irez.me Avatar Blogger Month

Weekly Photo Challenge: Curves – The Nature Of A Woman

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In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

When I look at photos of stick-thin women, I have to wonder, what is the appeal? What is more boring than a straight line? The gentle curve of the hips, the breasts, the shoulder and upper arm, soft and gently sloping, defines the feminine form. That women – and especially young girls – are conditioned to eschew this natural phenomenon causes more harm than can ever be expressed in a simple blog.

The Weekly Photo Challenge prompt this week is Curves. This photo not only shows a modern version of a curvaceous woman, but the framed print harkens back to a time when this shape was considered ideal.

There are other examples of curves in this picture, but the nature of a woman cannot be overshadowed.

Please click on the link above to see other examples of “Curves.”

Single Frame Stories: Creativity – Lessons From A Dead Poet

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Surprisingly, this week’s Single Frame Stories prompt, “Creativity”, pretty much stumped me. I’m not an artist. I take photographs and play around with processing them, but I am hopeless at creating anything from scratch. I have my own style, but it’s nothing ground-breaking or heart-stopping. It’s just what I do. It fills my time and it helps me relax. I just get in a zone and don’t see anything else. My senses are heightened, and they are fixed on what I am doing – trying to create my interpretation of the scene I have captured. Results may vary.

I was going to wimp out and skip this prompt. But then, ironically, I stumbled across this quote:

The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.
~ Sylvia Plath

So…feeling chastised by a dead poet, I intended to go into Second Life today and travel the grid, trying to find something that could tell the story of Creativity in a single shot. I was actually anxious about it, wondering what I could possibly come up with.

And then, I remembered a photo I had taken at Runestone, but hadn’t used in my original post. This painter’s easel has been at Runestone for as long as I have been going there. And it’s one of my favourite spots. I can never walk past it without grabbing a palette and putting brush to canvas, pretending to recreate the scene of the house across the water, playing at being an artist. When I opened the photo, I knew I could show in one shot how I feel when I am working to finish a picture: focused on the object, with everything else around me a blur.

I hope I succeeded.

If you want to participate in Single Frame Stories, you don’t have to be a blogger. All you need to do is upload your interpretation of Creativity, in a single photo, to the Single Frame Stories Flickr group. You can open a free account there, if you don’t already have one, and participate in this remarkable project. The deadline this week is Friday, so there is time to display the work at the Single Frame Stories SL10B installation. Go ahead…give it a shot. You may find yourself in the zone, too, once you’ve overcome your hesitation to share your creativity.

Putting Me In My Place

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Yesterday I ventured in to Second Life with three goals:

1. To clear out the Arcade items cluttering my platform from my shoot a few days prior.
2. To post my SL Movie poster at LEA11 in Berry’s Monday Meme Gallery.
3. Do a landscape shot for my blog.

I managed to clear out the Arcade items (although not organise them in my inventory 😦 ) and popped over to LEA11 to put up my poster. I even managed to knock poor Vaneeesa off the platform when I changed the width of my poster to 170.5 metres instead of adjusting the rotation to 170.5 (sorry again, Vaneeesa! *grimaces*) So far, two out of three down…I’m doing great!

Then I hit the wall. I opened the Destination Guide and TP’d to three different locations, trying to find a landscape to shoot. Despite rezzing issues, I attempted several shots in all three places. I adjusted my camera angle, Windlight settings (even going so far as to edit the water and sky settings), flew or ran from area to area trying to find just the right location to shoot and just generally wore myself out attempting to do what I normally don’t do.

After a couple of hours of this (intermittently, getting up frequently to rest my back and un-numb my bum) I started going through my shots for processing. Overall, I took over 100 photos and they were all…well, to be blunt…CRAP. Sighs. I tried to do something with a couple in post-processing to make them blog-worthy, but alas, you can’t make a silk purse out of…CRAP.

It’s for days like yesterday that I worked ahead for the Avatar Blogger Month. By the time I finished I was disheartened and exhausted. So, I took a day off.

Today, I went at it from a different angle. Yes, I wanted to find a pretty location to shoot, but I decided to add me into the frame. This time, I was happier with my results.

I headed to a sim I have frequented over the years, Runestone, and I wasn’t disappointed. If you haven’t been there, here is the description in the Destination Guide:

Runestone is a special place to relax and enjoy the sights and sounds of nature. Dance, meditate, or cuddle with a loved-one, visit the quaint cottages, or explore the garden with its waterfalls, rope-swings, and hidden pirate’s cave.

I was much happier with these photos which include me, but still show off the lovely location. In fact, all I did was crop these pictures.

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I’m not saying I’m going to give up on landscape photography, but until I master it, I’ll just have to keep putting me in my place.