Recently a friend of mine who is also a photographer agreed to do photography assignments with me drawn from Doug Beasley’s Vision Quest Cards: Photo Assignments For Personal & Spiritual Growth. It’s fun (and helps me be more accountable) to have someone to share the assignments with and to give one another feedback on our work.
Photography Assignment
Our most recent assignment has been my favorite so far. It is:
Recreate a classic photograph or painting, mimicking the composition, lighting and nuances, but in a new setting or contemporary surrounding.
When I began searching for “classic art” or “iconic art” I found countless beautiful and inspiring works of art. There were so many that it was difficult to choose just one piece of art. So I chose several.
Marry Cassat painting “Louise Nursing Her Child”
The two painters that I was most inspired to imitate were Georgia O’Keeffe and Mary Cassat. There were many others that I admire, but these two touch my heart in ways that others do not.
I have always loved flowers so O’Keeffe’s work was a natural for me. And as a mother and grandmother I feel a kinship with Cassat’s mother and infant photographs.
Yesterday, I made the portrait you see above, inspired by Mary Cassat’s painting Louise Nursing Her Child. It was the most fun I’ve ever had making portraits.
I asked my daughter if we could use her house as the light there is special. The portraits turned out better than I had hoped. The light was spectacular and my friend who posed with her infant daughter came up with clothing that was perfect! Many thanks to Brianna and Penny who posed for the portraits. (See more portraits from the session below.)
Magic Happens When You Least Expect It!
This assignment challenged me on many levels. I worked on new edit techniques and some compositing techniques. Figuring out the lighting and composition used another set of skills. And simply looking at art created by other artists was inspiring. But the fun I had creating the mother and baby photos was magic I had not expected. Everything came together—light, location, models, and clothing—to allow me to create photographs that I love. I think they are the best portrait work I’ve done. If I had not taken on this assignment I might never have discovered what a great space my daughter’s house is for making portraits. (She may be seeing much more of me in the future as I loved the light and the little spots we found to use as locations.)
Here are the O’Keeffe paintings that inspired me and my renditions of them using photographs:
O’Keeffe’s Pedernal
This was a photo I made at Ghost Ranch where I visited last summer. I chose a view that came close to O’Keeffe’s painting and then did what I could in Photoshop to make it look more like the painting. This was my least successful effort.
O’Keeffe Red Hills With White Shell
The base photograph for this was another photo I made at Ghost Ranch. The shell was from another still life photo made some time ago. The orange-red sky came from another photograph (highly modified). While the shell doesn’t match the translucent beauty of the shell in O’Keefe’s painting and the overall scale and details leave a lot to be desired, I got to practice my compositing skills and I enjoy the pop of energy and surrealistic vision of this photo. You can see that I need much more practice compositing. This one feels more like pop art than like it all belongs together.
O’Keeffe Bleeding Hearts
This photo was a combination of 2 different photos I made of bleeding heart flowers in the past. The leaves were from one photo, the flowers from another. This photo gave me more compositing practice as well as practice adding texture and color to the background to attempt be more like the background in O’Keefe’s painting. I like how this one turned out a lot.
When was the last time you took on a learning assignment in a creative art? Whatever it is that lights you up, I hope you find lots of time in 2016 to explore, enjoy, and learn more about it.
May you walk in beauty.
Magical Light Portraits (love the light at my daughter’s house)
0 Comments