Tag Archives: #beachpeople

Public Privilege

I spend a lot of time on the beach, walking and thinking and taking pictures. In this public space, even in a crowd, I feel a sense of solitude. Wrapped in the sounds of the sea, the wind on my face and the sun on my shoulders I pay attention the rhythms of the earth. I notice the ways the landscape changes, the habits of the seabirds, the movement of the sun and the moon, and the way the tides ebb and flow. No two days are ever the same…and yet this place is always the same.

I also notice the people who come in many shapes and sizes. I notice that they are more the same than different, looking like the people who live in my neighborhood and attend the school where I work. Of course there are visitors, vacationing along the shore…and the ever present #beachpeople who constantly interest, inform, and surprise me with all the things they do at the beach.

In this place, people shower in public,

play in public,

hangout in public,

and learn in public.

And with my camera in my hand, most people pay little attention to me even while I pay a lot of attention to them.

After all, this is a public place. Everyone is welcome. Or are they?

Sometimes I wonder about the gulls, often looked upon as pests. I’ve heard them called “rats,” a nod to their role as scavengers…and maybe to their highly adaptable behavior.

But who else is not welcome here? I notice patrols on the beach, mostly lifeguards but sometimes sheriffs in their vehicles cruise the beach. Are they keeping beachgoers safe or looking for troublemakers? Do those mean the same thing?

And where does public end and private begin? At the no trespassing sign?

What does my privilege allow me to see? And what does it blind me to?

So much to consider as I walk this beach…

Weekly Photo Challenge: #Make Art

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Some days finding a photo to take and post is a challenge. Most of the photos I take are “found”–meaning that I don’t stage them other than moving around to get a better angle or to change the light. I seldom arrange things or stage a shot. But yesterday was different.

First, I was thinking about the idea of re-mediation, a concept being explored in the second make cycle of the CLMOOC. My photo-a-day prompt was shadow…and I had just gotten home from a full day at the Summer Institute. As a break from working on my #beachpeople documentary, I grabbed my camera and headed outside to look for a shadow opportunity. Nothing was grabbing my attention–the shadows I noticed seemed ordinary.

That’s when I decided to pick a dandelion puff. As I looked at it I wondered how I might photograph it in a different way. I thought about blowing on it…but couldn’t figure out how to hold it, blow on it, and photograph it at the same time…and where would I get shadow from that? Instead, I started holding the dandelion out to see how it cast its shadow. I tried the sidewalk, the side of the house, my car mirror, and the shiny paint of my car. I had to work to get the focal length of my lens right so some portion of the shot would be crisp. I took a number of shots.

When I headed back inside to study my work, I noticed some interesting images…but I wondered if I might re-mediate them in some way. I rejected my go-to apps and started to explore some that I seldom use. PicsArt caught my eye–could I transform this experiment into something that looked like art…rather than a photograph? (I do think photos are art–but I was looking for something that looked less like a photo and more like a painting or some other kind of art.)

Here’s what I started with–the original, unedited photo.

And here’s the art I made as I re-mediated the image.

I love the resulting image–the crispness of the near dandelion and the echo from the shadow. I might need to print this one and hang it in my house somewhere!

So, make some art! That might mean playing with some new editing apps, staging the perfect scene, or maybe even catching someone else making art like I did on today’s beachwalk! (Love catching #beachpeople in action!)

You can post your photo alone or along with some words: commentary, a story, a poem…maybe even a song! I love to study the photographs that others’ take and think about how I can use a technique, an angle, or their inspiration to try something new in my own photography. (I love a great mentor text…or mentor photo, in this case!)

I share my photography and writing on social media. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter using @kd0602. If you share your photos and writing on social media too, please let me know so I can follow and see what you are doing. To help our Weekly Photo community find each other, use the hashtag #makeart for this week and include @nwpianthology in your post.

So grab your camera and make some art! You make the rules…and feel free to re-mediate and let your imagination run wild!

#beachpeople: a documentary

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As I have worked to grow and stretch with my photography over the last few years, I discovered a genre of photography called street photography. The idea is to document the people and activity on the street. I haven’t studied much, but it seems that this photography comes out of cities…places where activity on the street is common, especially if you are paying attention.

This is a harder kind of photography for me, my natural inclination is to pay attention to nature and scenes rather than people and their activity. It’s also about feeling intrusive, taking pictures of people instead of things. I’ve read that many street photographers talk to their subjects and ask permission to take photos of them. And this makes sense to me…but also takes away some of the candid nature of capturing the action in the moment.

So, I have been exploring this idea of street photography on my own terms, in my own place. I started to capture interesting moments and interesting people on my beachwalks and hashtagging those photos with #beachpeople. I love the variety of #beachpeople I come across. They are interesting and diverse. Some are obviously tourists visiting from other places–across the county and across the world. And some are natives, the beach is their place.

As this week’s make cycle in the CLMOOC comes to an end, I’ve been considering what the idea of re-mediation means for me…and what my make might be. And I started thinking about this collection of #beachpeople images. I decided to I would take these still images and create a documentary-of-sorts.

That took some doing. I considered using animoto and just tossing my photos in and letting animoto do the work. But I felt constrained by the 30 second free movie and the lack of editorial control. So I decided on iMovie–I’ve fiddled with it before (here and here)…but that also meant if I didn’t want to use the overly familiar iMovie music, I would have to figure out how to access open source music. I found this track called Folka Dot Tie by Mr Crispy–The Rat Room that created the sort of mood I was looking for and went to work.

As the mother of a filmmaker, I know what I want things to look like…but not necessarily how to do those things myself. I did discover some options that I didn’t know about as I positioned the photos and got them to move. And after spending hours getting to this point, I’m going to let this be good enough for now. I hope this re-mediation captures the variety and character of this small subset of #beachpeople, documenting just a few of the many reasons I treasure my beachwalks…and enjoy viewing the world through my lens.

I’d love to know what you think when you take a peek at my #beachpeople