While on the oopoomoo workshop in Trochu last month, we were given a rather challenging assignment/contest to take part in. After getting rained out on our sunrise shoot one morning we were back at the St. Ann Ranch drying out and Darwin proposed the assignment to us as something to work on until the conditions outside improved. The assignment was to make and submit an image that was taken within the building, using only one camera and lens, no tripod, and only in camera processing. It was a great challenge for sure, and we saw a lot of very creative images come from it at the critique session at the end of the weekend. Sam and Darwin are so good at teaching and encouraging you to open up your eyes to what’s around you and to see creatively. It’s certainly an area they’ve challenged me on lately and something I really want to work to improve on in my own photography.

While I was only able to submit one image for the assignment, I did make a few that I thought were worth sharing.

I tried a few different ideas with some of the old heat registers on the walls. I really liked the repetitive lines and patterns in these as well as the texture of the metal.

This old typewriter made for an interesting subject as well:

One of my favourite photos, and the one I submitted for the assignment came from this lamp that was hanging in one of the rooms. This one was made by shooting through the hanging red tassels and focusing on the beads of the pull chain of the lamp. Using a very shallow depth of field with my macro lens, the foreground just turned into this beautiful wash of red. The outline of the tassels on the opposite side can be seen in the background in orange as they are lit up by the light bulb inside the lamp. I left my white balance set to daylight to bring out the really orange colour of the lamp light to work with the red colour of the shade.

This next one was made by shooting up into the same lamp, again using daylight white balance for that orange background behind the beads of the pull chain.

This last one was just a simple capture of the neatly placed napkin inside my wine glass at the table as we waited for breakfast to be served. And no, we weren’t drinking wine with breakfast… the glass was later filled with orange juice.