Janet Worne - Thoughtful Photography

Georgia O'Keefe--True to Herself

My first look at a female artist is Georgia O’Keefe. I have included her even though she was a painter and not a photographer, because she has always been a tremendous influence in my work.

Her wonderful sense of composition was clean and elegant. Her use of color was almost musical. I can only say that when I look at certain of her pieces my heart sings. I also feel an affinity for her way of framing a scene. In fact, while reading her bio on the website of the New Mexico Office of the State Historian, I came across this: “Her paintings often used the framing and foreshortening that the photographer employed with the lens, and in the dark room. Her paintings, of huge flowers or bleached bones, cropped in unusual ways, mirrored the photographer’s gaze.”

    I saw an exhibit last year at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, called “Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities”. It was fascinating to see the similarities between her work and Ansel Adams photographs. I found a video about this exhibit that is worth watching. The video is a little too wide for the format here but clicking on the center of it after it starts playing will take you to a full version on YouTube.

Not only was she good friends with Ansel Adams, but she was married to Alfred Stieglitz, a pioneer in American modernist photography. There are many good biographies out there about her life so I won’t go into those details here, but my take away from her story is admiration for her wisdom and knowledge of her own needs. She was able to hear the voices inside herself and stay true to her art. She was determined to create good work and have it be judged by it’s own merits and not on the basis of her gender. She had the courage to take risks and do what she needed to do.

"To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage."                 ---Georgia O'Keefe

   

Unintentional Sabbatical

I know, I know. I have fallen off the face of the blogosphere. My computer died a while back and it was in and out of the shop for three weeks. I felt like I had both hands tied behind my back. Nothing was right with the world until I got my computer back. I finally got it back with a new (bigger) hard drive, new display, new housing, two new fans and a few other little odds and ends—all this a few days BEFORE my warranty expired. This was quite an ad for the benefits of paying extra for Apple Care on a new Mac.

So that doesn’t explain my extended absence. I guess it’s like belonging to a gym and getting into a routine of always going at a particular time without fail. Then your schedule changes or you get sick and your routine goes out the window. It is so hard to get back into it. Pathetic, I know, but that’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it.

Maybe I needed a break. I think I’m going through some sort of major change now and I don’t know yet how this is going to end up. I was a staff photographer for newspapers for 26 years and that ended abruptly when I quit and moved to New Mexico. As we all know newspapers are hurting and unlikely to recover any time soon, if ever. Work for freelance photographers is almost non-existent here so I find I must reinvent myself. I keep telling myself: change is good, change is exciting. It’s like a death/rebirth thing. If I work at it, the new me can be even better than before.

History is full of women artists and photographers who took risks and made the necessary changes in their lives so that they could live up to their potential and express themselves artistically.

Maybe if I take inspiration from these women who went before me I can find the strength to take new risks and step into the next chapter of my life with confidence. I will try to do that in future postings by looking backward at the lives of some of these brave women so that I may look forward to my future life, whatever it may hold.

Happy Birthday Hilary

My baby girl is 26. Yikes!!!

Inspiring Blog

Need a good dose of inspiration? Look at as much work by other photographers as you can. When I started out, the only way I could do that was in the library since I hadn't heard of the internet yet. I started at the beginning of the photo section and took out every book one-by-one until I had gone through everything they had.

Now, you can do that from home with the internet. (I can't imagine life without it anymore) There are many sites out there to instruct and inspire and here's one I just discovered thanks to The National Press Photographers Association (NPPA):

It's a documentary photography blog by Geoffrey Hiller called Verve Photo. In it he profiles NPPA member photojournalists and their work. It's a great opportunity to see that there is still quality work being done in spite of the problems facing our industry today.

Which Browser?

Anyone who has ever built or run a website or blog (and these days that encompasses a mind-boggling number of people) has or should consider how their site will be viewed. What kind or computer? Which browser will be used? Of course we have no control over that. Every viewer will make their own choices which means each person will see our work differently.

What I didn't realize was just how differently each browser renders photographs. Safari tends to look darker and richer in color than Mozilla Firefox. So a picture that looks intense and colorful on Safari can look washed out and disappointing on Firefox. If I tone for Firefox, it can look too heavy and overdone on Safari. And there are many other browsers to contend with.

What's a photographer to do? It's enough to drive you crazy. In the top 3 as far as I can tell, the most popular browser is Internet Explorer, then Firefox, then Safari. Since Internet Explorer and Firefox look very close, I've been toning with those browsers in mind. Maybe there's a better way, but I haven't found it. I think sometimes my pictures look a little washed out on those browsers because I don't want them to look too extreme on Safari.

