bavatuesdays

Today’s Daily Shoot assignment:

Make a photo of an interesting stack of books or magazines. Consider how you handle repeating lines in your composition.

Today’s shot is not too inspired, but I really didn’t have much time to take it, nor did I have the right light in my den. This is a series of books on the top shelf of one of the several built-in bookshelves in my new house (well, maybe not so new given we’ve owned it for a year this week). But at the same time, it feels new to me, and the built-in bookshelves are some of its nicest features, but I wasn’t up to capturing them adequately. So we’ll have to save that for another day. In the meantime, here’s my final daily shoot assignment for the section of the class on photography and visual storytelling. Now I just have to highlight my favorite shots from the whole class in a post sometime this weekend, and then on to audio stories.

I’m going to continue the daily shoot assignments because they really help me see things anew. I probably won’t post them regularly on the bava, rather I’ll send them right to Flick. Having the camera poised any given day is a habit I’d like to foster, and this past week has been a great exercise in training my habits of seeing

Symmetry can be calm and soothing. Make a photo today featuring symmetry, either in subject or composition. (@logista)
dailyshoot.com/assignments/312

I’m fired up about today’s shot, and not so much because the image is so beautiful—though I like it—but because 12 is my lucky number, and two twelves in a row? Doubly lucky. My cat is named 12, and if it were up to me my first born would have been named twelve, and my birthday falls on the twelfth day. More than that, 1212 is an anagram for 2112 which makes me think of Rush, which then makes me think of Andy Rush. There is a lot to both this image and this number, obviously. Symmetry is just the surface.

The daily shoot assignment for today:

Communicate chaos, disorganization or messiness in a photograph. Find some beauty in it. (@divadeb88)

I don’t know why this one was so hard for me, and frankly I’m not totally crazy with my shot. That said, I did manage to approximate the image I had in my mind when I took it, which you can see below (thank you, Brian Lamb):

If nothing else, these assignments start to pinpoint for me the elements of photography I would like to get a grasp on, like shutter speed, catching things in motion, dealing more intelligently with light, etc. But for the sake of time and sanity I will stick with this, unless my kids offer me a new vision of chaos when I get home tonight.

Today’s assignment for Daily Shoot:

Use a mirror as part of a composition in a photograph today. Show yourself in the image if you’d like!

What can I say, I love the whole sideview mirror thing.

Today’s Daily Shoot assignment:

Make a photograph of something that is soft, or at least looks that way. Convince the viewer of the softness.

This picture was fun not only because I get to feature my cat twelve’s so very soft throat, but also because with the onset of Fall in Virginia right now the light itself is becoming softer, and I love this time of year. So generative (that’s for you Tom Woodward), just like getting back in the habit of documenting my days visually has been this past week. So invigorating. And I haven’t even blogged about my crazy trip to the Natural Bridge yesterday. I uploaded over 1.5 gigs of images and video to Flickr last night, and I think I have some raw material for some pretty fun stuff.

The Daily Shoot assignment for 2010/09/19:
Some carry a talisman, amulet, “lucky charm”, or just a comforting thing in our pocket. What do you carry? (@btusdin)

I love this prompt, and while my image is rather quotidian, I love the idea of what you carry in your pocket is a kind of space capsule of your life at any given moment. Plus it was quick and easy, just pour out my pockets and see what’s there, cause I am not organized enough to carry around any one thing for too long, save, of course cigarettes—and you’ll notice I still carry a vestige of that life 🙂

This photo credit goes to Antonella, who was thinking about this assignment with me most of the afternoon. I was feeling the pressure and really couldn’t think of anything too inspired. This prompt was hard for me given I spent most of the day doing yard work and being generally lazy. So I returned closer to home, and we took some shots of Tommaso. The one above captures the size better than the rest, and in many ways it is capturing the size of my babies when they are this small that started me blogging and taking photos and videos in the first place. A kind of blogging return home. Anyway, we wanted to play with the idea of objects within objects, like the matchbox car subsumed within our actual car, and use the side view mirror for interesting composition, but not sure that came out just right. Seems a bit forced, and not nearly as natural and real as Tommaso and me playing in the grass. So here is the image we were going for: