Image One of 52

“Life is about accepting the challenges along the way, choosing to keep moving forward, and savoring the journey.”
― Roy T. Bennett

I have spent much of my free time in the past ten years traveling in order to photograph.  Life events have me staying closer to home.  This has led me to thinking of ways to continue to explore my passion of photography in different ways.

One of the things I decided to delve into

is control of artificial lighting.  I have been interested in artificial lighting for photography for years, but have not made much progress in this area.

Many photographers choose to do a 365 project at the beginning of a new year in which they take one picture a day each day of that year.  This seems to be too much for me to take on at this time.

I have been intrigued by and have followed a community called 52 Frames for a couple of  years now.  Participants in this community are given a challenge each week to photograph.  I decided this would be a wonderful way to keep me photographing on a regular basis.

For the first week, our challenge was to create a self-portrait.

I wanted to explore using flash to create my self-portrait.  I dug out the Pocket Wizards that I have had for years but never used and my flash that has had extremely little use. I figured out how to create the base image for this composite by putting myself between my camera and the flash.

During the holiday break, I spent several days looking at old family photographs with my mother.  In the large box of photographs we looked through, we even found tintypes of my great, great grandparents.  Sharing these pictures and stories was so incredibly special.

When creating my self-image, I wanted to incorporate this experience.  I added an image of my grandparents to my self-portrait.

I look forward to further exploration and learning as I work on the challenge for this week.