Category: <span>Photography</span>

Published October 8, 2017 by

Annual Traditions Are Overrated

traditions
© Avard Woolaver

Annual Traditions Are Overrated (Day 8 of 31)

It’s Thanksgiving weekend in Canada (tomorrow, Monday, is our Thanksgiving Day), so most Canadians are figuring out the logistics and timing for their dinners—who’s bringing which side dishes, and whether they’ll have time to make a run to the farmer’s market for a pie. It’s in this context—one of feeling profoundly grateful for all the good stuff in our lives—that I’m thinking about annual traditions being overrated.

I’ve realized it’s not the traditions themselves I’m arguing with, here. It’s the pressure they can make us feel. Some traditions require that an enormous number of variables line up right; and if any of them are a bit off, everything goes haywire.

In terms of photography, trying to recreate a certain moment year after year carries the implicit expectation that all the tumblers are going to fall into place: light, weather, people, traffic, moods, finances, health. Far better to go with the flow and keep expectations realistic, I’ve concluded.

The first time my wife and I took our young daughter to see Santa, she was two. A big moment. Unfortunately, the child just ahead of her in line was yelling and hollering as if Santa’s cottage were a house of horrors. “Erica! Erica!” this child’s parents were urging her. “Sit up on Santa’s lap so we can get a picture!”

Blood-curdling screams. Erica seemed to have figured out that David Sedaris insight, that Santa is an anagram of Satan.

Meanwhile, our daughter, observing this scene with enormous concern, was very worried at the thought that she was up next. You could see her wondering what hell we had planned for her.

Our family talked about that outing for years (we still talk about it). This random kid, known to us as Baby Erica, achieved fame in our household and will never be forgotten. (When our own daughter got to see Santa at last, she was, unsurprisingly, cautious; but things went fine.)

Poor Erica, though. We had a lot of sympathy for what that child went through. Better, probably, if her parents had just called it quits and missed the photo. Some of them just aren’t worth it.

(For the month of October 2017, I’m participating in the 31 Days bloggers’ challenge. You can find out about it here, and check out the interesting work other bloggers are posting.)

 

 

Blogging Photography

31 Days Avard Woolaver

Published October 7, 2017 by

When I Was Young, Everything Was Black and White

film, black and white,
Wolfville, Nova Scotia, 1980                           © Avard Woolaver

When I Was Young, Everything Was Black and White (Day 7 of 31)

I’m in my late fifties, which means I grew up with a black-and-white television. When I was young our TV got two channels, both of them snowy. Even shows that had been filmed in colour were, in our household and others like ours, translated into varying shades of grey.

And I loved paging through Life magazine; there, too, reality was shown in black and white. It became my default understanding of what a photo was.

Old family photos in my parents’ and grandparents’ albums, similarly, were in black and white. We had colour film, of course, and I enjoyed my father’s colour slides (shown on a big screen in the living room when we had company or at Christmas). But the basic set of beliefs I had about photos or images was that they were in black and white.

I think there’s some level at which, when I got seriously into photography in my twenties, I was working from that assumption. I still love looking at tonal variation and shades of grey—how a black-and-white photo can contain everything from deepest inky black to a pale, foggy, mist, to white and nearly silver. Black and white isn’t lacking, or second-best; it’s just different.

And it’s not better. There can be a kind of high-handedness about it, a sort of snooty, superior quality. A whiff of reading Russian novels at breakfast and watching only foreign films, an “I’m better than you” air. That’s an empty pretense, though. There doesn’t need to be any message in using it.

It’s beautiful. Colour is beautiful. Both are great—a pleasure to shoot, a pleasure to look at.

black and white
© Avard Woolaver

(For the month of October 2017, I’m participating in the 31 Days bloggers’ challenge. You can find out about it here, and check out the interesting work other bloggers are posting.)

Blogging Photography

31 Days Avard Woolaver black and white

Published October 6, 2017 by

Film Used to Cost a Lot

film
Toronto, 2003          © Avard Woolaver

Film Used to Cost a Lot (Day 6 of 31)

Are you a digital native with photography, or do you remember film? I was a film diehard for a long time, making the switch only around 2006. Film was getting harder to buy, harder to have developed, and just generally more of a hassle. I was pretty sure I’d dislike shooting digital, though, so I’d held out for a long time.

Well, this was another lesson learned about the fallacy of predictions. I loved my digital camera. The difference in the tones of the print, which I was sure would bother me, didn’t seem like an issue. There were slight differences, but they were minimal.

And the cost per shot! These things were basically free! Sure, printing was still an expense, but you could take photos and view them for nothing. I felt I’d been set loose on the world with unlimited resources. The first eight months I had my first digital camera, I took 10,000 photos—around 40 per day. A few years later, I was up to 100 per day, or more.

