Then we had a bit of a round table with each attendee describing their initial thoughts. One wanted to start a project photographing bridges, one a particular chapel, another a series of images using Hopper's Nighthawks as inspiration. Most of the other attendees, including me, were somewhat more vague, but as Brian said this was decision time.
Something I have done in the past few months that I got a lot of pleasure from was visiting examples of the old (photographic) masters and seeing if I could reproduce something similar.
For example, the following shot was taken after being inspired by Steichen's 'The Pond - Moonlight':
1/160 sec @ f10, ISO 200, 24mm, Canon 5DThe interesting thing was that I only half remembered the original image. So my rendition doesn't have a pond in it (!), and it is in straight B&W, whereas the original had some rather dark sumptuous colours, possibly caused by the gum-bichromate printing technique that he used. One other minor point is that this is a setting sun rather than a moon :-)
Another attempt is blogged here and here.
I might extend this idea into a full project. Pro and cons:
- It puts me in touch with what has gone before and having that sense of history seems important to me at the moment
- My appreciation of the images I choose intensifies markedly as I work them over and attempt to analyse them
- I learn a lot about my craft as I do the exercise
- Will there be a problem with copyright if I display the source images together with my own? I will probably have to scan them from books?
- There is a danger that it is creatively sterile, it is, by definition, derivative
