Month: August 2024

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Photography

Over the years, I have naturally been drawn to landscape photography. I can appreciate others’ facility with city photography, or sports photography, or photojournalism, but I do not have those skills. Nor, frankly, do I have the desire to develop them. On a recent vacation with copious opportunities for great wildlife photos, I realized that I was so focused on composing each image that I was missing the shots that could have been good in post-production if I’d just TAKEN. THE. DAMN. SHOT. I am not, and never will be, the kind of photographer who is in the right spot at the right time and whips their camera out to get that prize-winning image. But that’s also not what appeals to me, so I’m totally OK with that.

Instead, I need to plan. I need to compose my shot, maybe take several with different compositions to see which ones I like better, think about it some more, and then maybe come back when the light is different. I like to revisit the same spots over and over again for a different perspective. In my favorite places, I have shots from different times of year, different angles, different times of day. Acadia National Park is one of my favorite places to visit. In seven trips there over 12 years, I’ve been there in all four seasons. I’ve taken night photography classes there as part of their night sky festival in September. I have my favorite spots along the Park Loop road, which I visit each day I’m there. I go at different times of day, which usually means different parts of the tide cycle. I go in any weather. I don’t plan out where I’ll be each minute of each day, but I know my favorite spots, and I know I want to visit each of them, and there is a vague plan to do that. Repeatedly.

My favorite images are “uncluttered.” Some excellent photography has a lot going on. There’s a focal point in the image, as there always must be for it to be a good shot, but there’s a lot of other stuff in the image to look at, take in, and process. You see something new in it every time you look at it. Not my favorite shots. There is a simplicity to the images that end up taking my breath away when I get them home and really look at them. Take the Crater Lake shot that I used for the quilt above my fireplace as an example. There is a focal point – the tree – and the tree has texture and movement to it. There’s a line that your eye follows when you look at it. But the background is almost absurdly simple. When talking over potential quilting options for that quilt with a long arm quilter, we talked about, but ultimately rejected, the idea of adding texture to that sky. One of the things I like best about that picture is that the sky is pure blue – no clouds, no mist, no sun. Quilting over that, adding unnecessary texture, would have ruined the image for me. 

Fortunately, these types of photographs lend themselves well to my skills as a quilter. I’m never going to be the quilter who produces ridiculously detailed images with itty-bitty pieces of fabric. I don’t have the skills, and I certainly don’t have the patience. I also don’t see the world like that, but I marvel at people who do and just leave them to their own devices when they’re working on their own stuff. I am happy to stay within my own wheelhouse, which is simple without being boring. (Trust me – I have simple photos that are as boring as dishwater.) I want to visualize large swaths of color, with texture or not, and be able to recreate that from digital format to fabric.

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And All of This Leads To…

I was having a conversation with someone about photography earlier this year, and it came out that I don’t really consider myself to be an artist. At the time, I was thinking more about my submissions to an art show co-sponsored by the photography club I’m in. In 2023, I submitted four images to this juried show, and none were selected by the judges to be included. So I began to think about what distinguishes a good photograph from art, if anything. I had submitted some of my favorite photos to the show, and I was rather disappointed that none of them had been chosen at all. 

So it came out in this conversation that I, personally, don’t see myself as an artist. My friend was surprised to hear me say that. From there, a discussion of “what is art?” ensued, and I won’t bore you with the details of it. The conversation – and subsequent internal musings about it – has changed my perception of what it means to be an artist. I’m still not 100% sure I’d classify myself as one, but I saw my friend’s perspective when she pointed out all of the reasons she would put me in that category. And one of those reasons was the quilts that she’d seen me do in the years that she has known me (as well as the photography). And that conversation led me down the internal rabbit hole that has put me on the path to merging my quilting and my photography in a more meaningful way.

So…what does that mean?

In the months since that conversation, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time trying to answer this question. Understanding my limitations as a quilter – I have little patience for small, fiddly bits, and I mostly detest applique, among other things – would it be possible for me to bring my photography into quilting without simply printing my photos onto fabric, like the Crater Lake and national park quilts, and putting a border around them? What are the possibilities?

The ideas that I’ve come up with fit into three general categories:

  • Printing the photo onto fabric, but then doing…something…with it afterward. Current ideas for this include printing the photo in black and white and adding color back in through thread painting, or printing the photo but only using one element of it, while recreating the rest of the image with regular fabric one can buy at the quilt store.
  • Recreating the image with regular quilters cottons from the quilt store. I have a couple of ideas for this, including superimposing an image onto a normal quilt pattern, or just projecting the image onto a wall or tracing it onto paper, which can then be used as a template for creating the image with fabric.
  • Using the image as inspiration for something abstract. This is actually the first idea that I’m attempting to work on – I found a published quilt pattern that mimics an image I wanted to use, and I’ve been a little creative with the colors I’ve used to do so. So far (it’s not quite done yet), I’m pleased, but I’m learning lessons as I go along.

As I mentioned before, I have about 10 quilts that are sloshing around in my head in various planning stages, and I just returned from a two-week vacation with 3200+ more images to play with (one of which has already been printed out on fabric). Fortunately, what appeals to me as a landscape photographer also plays well with the “doesn’t like little fiddly bits” part of me as a quilter – I tend to like the sweeping landscapes with large scale elements that lend themselves well to larger pieces of fabric that don’t take terribly long to put together. So I have lots of options, and I promise I won’t run out of them anytime soon!

The journey ahead promises to be fascinating, both from a learning perspective (this is what I want to do, so now I have to learn how to do it) and a “push Allison completely out of her comfort zone” perspective (watch me be forced to embrace batiks, which I pretty much have refused to work with up to this point in my quilting journey). Either I rise to the challenge, or I end up throwing things through windows – either way, it promises to be fun to watch!