"Abounding Images: An invitation to Imagery Power: Photography for Writers" 🎉📸

So pleased that my article was published today as a Women on Writing Spotlight article. Check out the prompt I share as well:

“Abounding Images: An Invitation to Imagery Power: Photography for Writers”

By Melanie Faith

 

                I found three rolls of brand-new film in a drawer earlier this week that I’d forgotten I’d purchased. It felt a little bit like unwrapping a Christmas gift to myself. Eager to head into the great weather, I took my ‘90s Canon Rebel outside for a few nature shots. The heft of the camera body nestled in my hands just right. Working with a physical, clicky dial to blur the background and focus on the foreground was like stepping back into a favorite pair of blue jeans—comforting and the perfect fit. Need I say that I took the rest of the roll and returned to my desk, smiling?

                I’ve also been taking a lot of photos with my cellphone camera and find it a wonderful photographic experience, too. It is featherweight, and I can take as many pictures as I please. Cellphone cameras have come a very long way in the past ten years. Smart phones are equipped today with much better software and make sharper photographs than any of my first digital cameras. And they’re quite easy to use, and super handy. Rare is the person without a phone as a near-constant companion, which (of course) makes them absolutely the best for capturing inconspicuously as we go about our daily lives. And sharing cellphone photos is so easy it’s a dream.

                Whether you prefer making photos with an old-school film camera that takes film or film cartridges, taking pictures with your cellphone, or a combination of both, there’s something meaningful and meditative about the art of photography. Much like the craft of writing, we begin to see our surroundings, our daily lives, and even ourselves a bit differently, a bit better in some ways, by taking the time to focus on elements we might previously zip past on our way to the rest of our appointments and to-do lists. The fact that no two people see the same images in the same way nor interpret them in the same way enhances our development as artists.

                Making a photograph, like making a poem or a short story or a song or a chapter in a novel or an essay, is deeply personal. We have so many options that it’s exhilarating. We get to choose the subject. We get to choose the angle we take the image from. We get to choose the crop or zoom of the photo. We get to choose if we print the photo to make it a physical object in the world or if we keep it a digital file. We get to choose if we make the photo part of a series on a subject or if the photo is a one-off and stands alone. We get to choose light source and time of day and if we scan or upload the photo to software to alter its hues (hello, black and white!) or shoot in black and white mode or with b & w film.  

                It is in making these choices, often intuitively and in quick succession and very frequently learning and experimenting as we go, that we grow in other art forms as well.

Thinking about making a better photograph certainly continues to influence and encourage my poetry as well as my prose. Photography, much like writing and other art forms, focuses on the importance of the image, the resonance of created expression, and the great fun and challenge when we take the world as we experience it and offer a new creation that very likely will connect with other people who themselves make writing and other art.

                There’s no prerequisite needed, and I’ve had students who made visceral, beautiful, jaw-dropping photos from disposable cameras, phone cameras, underwater cameras, instant cameras, pinhole cameras, film cameras of many makes, and even from photosensitive photographic paper.

The field of photography is wide open to individual interpretation and vision. Begin where you are, with that little “Hmmm, that’s interesting” when you’re out on a morning walk, and see where it takes you. One snap, one click, one moment documented at a time.

 

Try this prompt: Make a photo today of an object someone else uses every day. Aim to show a special quality about this object—whether its shape, its size, its hue, its placement in the home or outside, or some other quality. After taking the photo, either write a few sentences describing this object, why you chose it, and who uses it OR create a character who uses this object and write about that character for fifteen or twenty minutes. What would happen if the character reached for the object and it was missing? Go!

  ***

 

The Power of Simple Joy, Camera Doodle, and Photography for Writers📸

This afternoon, I’ve given myself a few hours to rest. I started with some reading, some writing, then an afternoon nap, then some doodling, and now this post.

May has been bouncy and active in a good way, and it’s always refreshing to work in little pauses whenever possible for the simple power of joy—you know, those hobbies or spaces of free time that are the first to get shoved aside in a busy schedule.

Photography is certainly one of my places of simple joy. So is doodling, so I combined them and worked on this perfectly imperfect doodle of one of my film cameras, the Canon Rebel K2 I got for a song in 2019 or 2020 online.

This summer, starting July 3rd, I’ll teach one of my favorite online courses, Imagery Power: Photography for Writers. Just looking at this camera reminds me of the creative fun that awaits in the class—in which students are free to use any kind of camera (or a mixture of cameras) they fancy, from cellphone cameras to digital cameras to disposal cameras to photosensitive paper, to make their own photographic images and then write about them.

