Category: Blank Space

Frozen shoulders at work. Part 2 on photographing food in a small kitchen with kids around and pain that stays.

When children scream for sweets during the weekend, my husband occasionally makes them small biscuits (biscotti) without following any particular recipe except for obeying one rule and that is no white of egg as our son cannot tolerate it. When egg whites accumulate something needs to be done with them and when the sweet tooth screams the loudest, the temptation wins. We know that one day we will eliminate the sugar totally out of our family life, but last Sunday was not the day for it. I must admit I have a bit of a soft spot for meringues as they remind me of the time when the supermarkets were not common in Poland but hens on everyone’s yards were and instead of buying wrapped chocolate bars, mums and aunties would make meringues (bezy) as a treat. The Polish version was a bit smaller than those on the photos and more golden but I guess they were equally sweet and I must say I am a bit sentimental about this treat as much as I understand that it is most likely the last thing you should eat when you’re dealing with any sort of inflammation. But I am not here to preach but to teach and to share a few tips on how to make your life easy when photographing food while suffering from frozen shoulders or similarly painful conditions.

Last week I wrote about the use of the bottom drawer for set-ups to prevent having to lift your camera too high and to protect the set up from children running through the kitchen. This week I want to tackle a different obstacle, i.e. the weight of surfaces on which we photograph and their ease of moving and lifting.

Photographers are usually extremely grateful people. I have observed these creative minds for quite a while now and I learnt from them that sometimes the smallest tip changes the outcome of one’s practice for the better and for years and so I have learnt not to dismiss the value of the tiniest improvement I make for myself because small moves matter to our bones and joints as much as to our compositions and final images.

So the first simple tip today is: to avoid excessive weight lifting, appreciate flimsy things, the washing basket that you probably thought would not hold too much weight, the flower pot stand made of willow or the just delivered item in a box made of card. You can shuffle these around your kitchen with ease and you can then move them when the light changes during the day.

The second tip is: use light wood or light canvases as surfaces to photograph your food on. Canvases can be super thin and easy to lift but they are not as light as paper and so they hold food on them quite well. You can lift the canvas with your hand up and down easily to create the shadows that you want around your food. This is significant especially if as a maturing photographer you are already caring for your triangles in the composition. In the photos below I was purposefully creating triangles either with my arrangements or with the shadows. I was lifting the colourful canvas towards the light in such a way that the triangle was not only on the designed surface but also was dropped by the meringues giving the photos interesting look that created a bit of visual tension too – as what the drawn triangle on the surface was pointing to the right and the shadows dropped by the meringues to the left.

The additional benefits of using canvases are that you can leave them unpainted or you can create interesting patterns, textures or designs on top of them to give your photos extra interest and individuality. I used one of my paintings here that I textured with wax, a plain white canvas, and a different playful design piece that I did a couple of years ago after getting interested in abstract art and learning from Joy Fahey and Kasia Krecicka. Great abstract artists.

The last tip is: keep your strap around your neck. If you are in as much pain as I was last week, you are most likely not capable of holding your camera for too long. Let the strap take the weight and position your body against a cooker or a door to let those items support you if you photographing while standing.

My capacity in my hands is increasing but I learnt my lesson and I am not trying to take more than I can handle. I hope you are embracing creative life with all that you have.

Above are my photographic results. Enjoy your visual treats. :)

p.s. If you click on each individual photo, they will appear in full view. I dropped my ring light the other day and need to rearrange the diffusing cover. I have included the backstage photo as is so that you can see how close sometimes the food needs to be to the light source to drop the desired shadow.

Just a second

‘Just a second. I don’t want to throw them away yet.’ I remarked to my husband while we were cleaning the kitchen and reorganizing it to accommodate my functioning with two frozen shoulders. The plates and cups moved out of cupboards to lower surfaces and the pots now are within reach for hands that somehow it seems became shorter in the space of just few months. I had my grip measured today by the physiotherapist and while his grip was as strong as 56kg, mine was as much as a round 0 so I’m cooking in lighter pots now and I’m trying to surround myself with soft and delicate objects to touch, wrap myself in and sleep on too. I notice that soft fabrics ease the pain immensely as I suppose the nervous system is running this show as much as the joints, muscles and bones.

