Composition assignment - Jabez Jenkins

I suppose we all come to taking pictures with different motivations.  Mine have always been to capture family moments, and to document my garden.  Still life photography has not entered into my thinking at all.  The CandC Photography assignment on composition has changed all that.  Now I am intrigued by the possibilities.

I started out thinking of Kim Klassen's comment that she was drawn to old things.  My mother was a pack rat, so we have a lot.  I went scrounging around, and set up the first things I came to.  The doll is made of corn husks, dating back to the early 1800s probably.  The wool is homespun, probably a little later.  My mother christened the doll after a Quaker ancestor who sailed around the horn to China.

So -  meet Jabez Jenkins.

Here is Jabez as set up, from the front.

Here is the view from the top - not much to see, except the light and the weave of the homespun.

And here is Jabez full on, showing brilliant blue eyes which  I never noticed before.

I had trouble making my out-of-focus picture look like anything, so went with cropping.

His picture taken at an angle is really one of my two favorites.

My other favorite is this last one, showing Jabez in deep thought under a canopy of homespun.

Thanks to this assignment, I now see Jabez in a new light.  I'm only sorry I didn't have time to borrow a piece of my daughter's  primitive blue and white Canton china, which Jabez brought back from China, to add to the setup.  Next time!

The egg and I

The CandC Photography assignment for us all was to photograph eggs.  EGGS?  It was a challenge, first to find time to go to town and buy a white egg, and then to find ways to make it vaguely interesting.  I discovered that I really enjoy color photography more than black and white, that my creative juices are somewhat pedestrian, and that backgrounds and lighting are everything.  Not too surprising, after all.




 I really had more fun when I began to think of photographing a brown egg.  I tried to find interesting background stuff, and turned up a weight-watcher scale with a translucent plate, producing the following:

Further exploration of the kitchen revealed a another small vase, a large blue vase, and a plate, so all got tried, with varying success.  I really liked using these as stars in the kitchen show, and thought it was fun to see the variation produced ...

but really my favorites were taken outdoors, 

and I snuck in a little photo of the redbud in bloom, just to remind myself that spring seems to be arriving at last!