impromptu hike

ignore my horrible nail polish; one day i WILL get a proper picture of these rings. (because it doesn't get much better than STAR WARS RINGS)

stupid blurry pictures :(

johnathan winnel

 Model: Farren Anne
Styling: Noshin Mansourian
Lighting and special effects: Tom

Model, make up and styling: Farren Anne

photography by jono winell
view his photoblog here

be more curious.

10 Ways to be a more Curious Photographer:

1. Don't be held Captive by "the rules"
There are a lot of ‘rules’ going around when it comes to photography. Read the books (read this blog) and you’ll find them. Some of them have formal names like ‘rule of thirds’ and ‘the golden ratio’ while others are often just called ‘the right way to…’.

Rules are a great thing to know (and use) – however the curious photographer often takes great shots because they not only know the rules but because they set out to break them.

Take the Rule of thirds – sometimes the most powerful shots are those with a centered subject staring down the barrel of the lens. 

2. Ask Questions
Curious photographers are always asking questions. Questions of other photographers, questions about their own work, questions about their cameras, questions of their subjects etc

As a result they often learn things about their art (and themselves) that the rest of us don’t and their work improves because of it.

Find someone with the same camera as you and ask them how they use it. Find a photographer from a different genre to you and ask them about their techniques. Look back over your last month’s photos and ask yourself what you did well (and not so well).

3. "Ask What if..."
One of the key questions you should get in the habit of asking is ‘what if’? Curious people don’t just ask questions – they also come up with solutions.

Many of the solutions will end up being thrown away but if you ask ‘what if’ enough times you’re bound to make progress eventually.

What if I held the camera on this angle…. What if I got my subject to stand like this…. What if I lay on the ground to take this shot…. What if I lengthened my shutter speed….

4. Turn Questions into Quests
An old teacher once used this phrase with me and it’s stuck in my mind ever since – ‘turn your Questions into Quests’.

Asking ‘what if…’ (and other questions) is not enough. Keep a record of the questions that you ask yourself and keep coming back to them from time to time to attempt to find a solution to the problems behind the questions. Taking your questions to the next level like this may not always be fruitful but at times it’ll lead you on journeys of discovery to unexpected places.

Set yourself quests and challenges for your photography. I occasionally set myself a list of photos that I want to capture in an afternoon or will have a week where I explore a theme (the assignments in our forum are great for this). 

5. Learn from Others
While sometimes the best way to learn is by trying, making mistakes and then trying again – sometimes it’s more effective to find someone else who has already tried, made mistakes and tried again to help you avoid the pitfalls of photography.

Find another photographer to buddy up with when you go out on shoots. Swap ideas, give each other tips and share the lessons that you learn. This is actually whey I started this blog and more recently our forums – I want to learn more about digital photography and I know together we’ll discover so much more. 

6. Put Disconnected Ideas Together
Edward De Bono has a lot of different exercises that help people develop lateral thinking skills. In a number of his books he talks about how one way to think outside the box is when you put random ideas together to find new solutions to problems. Get in the frame of mind where you regularly do this and you’ll be surprised at how your mind comes up with wonderfully creative things.

The shot above of the guy under the umbrella with capsules dropping down on him is a prime example of this. Who would have ever thought to put drugs raining down on someone under a bright umbrella? 

7. Play
Perhaps the most curious of people are children who do a lot of what we’re writing about here (especially asking questions).

Another thing that children do is ‘play’. With no other agenda than having fun and seeing what happens next children will play with the things around them and experiment and push the boundaries of their environment. In doing so they learn about life, themselves and their world. I find that it’s often when I take this ‘playful’ approach to life that I’m at my most creative and make all kinds of discoveries.

Some of my best photos have come out of periods of ‘play’ when I just fooled around with my camera with no agenda at all. Play with new angles, with different shooting distances, with shooting from different perspectives etc  

8. Go WIth the Flow
One of the biggest blockages to creativeness and curiosity are statements like:

• We’ve never done it this way before
• This is Stupid
• It will never work

It is often directly after such statements that ideas stop being explored, projects end and people return to the humdrum of life.

Learn to ignore such statements and follow your intuition and hunches and you might just find yourself doing something that ‘has never been done before’ that people wish HAD been done before. I’m sure many of the images in the Flickr interestingness page are the result of this evolution of ideas by people who didn’t know when to stop. 

9. Get Proactive
One of the main things that I notice about curious people are that they rarely sit still and are always pushing forward and taking the initiative. Curious photographers don’t expect great photographic opportunities to come to them – but instead they actively search for them. They have a mindset where it almost becomes natural to ask, seek and find the things that the rest of us hope that will one day fall in our laps.

Grab your camera, get out of the house, find some interesting subjects and start shooting. That great shot won’t just come knocking on your door! 
10. Slow Down

We live in a fast paced world where we race from one thing to another, rarely sitting still.

