Let's Get Technical
Image by @thomasae via Unsplash
“Mom, did you know your expensive camera is sitting inside the console of your car?” Abi asked the other day.
“Yes, I put it there so I would go out and take photos, but I sorta forget it’s there.”
Let’s get technical. The fact is I’m no photographer. Besides one landscape photography class 20 years ago and some experimentation off and on, I am a pure beginner.
I purchased a black-and-white photography course with bite-size lessons (5 minutes or less). Today I watched 5 of the lessons and wrote down each lesson’s challenge as my “fun” for the week. Whether or not I’m any good yet, to me, photography is creative fun.
I chose photography as an experimental medium because I’ve been interested in it since elementary school. I got a Vivitar film camera for Christmas (1989?) in a pink nylon case. You can imagine how blurred and haphazard those photos were. I would get so frustrated with the beauty I saw through my eyes, but could not capture through the lens. I purchased a book to learn a few things, but the photos of naked people more than deterred me. I was not prepared for the world of art. But the bug was still there.
National Geographic was another inspiration for me. My dad had a neat yellow row of their spines on our living room bookshelf. I looked through each one, fascinated by the photos and later, the stories. My goal as a teen was to become a photojournalist. Obviously, that didn’t happen. However, I’m a sucker for coffee table photojournalistic books or stories about photojournalists (and spies). Today I’m purchasing a book for myself that is something similar to what I want to create in this project. (My prediction: The bill for books is going to prove hefty for this project.)
What am I creating, you may ask? There are 2 portions of this project: an academic paper (more on that in another post) and an artistic one. I’m creating a book of poetry interspersed with black and white photography in which I capture the stories of lesser-known ancient women of early Christianity who showed incredible resilience. Ladies like Perpetua, Felicity, Thecla, and others. A few may be legends based on a people, but many are not.
I want to highlight their contribution to Christian history, debunk the myth that Christianity debased the status of women (it did the opposite), and explore the power of Christian women’s testimonies. I’ll intersperse poems from the ancient women’s perspective with B&W portraits of modern women who also have stories of great resilience.
This week’s challenges were twofold:
My poetry is progressing snail-like as usual.
Reading about women in the patristic (early Christian) age is fascinating and laugh-out-loud-worthy at times, but 3 hours in one day puts me to sleep.
Victories:
I have at least one solid lead for a modern subject for the portraits.
I learned what fancy terms like high-key and low-key photography mean.
I pulled my expensive camera from the console and sat here in the coffee shop and played through undiscovered settings.
Technically, being a beginner is a great place to act on those childhood dreams and trade years of perfectionism for building resilience in myself.