I’ll use this handy-dandy book, Photography for Writers, that I wrote as a class text and also have just written some new prompts that’ll be fun to take for a test spin. Teaching the class also inspires my own photographic process, and I’ll be doing the assignments alongside my students.

Have some time this summer? Care to tap into some simple photographic joy? No previous photography experience necessary. I’d love to work with you and a friend. Sign-ups currently open! More details: Imagery Power Clickety-Click.

As we think about summer, the time is perfect to pause and think about how to work in a little more time here and there, a little more time this week or as soon as possible, for these little pauses that bring you joy. To summer and much happiness ahead!

***

If you’re looking for an online class to jumpstart your creativity later in the year, I also have these two courses coming up:

An Insider’s Look at Launching as a Freelance Editor (NEW!) One-Day Webinar, September 15, 2023, 1-2 pm

Food Writing for Fun and Profit (starts October 6, 2023, 5-week class; sign-ups open)

New Notebook, New Season, New Doodle📝

Starting a new notebook—this little 5 x 7 beauty was a whole $1.25—is always a good feeling for me. Potentiality on each page. I’ve been experimenting with different types and sizes of paper for my doodles.

Last night, right before sleep, I broke out my new notebook, my 0.7 mm lead pencil, and my colored pencils and made an outlined sketch of a photographer. It was a peaceful, simmering hour as I drew a preliminary/reference sketch on scrap paper, opened the second page of the notebook (I often skip the first, as it sits a bit askew in the binding), and then started this drawing.

Filling in the figure was a particularly pleasant part of the process as well—colored pencils force a kind of quiet contemplation and over-and-over-and-over patience that slows my thinking and flashes me back to childhood hours quietly coloring or writing.

It’s probably not surprising that I would choose to draw a photographer in motion. One of my other happy places is photography (a few years ago, I wrote a book that combined my writing with my photography practice and tips, Photography for Writers).

Much like when writing, when I’m behind the lens, the daily drops away. I like the challenge of making what I see and how I see it into a composition. I like that it’s not an easy process nor a process I can take for granted or even a process that I fully steer, but that there are many do-overs available—as many as I have time and inclination to make.

Mostly, photography is a place of rare transcendence where the world slows and I make my thinking and my seeing into something at once me and not me. It’s a good space.

This is my first go-’round with sketching what I’m calling a silhouette portrait. Kindly ignore the erased shoulder and erased original feet, which I only realized after pondering them were pointing in the wrong direction from her body’s stance along with the smudge at the bottom of the page by the date. We’ll just call those markers of authenticity.😁

I have to say, though: I was a little surprised that one or two elements of this drawing felt to me like what it feels when I’m behind my camera: a liminal in-between space that just is what it is and unfolds as it should (if, frequently, not as I would have originally imagined).

Or maybe this is just my fancy-pants way of saying I couldn’t believe it actually sort of resembles a human and not a stick figure. 😆

The little notebook says “Plan” on the cover, but as we know, there are many things we simply cannot plan. Mostly, we can move, slowly, in a slightly new direction and see what happens, and then repeat the process as the happening unfolds. Drawings, photographs, writing, ourselves—all unfolding.

"3 Ways Writing and the Visual Arts Inspire Each Other" 🖊📓📸

Thrilled that my craft article, “3 Ways Writing and the Visual Arts Inspire Each Other,” was featured today through Women on Writing. [Article below.]

Also check out my July-August online Imagery Power: Photography for Writers class that starts Friday, July 16th. Sign-ups open for a limited time! I’d love to work with you and your creative friends. 🙌📸📕

“3 Ways Writing and the Visual Arts Inspire Each Other”

By Melanie Faith

 

            Over the years as a writing teacher, I’ve discovered that many of my talented writing students are also visual artists.  From fellow photographers to sculptors, painters, and collage artists, there’s something about the skills used to write vivid imagery and/or scenes that also translate well into other art forms, and vice versa.

            So, what can a writer learn from photography (or another visual art) that will enhance their prose or poetry projects?

 

·         Focusing on bite-sized portions create resonance.  When you write a scene, chapter, stanza, or paragraph, there’s a format you have in mind—after all, a single chapter or poem can’t last forever. Just as you can’t include everything into a single scene or chapter or poem, you can’t include everything in visual art. A visual artist focuses on parts of a scene for a landscape photograph or painting; it has to stop somewhere. As writers, we make decisions, especially in later drafts, about both what details are extraneous to the whole as well as details or images that must remain to create a unified whole that speaks to a reader’s/viewer’s own experience.

