window to the soul
bonjour mes amis, ca va? i hope that winter has passed, your windows are flung open and spring has sprung! i found this image on pinterest and i should have know it was captured by the one and only Georgianna Lane! she is pure genius. well, her photo hit me hard enough to come to the blog. it’s been a while and i know you know that it’s impossible to write unless we’re truly inspired. so what was it about this pic that called me to sit down in the middle of a busy day and check in? why is this photo so special when to some it’s just an average window like hundreds of others…but to others it’s magical? well for me, besides it being in paris and evocative of so many romantic thoughts, it’s plain, and hopeful. the simple experience of an open window. the brightness feels like fresh cool air and at the same time the beaming sun is warming the chevron floors. we can actually feel the smooth wood beneath the soles (souls)! of our feet. it’s the exquisite perfection of a shadow from an intricately turned metal, transformed into art. the light through it creates a world of fibonacci spiraling, art noveau, twisted iron that speaks volumes as it silently secures the window. it’s probably been there, leaned on hundreds of times for a hundred years as the inhabitants checked the weather and felt the sun on their faces before the day began or closed it up tight against the rain and cold. maybe there were even days that suitors stood below and swooned to their would-be love. the curve at the top of the frame indicates that this is a very special portal, maybe on a particularly ornate building, maybe even one that’s still intact and preserved and revered as a treasured, special paris apartment. today i’m thinking about the sweetness of the simple things in life, and how beauty and inspiration can be found in even the smallest of everyday objects and rituals. have a beautiful, sun filled day!
a white night
hi all, happy tuesday night. it seems by the time i get here it’s pretty late and tonight is no exception. i’m gonna make this short and sweet. it was a dreary day and although i ran around a lot, am not sure much was accomplished. then again, who’s to say what’s an accomplishment as long as there was progress, right?
real quick before we get going, wanted to announce the winner from the other day with the christian lacroix journal and it is…Paige!
please email me at theparisapartment@gmail.com with your address and i’ll send it out tomorrow.
i’ve been procrastinating photographing some of my pieces cause it’s a lot of work to shoot, edit, upload, crop, colorize, measure, describe and post items to my website as well as some of the other portals i sell with. to make the process more bearable, i started to break it down to digestible bites. now instead of doing it all at once, i shot in the afternoon so i can edit while i’m relaxing and watching tv. this small change took away a lot of the stress of feeling like not much was getting done since there is so much involved with each and every piece.
i shot a collection of japanese goddesses that have been waiting patiently to go up on my website. i like the clean look of having white backgrounds and there are lots of techniques and tricks to getting images to pop. the one above is not perfect, in fact she needs work (the lights are reflecting on her forehead, the bottom still has shadows and is not completely white)…but below is a quick overview of how i shoot and try to get the background to recede. there are other videos and articles below to check out if you want to go deeper but this is my method:
pixelz.com/blog/photograph-white-products-on-white-backgrounds-ecommerce
pixelz.com/blog/high-key-photography-white-products-on-white-backgrounds-part-ii
insimoneskitchen.com/food-photography-white-whiter-whitest
anyway, that’s what’s up for today. if i was really on top of it i’d spend the next hour working on the pics i took but think i’ll call it a night instead and do something radical like…read! my friend dayle sent me a book i’ve been dying to dive into so, until tomorrow, sweet, pure white dreams!
it’s all luck
“It is an illusion that photos are made with the camera…they are made with the eye, heart and head.”
hi dear friends, i hope you’re having a lovely sunday. it’s been ridiculously long since i’ve been able to get to the blog and reading someone else’s actually inspired me to sit and put this one together. do you know soli kanani? she takes wonderful photos of her travels. in one of her recent posts she wrote about visiting the pompidou center in paris to check out the henri cartier-bresson exhibition. as an apsiring photographer his quotes really moved me and i wanted to share them. it’s very easy for us to get caught up in the snap happy world of our phones and hope we get the right image after 5-6 tries. maybe there’s more to it. or less…
“You just have to live and life will give you pictures.”
“Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera.”
“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.”
“A photograph is neither taken or seized by force. It offers itself up. It is the photo that takes you. One must not take photos.”
“Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever attentive eye which captures the moment and its eternity.”
“We must avoid however, snapping away, shooting quickly and without thought, overloading ourselves with unnecessary images that clutter our memory and diminish the clarity of the whole.”
“Reality offers us such wealth that we must cut some of it out on the spot, simplify. The question is, do we always cut out what we should?”
“Of course it’s all luck.”
wikipedia: Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004)
well i’m off to make the most of the rest of the weekend, have a beautiful afternoon, evening, dusk, twilight and night!
the paris apartment 