In retrospect, I had grandiose ideas about how the Creative Renewal Fellowship would begin. I anticipated my life being less hectic and there would be an opportunity to wake up to a new approach to each day. Life with less stress, more art. But, life has been as usual...busy.
On July 1, the first day of the CRF, I spent my day running errands and preparing to teach class that evening. I teach a beginning photography class to a mix of photography majors and non-majors. My husband and I spent time looking for sparklers, smoke bombs and light sticks for my students to use during class that evening. I was going to lecture and demonstrate light painting in photography. It seemed appropriate since the students would be working on the assignment over the fourth of July.
We spent the beginning of class with the usual question and answers about homework and technical issues regarding Lightroom2 editing. Then we began our lesson. The students were very excited and eager to explore new ideas. We had a model (a student's friend was in town) who helped us out, and she was great. We shot images in the studio, and then went outside to explore the fireworks that I had purchased. The sparklers were fantastic, the smoke bombs were not. The smoke lasted only about 30 seconds, not long enough for me to set off my flash enough to see the smoke moving through the air. We were still able to get some interesting effects.
We were so involved in our work that we did not finish our explorations till 10:20pm (class ends at 9:50pm). At this point, we found that we were locked out of the building and had to track a security guard down to open the doors. For once the students did not mind staying after class...and neither did I!
We were all excited about our endeavors that night. So much so that I couldn't fall asleep till 1am. I found that at the end of the day, I was renewed in my excitement about teaching and photography. So, maybe my grandious plans weren't so far off, just different.
If you want to know more about light painting go to http://www.diyphotography.net/painting_with_light or http://digital-photography-school.com/tips-on-how-to-light-paint-video-tutorial. You can google light painting and many, many more sites will be available.
Fletcher Place United Methodist Church, Indianapolis, IN
Type- C Photograph
About Me
- Ginny Taylor Rosner
- I started photographing abandoned spaces over twenty years ago. Initially I was attracted to the play of light and the look of deserted abstraction they offered. As I worked in abandoned factories and warehouse spaces, I began to get a feeling of “presence” from them. What’s more, viewers of my photographs also felt this “presence.” I felt that I was succeeding in my efforts to transcend the ordinary. To push the idea further, I began to photograph abandoned homes, barns, businesses, greenhouses, schools, and churches. These images speak of social, familial, economic, and spiritual issues. Even more, the photographs tell stories about the lives of others, and help the viewer reflect on their own interior landscapes. The abandoned structures and their contents indicate a presence and a past, awakening the viewer’s own self-awareness and memories. My photographs document an interior human experience. I work with traditional color materials and historic photographic processes in a wet darkroom to capture photographically the distinct poetic beauty of these decaying remnants.
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