But in the past year or two something has changed for me. I’m not tired of taking pictures; far from it. But I remember how much more thoughtful I had to be when every single shot represented an expense that was coming out of my wallet. (For those of you who don’t remember the days of film, it used to cost around $4 a roll, with developing and contact sheets or proofs on top of that.) Paying for it had kept me careful. Back in the 1980s, I always had to weigh my priorities, use my judgement, consider the shot before I pressed the shutter.

Do I think the extravagance of the past few years has been somehow bad for me? Like a moral failing, a photographic gluttony? No. I feel that I sharpened a lot of my skills during these years of easy photos, of taking hundreds of photos a day. It’s been great for me. I just find that I’ve moved into a different phase.

These things come upon us without our planning them. An interest or compulsion ebbs, or something inside you shifts. I’m reaching a point where what feels right for me now is to take fewer photos, more judiciously. It’s quite possible I might even return to shooting film.

Don’t you love the ways we surprise ourselves? You can think you know yourself so well, and then you learn something new.

(For the month of October 2017, I’m participating in the 31 Days bloggers’ challenge. You can find out about it here, and check out the interesting work other bloggers are posting.)

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31 Days Avard Woolaver film

Published October 5, 2017 by

The Light of Autumn

light, fall, autumn,
© Avard Woolaver

The Light of Autumn (Day 5 of 31)

Fall light is magic. More people claim fall as their favourite time of year than any other season, and the way the world looks is a big part of that. The vivid colours and changing leaves we associate with this time of year give us a jolt of energy, and the freshness in the air makes us eager to start new projects.

Meteorologists tell us there are two reasons fall light is so special. One is that the sun is hitting the earth at a lower angle, which changes the quality of the light we see. The other reason is that, in most places, fall is a time of lower humidity than summer. The air looks so crisp and the sky so achingly blue because an invisible haze has been stripped from the world around us. You are, literally, seeing everything more clearly at this time of year.

The opportunities offered for photography are generous. In most areas you can still dash outside with just a jacket; you don’t have to deal yet with boots and hats and bundling your kids up in snow pants. If you need an incentive to get outside and snap a few shots, remind yourself that this is, for most of us, a brief season.

It’s a good time to get landscape photos—leaves, dew on grass, afternoon shadows. Tree branches, too, tend to show up well in the crisp light of these days. Even if you can fit it in only once or twice, strolling around and taking some photos in the autumn air is guaranteed to be rewarding.

(For the month of October 2017, I’m participating in the 31 Days bloggers’ challenge. You can find out about it here, and check out the interesting work other bloggers are posting.)

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31 Days autumn Avard Woolaver light

Published October 4, 2017 by

Use a Window as a Frame

window, frame,
© Avard Woolaver

Use a Window as a Frame (Day 4 of 31)

The views from your windows are the transitions between your home and the outside world. Whatever you see when you look out—green grass, rooftops, laundry, beach, leaves—those are the boundaries that demarcate and separate your private life from public life. Inside your walls are privacy, autonomy, and (one would hope) safety. Outside that lies the rest of the world, with all its demands and scrutiny.

It’s interesting to document this transitional zone. Doing so captures, and can later remind you about, all those details of the outside world that are most familiar to you. The hours spent idly staring out the window while washing dishes or musing or waiting for a ride to arrive—all these are moments worth photographing. Children play in the yard, learning to ride bikes, or running through sprinklers on hot days. Dogs lie around in the yard, switching from very busy to stupendously lazy in that charming way they have of going between extremes. If you’re a homeowner and have a house, your yard is your property, the little patch of earth that’s yours. (And if you live in an apartment or similar setup, you have that same relationship: the piece of land may not be yours, but the view is.)

Using a window as a frame underlines the idea that this is your view from inside. It hints at so many aspects of your daily life: leaving and coming home again; greeting your family, or sighing with relief while you slip your coat off; locking the door at night and feeling reassured that you’re safe until morning.

Photographically, a frame creates a dynamic composition. (A doorway can be used the same way in composing your photo.) Because the light is different in all seasons and at various times of day, the view that initially seems static is in fact constantly changing. It’s a helpful way to remember to observe what’s going on around you.

So, a window of your home in your photo operates on many levels: as a metaphor, as an important graphic element that can make your picture stronger, and as a reminder to stay alert.

window, frame, winter,
© Avard Woolaver

(For the month of October 2017, I’m participating in the 31 Days bloggers’ challenge. You can find out about it here, and check out the interesting work other bloggers are posting.)

Blogging Photography

31 Days Avard Woolaver