said “God does does not play dice.” Niels Bohr’s response? “Einstein, stop telling God what to do.”

I also found this:

This is the 1945 high school report card of John Gurdon, the guy who won a Nobel Prize in medicine this year. Boy, was that teacher wrong!

In short, science (SCIENCE!) is rad and no matter how old we are we should always try to learn everything we can. Even if it is just so that we can be superstars at trivia every week.

Did you learn anything new this week?

Have a happy, happy weekend!
DH

The Tablecloth Trick

Remember in my last post when I said that I was looking forward to my life settling a bit? And remember how I was excited that it probably would because I had just started a great, new, grown-up job?

I was laid off yesterday.

It’s a fact of life these days, but nothing like this has ever happened to me before. No one has ever even wanted to fire me, especially after only three weeks of work. It feels like I’ve had the air knocked out of me, or like when a tablecloth gets pulled out from under place settings at a dinner party, only not in the cool way where everything stays on the table, unbroken.

The Dinner Table (1897) Henri Matisse

However, I have realized in the last twenty-four hours that I am still on the table. I’m a bit tipped over, and there’s a whole mess of broken stuff scattered around, but I am still here and there are some great people, some of whom I barely know, who do not understand the choice that was made yesterday any more than I do and are helping me pick up the pieces.

I feel a lot better today than I thought I would be able to at this time yesterday. I am still stressed and scared, but I feel like I’m going to make it.

And who knows? Maybe getting laid off will end up being the best thing that could have happened.

I don’t know what’s next, but I believe in myself a little bit more than I did this morning and a hell of a lot more than I did yesterday at five in the afternoon.

We will just have to see what happens. And keep on living.

<3
DH