I took my Saturday students out in bitterly cold weather on the last day of January to shoot car trails. The high temperature during the day was 52° but it was supposed to get down to 24° that night. The sky was totally clear so I knew that we would be chilly at best. I was worried that the weather might turn them off and everyone would leave within an hour. Oh me of little faith!

We met at the Light Factory at 5:15 in the parking lot and carpooled to the location. It only took a few minutes to get there so we had to wait for the sun to start to set. Traffic whizzed by behind AND below us as we stood on the bridge with our tripods and cameras. People honked. CATS buses shook the bridge (always a stomach churning feeling… one of the students stayed close to solid ground which ended up not only feeling more safe, but provided a great vantage point for his shots).

As the sun finally started to set, the shutter speeds got longer. One student was experimenting with his exposures and got the first hints of the car trails with a 2-½ second exposure. Then it was on! Everyone was experimenting and asking questions and getting shots that they were happy to call theirs. We were even briefly joined by on the bridge by another photographer who saw the group and wanted to benefit from “safety in the numbers.”
They all had a blast and were still shooting three hours later! My fingers and toes were numb, but it was thrilling to have these guys bring their cameras over to me to show off their images in their LCD monitors.

I get to do it again on Wednesday night with my other class…

Pictures of Farm Animals...

... in places other than farms.... Just photographic musings from uptown Charlotte (!) and the Carolina Renaissance Festival petting zoo...



This bull was actually very people friendly, which was a good thing because he was in a temporary pen outside the Levine Museum of the New South as part of one of their openings. He seemed to enjoy having his head scratched and being petted.

Of course I like this picture because it seems to go quite nicely with "Future Vegetarian" which I posted some time earlier...




These guys were at the petting pens at the Carolina Renaissance Festival. I had taken my camera equipped with only my Lensbaby to see what I could accomplish.

It is difficult enough to focus a Lensbaby correctly, but when your "models" are only interested in food... well...

CarnEvil

I spent this weekend shooting at CarnEvil...


I was not entirely happy with the images I got on Friday night. I was trying a different way of shooting (read: I used my flash... and I was wearing fairy wings AND traipsing about with my tripod... I did feel like a bull in a china shop). Anyway, I did manage to get some decent shots.

I felt MUCH better about the images I shot on Saturday. More of the way I'm used to shooting --- and that gave me the confidence to look back at the Friday images with less self-criticism. It was cold and smoky and loud, but the guy checking ID's at the front door seemed genuinely shocked at my age (I thank you!) and I ended up stretching my photo muscles.

If you'd like to take at look at what I got, go to http://www.jawileyphotography.smugmug.com/ and take a look...

I Survived My First Solo Show!

I survived my first solo gallery opening this past Friday night!

It was touch & go there for a while... I felt quite insane all last week. Not at all like an inspired artist getting ready to tell the world what's on her mind.

I even went as far as to shoot two new images the morning of the opening! (I already had 2 portraits of Venetian masks and I wanted to fill up a tall, slim blank wall... so I shot 2 more of the masks I had at home...)

I was nervous because this was all my work. No one else to fall back on. If people didn't like it, there wasn't anything else in the gallery for them to look at. Plus, 3 people from the Light Factory (one of 4 museums in the country that is devoted solely to the promotion of photography and filmmaking as art) came to the opening... The director even bought one of my prints.

Not too shabby.

The nice thing is now I'm really ready to start shooting new projects. I think the exercise of doing the show without a backup helped me focus. I know more things I want to say with my images...

So the day after the show, I went to my friend Austin's annual Shrimp Boil. I got to see my cousin and her (painter) artist husband who was just back from visiting his father abroad. I told him about my almost meltdown and he just laughed... He told me "I've seen worse situations." He used to own a gallery himself and told me about the artist who had an opening one Friday night and as of that afternoon had not hung a single piece of work. The artist told him that she was not going to have anything to hang, but he talked to her and by that evening, she had the show hung. That did make me feel better.

Note to self: Procrastination bad... Preparation good. And don't listen to the naysayer voice in your own head who keeps trying to talk you out of taking the leap of faith.

Did any of that make sense?

Decisions, Decisions...

Future Vegetarian

It's coming down to the wire now...

Frank & I are hanging my new show "Sojourn in Venice" next week (on Wednesday) and I'm having trouble deciding exactly which images to print at which sizes... you know, so that the show will tell a cohesive story.

It's my first solo show and there are worse problems I could have --- But I've been blessed with a gallery and gallery owner that likes my work and gives me the freedom to try new & different things. The world is my oyster here and I guess it's a little scary.

Okay... time to jump and start hitting the print button... Andiamo, babies!

Lessons Learned...

I did my first outdoor festival this past weekend and I'm still "recovering" from the experience. All in all, it was fun and enlightening --- I got to meet some cool people, I discovered that I have more stamina for standing around 8 hours a day than I imagined, I added quite a few people to my gallery guestbook, etc.
What remains to be seen is whether or not this was a financially smart move. I did not sell enough of my work to cover the cost of the space rental... but from what I understand, not many people did. While I was riding the shuttle van back to my car one day, one of the other vendors remarked that no one was really selling anything and that was pretty much the story in the entire area --- people balked at paying over $5 for any sort of art. Paying $10 for a burger was not an issue, but art... that's another story.
A tinge of bitterness in my voice? Maybe a little... but I guess it's just a different mindset... a difference in what is important to different people. Or quite possibly, the outdoor art fair is simply not the place to try to sell art. Maybe it's a marketing tool.
Hopefully I'll have a good turnout for my gallerry show on october 3rd...

Lensbaby Luv...

It's difficult enough getting pictures of my cat when she's not in the mood to be my model... That's why I'm particularly fond of this image.

I'm still learning to use my LensBaby 3G. I still feel like I'm all thumbs and when I do manage to get a shot of her, it's usually of the back of her head.

But when I look at this image, I realize that I can actually accomplish something that I like. More experiements to come...