My camera work has taken a back seat for a moment. I am quite frightened of the camera’s weight and the repercussions of holding it for too long and too high but nothing is ever lost for the stubborn-hearted, right? I am using the time to make some sensible rearrangements that support creative with restricted hand movements. I’ll write a few posts on this soon. It is tough. I’ll be honest. Very tough at times and I’m cursing and crying sometimes at once and of course I fail not to mention the word ’embittered’ too many times to my friends while describing my moods. But then, I remind myself that I still have my index finger working quite well and, you know, photographers do not blame people, God or circumstances, they use this finger in different ways. So I remind myself to live by the standards of the profession and to search for the light. :)

Writing is taking me to various places at the moment. I have been trying to voice difficult thoughts to myself sensibly before I share them with others. Inner-dialogues have got this ability to get very complicated if left untreated, don’t you think?

My son has just started his secondary school and it pleases me to see him searching for his literary voice and that he is indeed enjoying his English homework. There is something about working with a dictionary that gives us rest and reassurance. All of a sudden everything has a meaning..

How have you been lately?

Personal ‘wows’

I have been working with a borrowed macro lens this week that is going back to its owner soon. Hence this abundance in macro photography here. I’m enjoying it more than I expected and it pleases me to play with different forms and styles. I see great limitations to my craft here though – on the macro front – and great possibilities at the same time for dreamy illustrative work and wall art.

This exercise, as usually, is prompting a few conversations in my head about personal ‘wows’ that perhaps are more derailing than demanding. But then.. a long time ago I complained about my inability to deal with disappointments in the process of creation so I’m on a mission again.. of finding balance and an honest appraisal of my skills.

And as always, I think about consumerism and in this case about borrowing things.. or rather having to return things quickly. I’ll be honest. I do not like borrowing things – mainly because my children destroy things and then I end up paying for them anyway as I do not like returning items with scribbles on, dolls with hair-cuts, broken lenses.. you get the gist. Well… in this case… the lens needs to be returned soon and I am trying to be very careful and what I have noticed that out of this borrowing creative abundance flows and it makes me happy. I even wonder if I should be borrowing pens.. would I write more then as long as the pen has a return date on. 🙂

How have you been lately?

May be an image of scorpion grass and nature

15 s

Worth the effort?

While the Internet is flooding with messages of growth, renewal and resurrection, we are not there yet… really. We are still in darkness and we think that we will remain in it. Despite the promise, there is no certainty. Anticipation only, perhaps, on the shoulders of those who have never lost hope…

‘Why not to die on the cross for others?’ Jesus said not to Himself. But he did it. Because someone else said so.

He thought it was worth the effort. Do we?

Waste to Art: Guest Post on Laudato Si Blog

Yesterday, I was privileged to contribute my post to Laudato Si blog that is full of great green tips and explores the Christian calling to care for our common home.

Here is an extract to the blog post. Link to the full text below.

A long time ago, inspired by a blogger from Australia, Sash Milne, I started a Nothing New Project, i.e. I tried not to buy anything new for a year, to decrease waste and increase living. While back then I felt quite virtuous about living that way, there was nothing too virtuous about the way I live now, as if back then I stretched myself too far and snapped like a bandana that children get for the Remembrance Day in the UK. When you do a project like that, that forces you to reduce your buying and question every moment when you open your wallet and reach for a coin not out of poverty but out of restraint, you either learn to love yourself as you are, without the gadgets and extra consumption and you learn to live differently or you feel somewhat destabilized because you locked yourself out of participation in the prevailing culture, i.e. the culture of consumerism. Oh, and one more thing, you can also develop the maturity to make yourself accountable for the trail of waste that falls behind you but, in all honesty, this wasn’t the learning outcome that I have satisfactorily reached and consolidated. To consistently swim against the current, you have to decide to consistently swim against the current and that is hard.
What the Nothing New project showed me is that I by and large go through life inattentively, to the shouts of waste that brutally lurk in the shadows of my life or blatantly ‘shine’ on display in my house – as if the psyche couldn’t quite handle the tension between wanting more and needing less. I go through life with an ecological heart that is neither pure nor faithful to the principles of ecological teaching, but I still have hope for myself and the humanity – that we will make progress. Read more..