Abstracts
It’s tough shooting in nature during the dog days of summer. No wildflowers left worth shooting at my local parks, the ponds are all dried up, and everything looks pretty beat up from the heat this year. Another problem with this time of year is everything is green, and no other colors to work with. Plus I hate shooting in the heat. I’m not saying that there isn’t anything at all to shoot in my parks, just nothing there that I haven’t already shot a million times.
I need something new and that is where the local museums have offered me a new outlet for close-up opportunities. When I was in the art show business I learned that people were not really interested in buying the abstract images, so I didn’t spend a lot of time shooting abstracts which I love to shoot. The photographers liked my abstracts but they weren’t the ones buying my prints. Since I have now concentrated on teaching and stop doing art shows, it opens the door to shoot more interesting abstracts.
Shooting close-ups of subjects in the museums, junkyards, old buildings, etc, offers me a chance to shoot more abstract looking subjects and makes it fun for me to create new artistic images. A photographer friend that new I was expanding my range outside of nature told me about a museum near my home that I didn’t know about. It is the Walter P Chrysler Museum. It has some of the coolest old cars I have ever seen. The designs of the ornate details on these cars are a close-up photographers dream shoot. I was there for just a few hours and got lots of great abstracts and didn’t even cover a fraction of what there was to shoot. So I can see I will be making many trips there and plan to do some small group workshops.
I also know there are a lot of photographers that like shooting close-ups of subjects outside of nature. When I offered a survey on my blog asking how many people shoot subjects that are not of nature, it was about 120 people saying they did shoot subjects outside of nature and less then ten said they only photographed subjects in nature. So it told me there is interest in shooting other subject matter in the close-up world. When I offered a workshop at the Henry Ford Museum for a hands on small group it sold out in less then twenty four hours. I will always be out in nature shooting but during the dead of winter, or in the heat of summer when subjects are limited in nature, I now have options that are also fun and challenging to photograph.
The nice clean glossy paint jobs and all the chrome on these cars provided a lot of reflections which made for the interesting abstracts I was looking to find. Here is some vents on a hood from an old car and the vents are reflecting in the black fender, and as the fender bends downward it picks up stray reflections from other subjects nearby. I love all the odd lines running in all different directions. The lighting on these subjects is usually overhead spotlights which at times can had an interesting feel to the subjects.
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