Curiosity

Integrity, honesty, confidence and dedication are all great qualities. However, it’s curiosity that I feel is the most important quality for an artist. What if -- ? That question alone will take you so many different directions. It’s curiosity that leads to learning something new. It leads to discovery and growth. It leads me to my creative universe. Without curiosity, I wouldn’t push so hard. I wouldn’t question what I’m doing or analyze the world around me.

Olivia

I remember long ago, sitting in the kitchen when I was about 8 years old. My dad was taking apart a cardboard box that some product he had bought came in.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

“I’m taking it apart to see how it was made,” he said.

“Why?” I asked.

He looked puzzled at me and said, “Aren’t you curious about how stuff is made?” I really hadn’t thought about it before. I wasn’t really conscious of my curiosity.

Sequence Poster

Now I look at a photo and analyze the lighting and the composition. I take it apart and look at how it was made. For a visual person, reverse engineering is a wonderful way to learn something new or take your work in a new direction. I look at inspirational images and wonder, how did they do that? How can I apply this to my work?

Star Trails

I love it when I get bored. I start to look for things to take apart and see how they are made. Sometimes it leads me to new places. Sometimes I end up at the same place but with a better understanding and a new point of view.

Learning

Much of my time away from teaching has been spent learning new techniques and how to do my usual imaging tasks better, smarter and faster. Some of the things I have been doing have taken me out of my comfort zone. I’m quite comfortable photographing a landscape. It’s kind of like breathing at this point. I still enjoy it, love it in fact, but the learning curve is starting to flatten out a bit. Working in the studio pushes me to learn new tricks. I started doing some work for a Photoshop course I’m redesigning. The first stage of this process started with water.

Splashing Water

Using a Canon 580 EX II flash and a set of pocket wizards, I was able to freeze water drops. Setting the flash to 1/16th power and bouncing it off a white backdrop froze the motion and gave good contrast.

From there I started dropping things into water.

Strawberry Splash

After several days of working with a large beer glass, I bought a 10-gallon fish tank. The lighting set up was much different for the tank. Through trial and error and a lot of zip lock bags to cover my equipment, I came up with images like this:

Splashing Peppers

I ended up with several, what I call “Kitchen Posters”. Here are a couple of samples:

Sequence Poster

Tomatoes Poster

My next project is whisky. Shoot first, drink later has always been my motto...

Bourbon Bottle