In addition to being a member of the Eastern Maine Camera Club, I hang out with a dynamic, ever-evolving, growing and changing group of photogs and we meet periodically for P.I.E. (We actually do eat pie, made from scratch by the lovely wife of one of our photographers - Phil Flagg.) But P.I.E. stands for Photographers Information Exchange. It is a friendly, collaborative, open and non-competitive get-together where we simply chat, share, ask and compare notes on anything and everything photographic. It's awesome actually.
One element of our recent P.I.E. get togethers has been to issue challenges to each other. The purpose of the challenge is to recognize that we all get in photography ruts from time to time and need a good, swift kick in the pants to push us out of our respective comfort zones. I'm sure that not everyone in the group looks at it that way completely but it is fun to all contribute a topic on a little piece of paper and then put those topics into a hat out of which each of us then draws a topic. We now have an "assignment" and are now responsible to make a photograph (or more) of the topic and share it with the others in the group on our closed Facebook page.
I LOVE seeing how people attack their topics and frequently say aloud to my computer screen while looking at their work, "I would not have thought of that in a million years!" I love this! Thank you Jodi Renshaw.
Last week I drew "A Stranger."
I set out this morning to photograph a stranger here INORONO.
One of the very cool things about Orono is our people. I literally walked up to three young men in The Store/Ampersand INORONO (see previous Blog entry), told them what I was doing and each agreed with virtually no hesitation.
The really cool part is that one of them was also a photographer and was out exploring this morning INORONO and shooting analog. Yes, that means he was shooting film. You remember film......right?
I chose a totally minimalist approach. Nikon D700 with 50mm f1.4 lens and available light. Period.
I wanted to shoot wide open (f1.4) and I wanted an old-school, grainy black and white film, newspaper quality so I cranked up the ISO and pretended I was shooting Kodak Tri-X 400 push-processed to 800 with developer and fixer that really should have been replaced. (Yes I remember The Darkroom)
Pretty happy with the results and want to thank Devon, Scott and Justin - you are part of what makes living INORONO special.
