Starting off with my PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE WEEK, I really recommend checking out this website, everyone: photographyserved.com. I have found some excellent photographers, that would otherwise be unknown to me, if it hadn't been my sister who introduced this website to my incredibly eager eyes. A photographer I found for this week is Vladimir Kukorenchuk, a Ukrainian man who captures the essence of eastern Europe vividly. A collection I found of his work (on the website listed above), was centered around "old age" in Ukraine. You see your typical Babushka wearing Bubushka (I know that sounds redundant, but Babushka means both "grandmother" and "scarf" in Russian haha), intertwined with older folk men, and the grisley, cold feel of the lonleyness of old age. It looks like he only works in film, at least for this one series of photographs, but in both black and white and color.
Now, As for my 10 RULES FOR TAKING A PHOTOGRAPH:
1) I always go with rule of thirds, or at least, try to. I like the "classically trained" aspect of it.
2) I tend to shoot a little darker, meaning, I tend to have a smaller aperture or a faster shutter speed. I'm a fan of darker photographs, possibly because they're more mysterious, and more my own.
3)I like subject matter a whole lot. I am not a fan of most abstract photography. If I can shoot a building with a person in front of it, versus a building without a person, I will 99% of the time, go with a subject matter in my image.
4) I will always go for real life people versus posed people.
5) Big fan of wide angle, and capturing the whole landscape.
6) I don't photograph sculptures or art that others have made. I feel like it's almost some sort of plagerism.
7) Street photography and landscape photography > everything else.
8) Never macro. ever. Nobody cares about the detail of a combination lock. Really.
9) I now always change my white balance. ALWAYS. no excuses.
10) I'm patient when it comes to nature photography. I will wait for that fog to come across the meadow. I will wait for that deer to look me straight in lens. I will wait for the sky to change and unfold. I will wait.
Lastly, THE PHOTOGRAPH i AM AFRAID TO TAKE.
It's difficult so take this photograph, on account that I haven't the means to travel, really. I need travel to take a photograph. I get too eager to move on and see more, instead of really focus on one place for a long period of time. However, the photograph that I see myself wanting to take (I guess more in the future, however) more than anything else, has to do with poverty. I have never lived in poverty and of course, hope to never. Both my parents have lived in a poverty-ridden household or country. My mother is from El Salvador, where even still, civil war is not completely over, even though it'd been going on since the late 1970s. She has seen poverty, and the ill, and the dead. She has experienced poverty, when she didn't know when the next meal was coming from, or when an awful earthquake in the early 70s happened to destroy her entire home, leaving her and her family homeless for god knows how long. My father grew up in Rye, New York, which is technically a wealthy little town, 30 minutes above Manhattan. But he grew up poor. He grew up unpriviledged financially, and had to move out of his own house, and was living on his own, by the age of 16, just because his mother could no longer support him and herself. I want to see poverty. I cannot become sympathetic with my parents entirely, when I have not witnessed these things myself. The poverty I have witnessed has been only that of homeless people. But to be engulfed in a country of entire poverty or war-torn destruction is intriguing and heart-wrenching. I need to see these things and process them, so that I may become more hopeful and thankful for myself. I am so incredibly afraid to take a photograph of poverty, because I am afraid that I will shut down and be overly affected by the scenario. But it's something I want to take at the same time. It's difficult to explain. I don't want the aesthetic pleasures; I want the raw and the pure. I want to give a voice to the people who can't seem to get that, for some reason or another.
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