After an inspiring and productive first week, I began the second week of my class while in Maui. The theme for the second week was auditory observation, using sound/music as inspiration. This week was loaded with assignments and materials to review: videos on how to be an effective listener, about how sound is something more than just what we hear using our ears--it is also something we feel and experience with many parts of our bodies. We were asked to choose a film that was accompanied by an Academy Award-winning score (I chose Gravity from the short list of films) and review the movie while being mindful of the score and its impact on the film's viewer. Then, we were allowed to choose one of two Brahms pieces to listen to and draw inspiration from for our work this week. I first listened to this piece:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhKYEHlKGjM?list=PLDFD5482D65E56DD7&w=560&h=315]

When listening to this piece, I kept imagining a mother; in the beginning, there is a single melody as she rises to greet the day. One by one, other instruments begin to play harmonizing melodies, as if her children and husband were awakening and join her in her day. Tension begins to build as the chaos of the day swells to crescendo, but suddenly, a moment of somber sweetness as she says her farewells. The entire piece continues to cycle through moments of joy, chaos, frenetic paces and slow, sweet lulls, just as a mother's day is interspersed with busy moments, boo boos to kiss, arguments to referee, a times of rushing from place to place. This was the photograph I captured. I intentionally used a slow shutter speed to introduce movement and tried to capture the happy chaos that is motherhood.

I like this photograph, but I regret that the window frame runs through the heads of two of the subjects. As this was taken via remote shooting app during a spontaneous tickle fight, it was impossible to account for this. However, I do feel it captures the sweet-yet-chaotic mornings in our home.

I decided to give it another go. For my final assignment, I was drawn to creating an image from this piece:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg1TlHwM-xI&w=560&h=315]

When listening to this piece, I heard the sounds of romance. In the beginning, it is a new, shy, sweet attraction that begins to sweep with love and passion. The emotion builds, as well as the tension, and there is a climactic moment of an argument, a lover's spat, followed by the halting resolution and then forgiveness. The music returns to sweetness, repeating this cycle of love/tension/conflict and resolution, but then moves into a time of steady sweetness. It is the "middle age" of these lovers' life--the music has an almost heartbeat-like quality, and it steadily continues, with small rises and falls, before sweeping into a climactic moment of tension. This is followed by a prolonged, mournful section, before repeating the earlier cycles of happiness and sadness before settling into a quiet, but final, conclusion.

I would have liked to have created a storyboard of images for this piece (which I still may do), but spare time was a major factor this week, so I decided instead to capture a single image of love and romance inspired by the piece. What I ended up with was two images that I loved for different reasons, but that both captured this feeling of love and romance.

Next week is a break week in the course, which I desperately need to let my brain absorb everything I've consumed in the past two weeks. I'm loving this course, though, and am excited to get back to things in a couple of weeks.

(Click here to read about the first week of my Art of Observation class. Or, if you'd like to learn how you can take a course like this, complete with instructor feedback and critique, in an online forum, click here to learn about Clickin Moms).

For a couple of months now, I've been in the worst rut with my photography. No creative spark, no energy--mostly because of sheer exhaustion. It's been a rough couple of years, with constant hits and no real support network out here in the Pacific. So, I decided that after the craziness of this year's Forget the Frock Easter campaign (that's the non-profit which I serve as Creative Arts Director), I would take a photography workshop online and focus on picking up the camera again. I chose the Art of Observation, a course via Clickin Moms, which is a photography forum for women. This isn't my first course with this site--in fact, I can credit the courses on Clickin Moms with giving me a solid foundation of knowledge in shooting my camera in manual and learning how to create art rather than pure snapshots. This particular course is all about finding inspiration in the world around you, whether it be from music, art, cinema, etc., and channeling that into strong photographs.

Our first week's assignments were all about observing and studying the paintings of the great masters and using them to inspire a creative photograph. I studied The Grocery Shop by Gerrit Dou.

After spending a long while contemplating this painting, I was very drawn to the woman on the right side of the frame in the background. Her piercing eyes, the ambiguous look--the silent observer intrigued me. I also could "hear" the sound of the items falling into the metal scale, and the framing of the painting with light and shadow and elements of clutter caught my eye. I created this image as a warm-up, inspired by the sound of the items in the painting clinking in the dish of the metal scale:

After stewing a bit, I came up with this image, which explored the theme of the silent, watchful observer:

And finally, I created this image for my weekly assignment.

After mulling over it a bit, what I ended up doing here was flipping the perspective. In my painting, there is a woman in the background observing the foreground subjects, and almost making eye contact with the viewer. Her gaze calls the viewers eye to the transaction between the two women, and her expression is ambiguous, forcing the eye to examine the painting and try to discern the story from the visible elements. But here, I decided to use the same technique of light to draw the eye through the frame and frame my subject, but I decided to face my subject away from the viewer. The viewer doesn't know what I (the subject) am looking at--there is a similar sense of ambiguity, but here, the viewer has greater sense of ownership in telling the story as the subject is anonymous.

I was very pleased with how the image turned out and am looking forward to the remaining weeks of the course. It feels wonderful to be exercising my 'creative muscle' again after so long.