A tough thing about trying to turn my hobby into a small business is that I have to make some hard decisions. Which of my pictures I am going to put in the galleries here? I enjoy taking these pictures so much and take care to finish them. It leaves me emotionally tied to everything that gets exported out of Lightroom.
So, what do I do? I can't have a page with hundreds of pictures, but I want to share. I need to whittle it down to maybe 20 photos per gallery.
My "Pics of the Days" page does this a bit, but I'm just posting without giving much behind it. It's largely a mechanism for me to get myself practicing as much as possible. To be honest though... trying to get a picture up daily is pretty exhausting and causes anxiety occasionally (those are usually the days I don't post).
When I took improv classes a few years ago, making these hard decisions was referred to as "killing your babies" and that's a very apt analogy. I think I am going to make a point to show my favorites that don't make the cut in some form here. I'll tell the story behind these favorites in a blog post and hope everyone that reads it can feel a bit of what I feel. That's what art is for, right?
So, I'll start with this picture...
If you follow photographers on Instagram, you will see a lot of these lens balls as props. They are a good way to shake up a person's perspective. I had mine sitting on the beach in Silver Bay, Minnesota and looked down. A couple of small steps left and right to frame it properly and bam... an interesting self-portrait.
The narrow depth of field shows up in the right corners, forcing your eyes downhill across the grains to the lens ball. Then the blue sky in the ball is sitting on top of the gray beach. It feels like the whole world is inside that ball... the ground, trees, blue skies and clouds.
shane