Rebirth

To those of you who followed me closely until I dropped off the face of the earth a month and a half ago, but love me enough to show up again when they saw the new post email, I sincerely thank you for bearing with me. I offer no excuses and ask no forgiveness.

Me (left) and My Nieces and Nephews

The brief explanation I owe you is after having my wisdom teeth removed and my work schedule intensify with a huge shift of responsibility onto my shoulders, most of my evenings have been spent with my family, my church, or my bed. To my most devoted followers and friends, Mona, Mary, Andra, Victoria and others, thank you for continuing to share and inspire with your photography and writing. You all coaxed me out of hiding helped encourage me to pick up the camera after work and do what I love again. To those of you who are here for the first time, I assure you such a lull in content shall not be the norm moving forward and you are well welcome company in this circle of friends and photographers.

Today after work I started a load of laundry and decided an appropriate theme for my return from absence would be rebirth… My Junior year of high school, we found out parts of our building were “unsafe.” Over the course of a tumultuous weekend our community and neighboring schools came together  to create a portable school in our Award Winning Band’s practice field. It wasn’t an ideal situation, but we made it work.

Portable Row

Above is a look at the portable row today. It’s a nearly stifling environment, one teacher went so far to describe it as our camp of concentration. Naturally, I hate to look at the dismal grey rows of buildings so I found the part that caught my eye and did what I do best, I got in close 🙂

This was hanging outside one of the buildings. I really liked the contrast of green on the otherwise grey background. My f/stop was very low, f/1.4, so the sun and the sky gave me a nice white glow to fade into the deep blue sky in the upper left. I thought about playing with this in Photoshop for a while, but maybe I’ll do a tutorial on that in the next post. This is the image exactly as it came out of my camera.

I got my fill of the old site and moved over to the edge of the new construction. It’s been nearly 5 years since we moved into the practice field and the new building is finally a reality. Of course you can’t tell in the above image. 🙂 I ran my f/stop up to a fast f/1.4 and my shutter speed up to a quick 1/8000th of a second to get the DoF (depth of field) and brightness I wanted in this. I love an artistic shot of nature in the midst of an urbanscape or a construction site.

The building is a lot closer than it looked isn’t it? With my f/stop down to f/16 we can see the new building a lot better but the plant is definitely still the hero of this shot. A few fluffy clouds in the background add a lot to this image but you probably didn’t notice them until I said something. Some elements of a photograph appeal to us more sub-consciously than consciously. The same is true in the advertising world (yes I’m on a Mad Men kick along with the rest of the young male in a desk job populace.)

Finally here’s a look at the front lawn of the new school. I definitely prefer sprinkler row over portable row.

I hope you’ve enjoyed a slightly more local peek into my photography experiences. I appreciate you visiting and hope I get to hear from you all. I live for your feedback so feel free to fill my comments section with your thoughts. I do my very best to respond to all of them. If you think your reader’s would enjoy this or any post you are always more than welcome to press me. Social links for FB and Twitter are around here somewhere. 🙂

God bless you all and have a wonderful week! -Arley