New Year, New Projects: Part 2

I recently bought myself a camera. Well, technically it was a Christmas present from my husband, even though I'm the one who did everything required to actually get that camera into my hands... but whatever. It's a good camera. My first SLR since film went the way of the dinosaur. I bought it so that I could take good high-resolution photos of my paintings for reproduction purposes (yes, prints are coming), but once I had it in my hands I remembered something: I really like taking pictures.

My dog Cleo | Jan7 

I used to love my camera. Anyone who went to school with me can tell you what a pest I was. Every few weeks I'd carry the thing around for a day and take photos of my friends (don't worry, I'm not going to post any of them... but I still have them all, so be nice to me). These were the days when you had to get everything processed and printed, and it was expensive. And I was young, and broke. So I didn't use that camera nearly as much as I wanted to.

These days everything is digital, the memory cards are huge and I can take as many photos as I want. So I think the time has come for me to actually learn all the ins and outs of how the camera works, and experiment a little. To make sure I do it, I signed up for Blipfoto... an online daily photo journal. One photo a day for a year, uploaded to the site. Now I'm not silly enough to believe that I will actually take a photo every single day. I know I don't have time for that. But if I can manage a couple a week I'll be happy. I imagine there will be lots of shots of my dogs, some pics of works in progress, maybe one or two of my kid if he'll let me (though at 16, that's not likely).

My grandmother's piano | Jan 3

It'll be interesting for me to see how my painting is influenced by this project. I use photos for reference, but usually these are snapshots taken with a point and shoot, and I find sometimes the shot I thought I had just isn't good enough to work from and I have to discard the idea. I've played around a bit with image transfers, but ideally, I'd want to work with my own images, not the stuff I can rip out of magazines. And what about collage? There are so many ways I can use photos in my work, it could open up something totally new and exciting.

Blipfoto will automatically post my photos to Facebook and Twitter, but not to my artist page... that I've been able to figure out yet anyway. If you are interested in following the journal, my profile link is here:
http://www.blipfoto.com/morris4of4