Unfortunately it is easy to bring this way of life into our photography. We impatiently wait for ‘the shot’ and when it doesn’t quickly come we snap away and move on. However in most cases photography isn’t a fast paced medium. I learned this talking to a Pro Landscape photographer once who told me that some days he’d sit in a spot for a full day and only take a handful of shots. He had learned to slow down, to see the smaller subtleties of life, to be patient and the results were that his work was truly magnificent.

Set aside a few hours this week to go and sit quietly in a pace in your town or city and watch the world go by. Don’t set yourself an agenda – just watch and when you see something worth photographing take the shot.

applicable to all aspects of life

 

article by darren rowse of digital photography school

knitted homes of crime

knitted by Jean Arkell
these are the homes of female killers and the houses where they committed their crimes.
(or an ultimate spark of genius quirkiness)

Christiana Edmunds was a 43 year old spinster who lived with her widowed mother. She had become infatuated with a married man, Dr. Beard. In September 1870 she brought a box of chocolates to the Beard's house and insisted that Mrs. Beard eat some over a pot of tea. Christiana had filled these chocolate creams with strychnine. Immediately after eating one Mrs. Beard became severely ill. As a result Dr. Beard accused her of trying to poison his wife. Christiana denied the charge and set about trying to prove that there was a poisoner at large in Brighton. She would pay children to buy chocolate creams from the same sweet shop that she purchased the box of chocolates for Mrs. Beard from. She would inject these with strychnine, then re-wrap them and pay another child to return them. The innocent shop-keeper sold on these poisoned sweets. On 12 June 1871 this activity resulted in the death of 4-year-old Sidney Barker. Christiana even sent poisoned cakes and fruit through the mail, addressing some to herself, to try to emphasise her innocence. She was eventually caught and sentenced to death but when it transpired that she was mentally ill her sentence was commuted and she was sent to Broadmoor. She died there in 1907 aged 79. It later transpired that no less than four members of her immediate family had died as a result of mental illness.

Charlotte Bryant, a 33-year-old illiterate mother of five, lived here with her husband Frederick. She enjoyed a drink and had a reputation as an amateur prostitute in the local pubs. Apparently her toothlessness and lice did not put the men off. Sometimes she even brought them home. One of these men was Leonard Parsons, a gypsy horse trader. Leonard became an occasional lodger in the Bryant household and Frederick did not seem to mind sharing Charlotte with him. Charlotte decided otherwise and started poisoning Frederick so that she would be free to marry Leonard. Frederick eventually died on 22 December 1935 after drinking a cup of Oxo containing arsenic. Charlotte was caught after the post-mortem on Frederick's body. A friend also told the police that she had seen Charlotte trying to destroy a tin of weed-killer. She was hanged at Exeter Prison on 15 July 1936.

Mary Eleanor Wheeler, aged 24, was living with a Charles Creighton under the assumed name of Eleanor Pearcey. She was having an affair with a married man, Frank Hogg. On 24 October 1890 she invited his wife Phoebe to tea. In her own kitchen she battered Mrs. Hogg over the head with a poker and then slit her throat. She also killed the Hoggs' 18-month-old baby daughter who Mrs. Hogg had brought along with her. Eleanor put the bodies into the baby's pram. When it was dark she pushed the pram around disposing of the two bodies as she went. She was soon caught. Despite her claims that the blood in her kitchen came from a session of mouse killing she was found guilty and hanged at Newgate Prison on 23 December 1890. Her father had been hanged ten years earlier. Her last request was for a mysterious advertisement to be placed in a Madrid newspaper. It read "M.E.C.P. Last wish of M.E.W. Have not betrayed"

really late post

can you feel that summer is ending?
i refuse to >:)

disney's california adventure. disneyland is next monday :)

katie baron

site blog

anna denise

 

anna denise - blog - flickr

picture book

i love looking through the family albums.
i am wishing i could reach into the pictures and bring back the beautiful outfits my mother wore.

florals and yellow heels, silk on silk, long pale pink skirts.
simple and beautiful.
am going to attempt to sew myself a replica of the blue dress for my own birthday


(im the tiny one in the blue)

happiness

hunington beach,

there was Much traffic, thanks to the many surfers rushing alongside us to the "US opening of surfing"
we came for the music, but arrived too late to see the Hot Hot Heat :/

got some in-in-out on the way home. it was a good day.

laguna beach

in the summertime

in the summertime - mungo jerry

charlotte gonzalez

Melt! Festival 2010 from charlotte gonzalez

visit her blog.

millions of particles fused together.

i love kip fulbeck.
page from The Hapa Project

i need inspiration

"You see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things as they never were and ask, 'Why not?'"

- george bernard shaw