 

One of the many definitions for “resonance” at Dictionary.com, states: “The ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions,” while Merriam-Webster.com defines the term as “a quality of richness or variety” and “a quality of evoking response.” Ultimately, in both writing and visual arts, this is exactly what we want: layers of meaning from the writer/artist that are interesting and hook the reader/viewer so much that the imagery presented stirs their own emotions just experiencing our art.

 

Made with my ‘90s Canon and Kodak Gold 200 film: “Curlicue L3.” 📸✨

Made with my ‘90s Canon and Kodak Gold 200 film: “Curlicue L3.” 📸✨

That’s one of the great joys of reading, writing, and making art: the more specific and focused our own works are, the more others will click with the work and want to spend time with it. Creating bite-sized portions of art informs, entertains, and captures the human need to be understood. What could be better than that?

 

·         Layer it up: the more meaning the merrier! In an essay or poem or novel, no matter what the theme is, there’s more going on in the writing than just a sentence-or-two synopsis of what literally happens or what its main idea is. Reaching into the grab bag of literary analytical terms, there might be one or several concurrent elements that contribute to make a scene, chapter, poem, or visual arts piece seem so real-to-life, including but not limited to: symbolism, auditory or taste or visual imagery, synecdoche, metonymy, juxtaposition, simile, and/or metaphor, and more. Below the immediate level of what the work is “about” literally, the deeper, gooier, more subterranean meanings reside and represent where the creator does some of their best work.

 

Working subtly to show something deeper about human life beyond the immediately obvious—indeed, the word crafting is splendidly apt here—writers and artists work emblematic representations of ideas, emotions, and conflicts into their work to deepen and connect with reader/viewer experience. Real-life ain’t easy or simplistic, so our writing and art better not be either—there should be more-than-meets-the-eye occurring concurrently with the easier-to-spot initial image or dialogue.

 

As writers/artists, we shape and sculpt ideas so that they are both what they appear to be and also much more than they at first suggest. That kind of composing requires both literal and figurative decisions that make the utmost of each word, each line, each paragraph/stanza, each page, or each canvas, digital chip/pixel, and/or paint.

 

·         Both writers and visual artists actively compose reality. That is, we consider how parts of a whole interact with each other, we leave in necessary imagery and crop out unnecessary or cluttering details, we omit and/or change the pace of reality by slowing down/zeroing in focus on some elements so that others fade into the background, and more.

 

The element of careful and mindful composition is somewhat subconscious (at first draft, before editing, anyway), and it’s also where a lot of the plain fun of being a writer or artist occurs in the conscious stages of making.

 

Some subjects, themes, and ideas we might be innately drawn to, such as trains, but the majority of our work revolves around recurring ideas or symbols from an array of life experiences that seem to recur, both in our lives and later in our work—to take the train example further: the artist’s father might have been a 9-5 commuter for many years and so the recurrence of trains in the artist’s work may suggest a whole host of ideas from family responsibility related to jobs, feelings of missing a parental figure, to what it means to live in the suburbs but work in a city, and more.

 

Writing and the visual arts integrate many decisions at both the conscious and subconscious level of creation: exciting and complex composition that continues to inspire, mystify, challenge, and motivate our work from the first experiments in each medium through all of the works we produce and share.      

 

Clearly, writing and the visual arts are meaningful, rich explorations into self-discovery and also important genres for commenting on and sharing ideas about the complexity of human experience.  One art form—writing—can inform and inspire growth in visual arts as we reach to become better self-expressing writers and insightful communicators to a wider audience.

❄Featured in Snowflakes in a Blizzard ❄

Author Photo with Photog for Writers Book 9-19-19.jpg

Pleased to share that my craft book, Photography for Writers, is featured this week in Snowflakes in a Blizzard, a wonderful book blog.

Learn more about the blog as well as check out their other great featured books here and here.

Book Ad Photog for Writers for Insta post 1-28-21.png

✨ "3 Suggestions on a Saturday Night" ✨

I have the pleasure of guest blogging today at Nicole Pyles’ wonderful blog, World of my Imagination.

Check out my “3 Suggestions on a Saturday Night” for some literary, movie, and audio amusements.

Book Ad Fourth Page Color 5-20 Photography For Writers 3.125 x 4.625 1_4 page ad - color.jpg