March/April Creativity Exercises - Clickin Moms Editors Choice Award

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow. Once again, I am just so excited and humbled by this. I belong to the awesome worldwide organization Clickin Moms Photography forum for women in photography. This truly is a  worldwide network of professionals, hobbyists and artists that come together to share and learn in our photography journey. I am inspired and blown away everyday by the work and vision I see here. Each month or so, they propose an exercise in creativity. I try to participate in as many of their exercises and challenges that I can, not for recognition, but just to get better. To be recognized again for anything, I am just speechless. Each challenge and exercise has a specific theme for you to interpret. This time it was breaking the rules so ingrained in our photographic brains. 

You have to know what the rules are to effectively be able to break them. This was fun to try to do just that. And I guess especially rewarding to be recognized for doing something wrong, right. 

 

Here is my image that was selected for this theme. What you should try to do is have leading lines into the frame drawing you right to your subject. In this simple image, my daughter is running out of the frame. The sun is reflected in the puddle in the lower left pushing her and this winter OUT of here when we desperately needed it to be gone already. 

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Breaking the rules has never been so much fun. Here are a couple of other images that do just that.

I have had many conversations with my lovely friend Dorothy Masom, a brilliant painter, about composition. You want to keep anything important out of the center of the painting or likewise, a photograph. Your eyes need a way in, a path to follow. But sometimes it can work to keep things very centered. Here's my daughter. She was playing at Longwood gardens, just on the opposite side of this fence in the Children's Garden. I asked her to stop and look through the fence for me. She is right in the middle, with the fence crossing through the middle of her eyes. It is abrupt visually, and completely changes the nature of where we actually were. 

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Another thought provoking part of this exercise was to deliberately keep something out of focus. This is harder to do than you think. This is the diner before coffee. The way it probably really looks to me. Yanno, we all need our cup of Joe!

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Check out the rest of the Editor's Choice Awards here.

Thanks for reading! -  Annmarie