Author: queentracey1

I was lucky enough to travel to the seashore this weekend.  Like all of the other little kids, I found myself filling my pockets with seashells.  Today as the sun shone brightly throughout the house, I took photos of the shells in a series of different poses, so to speak.  As with the sunflowers mentioned earlier, I leaned toward the abstract.  Still working with the images, but here are few.  We’ll see what the rest of the summer holds in store.

Lately I have been struggling with photography.  If you’ve read through more than a few of my posts you’ll see I’m kind of everywhere.  Nature, urbex, architecture, portraiture… it’s because much like nurses will work in different specialties to find their passion I have had to do the same thing to figure out where I want to spend my energies.  There are thousands of mediocre photographers and I just don’t *do* mediocre.  Uninspired attitude begets uninspired photographs and I just don’t want to publish mediocre work.

My biggest problem has been wanting more from photographs.  Yes, that’s a cool abandoned prison, that’s a pretty flower, that’s a nice landscape but I’m feeling la-di-dah about it.  A unique angle, a well-lit subject, a neat camera effect is desirable but I want more of me in my work and I’m not talking self portraits.

Today I came across the work of Kristy…

I have been having great difficulty photographing sunflowers.  Somehow the image of the whole flower is never quite right.  Finally I decided to stop worrying about the mythic image and enjoy the beauty of the abstract.

Well, I won’t lie.  I was having a moody morning to be sure.  The approaching storm outside my window didn’t help.  But instead of denying that fact, I decided to use that darker energy for this post.

I may have had no choice in the matter.  You see, as I sorted through images this morning for a project that must be bright and colorful, I found myself drawn toward the darker photos, those with branches and leaves in stark contrast against pale skies.

Like a persnickety child, I suddenly wanted to select only those images, the darkest of my photographs in black and white …

… and those in hues of all the shadowy shades.

Even though I knew I could not submit them for the project.

But selecting the images and spending time in a darker place was like taking a deep breath … or smacking a styrofoam…

* more photos from the ONE series can be viewed here.