It's a balancing act. Take a look. If you have more than one browser on your computer, open this page in all of them and compare the results with these photos I took recently at a friend's house in Ramah, NM.
 

Hummingbird Mystery

I saw a young visitor out my kitchen window this morning. It made my day. She sat in a yucca tree and groomed herself meticulously--long enough for me to run and fetch my camera and fire off 31 frames. Most of the hummingbirds in our yard are the black-chinned variety. This one had a prominent yellow spot on her beak that I hadn't noticed until I was looking closely at the images blown up on my computer.

I was stumped. A hummer with a yellow spot on its beak? Never heard of one. I looked further. She was cleaning her needle-thin beak with her feet.

A few frames later cleared up the mystery. The yellow must have been pollen, now washed away by the bird's hygienic habits. I'm still not sure, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that this young female is, indeed, a black-chinned hummingbird.

It's definitely adorable.

JAWS

 I recently joined an organization called JAWS, which stands for Journalism & Women Symposium. The declaration on their website states:  "JAWS supports the professional empowerment and personal growth of women in journalism and works toward a more accurate portrayal of the whole society."

The first local get-together I attended was great. (I call it a get-together because that's precisely what it was, rather than a formal meeting) I found mostly writers--in fact I think I was the only photographer. That's okay, though, because I consider myself a writer as well as photographer. It was wonderful to gather with a group of women in my field and compare notes. Even though the number of female reporters, editors and photographers is growing steadily, we are still not well represented in management. We still face the unique issues that men don't seem to worry about as much, such as juggling childcare with the crazy hours of a journalist, and being taken as seriously as our male counterparts by our bosses and the public. It is refreshing to have a group to talk to frankly about those issues and have them actually UNDERSTAND what I'm talking about.

I am on their mailing list and the latest topic was a call for quotes by female journalists. Here are a couple of my favorites:

“When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent left, and could say, "I used everything you gave me.”
            --Erma Bombeck

"Networking is a primary way women discover that we are not crazy, the system is."
             -– Gloria Steinem

"Women are in a double bind. If we talk like women we are not respected. If we talk like men, we are not liked."
             -– Deborah Tannen

"Information is power and without it we can ‘t make the changes that we need in order to balance our work and family lives."
             -– Judy Mann

“In journalism, there has always been a tension between getting it first and getting it right”
                --Ellen Goodman

Annie Leibovitz Quote

"A thing that you see in my pictures is that I was not afraid to fall in love with these people." 
                    -- Annie Leibovitz

Asleep At The Wheel

I went to an open air concert last night at the Albuquerque Summerfest and photographed "Asleep At The Wheel". It was like old times. Very, very old times.

Years ago, you could find me leaning against the stage at various concerts with my camera, happily recording the visual moments while savoring the musical feast--for as long as I wanted.

These days, an army of security guards stand by your elbow ready to pounce if you override their strict rules of picture-taking. No flash photography. Only shoot from the tiny prescribed area. Only shoot during the first song. Oh, and first you must sign this document agreeing to turn over all rights to your work and your first born child.

I am exaggerating of course, but only a little. Last night, though, there seemed to be no such restrictions and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Ray Benson on lead guitar and vocals was as entertaining as ever...

And even played his guitar backwards...

Jason Roberts, center, played fiddle and vocals and Eddie Rivers, right, played sax and steel guitar...

Keyword Inspiration

Our July/August monsoon season seems to have arrived ahead of schedule. Not that we have been getting a lot of rain--especially by my old Kentucky standards--but our typically blue, cloudless skies have seen small storms rolling past periodically each day. For us that translates into cooler afternoons and evening light shows. What rain there is to be dropped, is usually unleashed on the Sandia Mountains within sight of my camera.

I took these pictures during Mother Nature's after dinner entertainment while sitting on our patio. Looking at them I am still awed by what I see. My mind runs through the list of keywords I attached to the metadata. I start with the literal: mountains, weather, wind, clouds, sunset, sky, Southwest, Sandia, storm...

Somehow that seems inadequate. I move on to the more descriptive: alpen glow, pastel, orange, intense, scenic, strength, grandeur, big sky...

Then I unleash my feelings and add a few larger concepts for good measure: Enchantment, dreamy, faith, spirituality, passion, perfection, surreal, vitality, dreams, goals, Zen...

Can't you just see one of these photos on a poster with some inspirational message about reaching for your goals with passion? The point is, if they were languishing in some stock agency with only the literal keywords, the buyer looking for an image to illustrate a concept or inspirational message would never find them.

Awe-inspiring. I never tire of looking at that mountain. I need to come up with more words to describe it.