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Originally Posted by alaklondewen
Would you say that photography effects your writing?
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Without doubt. I'll tell a story, if you'll forgive it.
I took only two classes for my third term. It was a six week term and they were intensives. One was creative writing and one was a workshop in which we combined image and writing to make something "even more". I've never had so much fun doing school work.
My final for the writing class was to compose a short story. My final for my other class was to make a book or something else that combines image and word.
I had no idea where to start for each, so I was flipping lazily through some of my favorite pictures and spotted
this image of Lucy. I glanced out the window and realized that the late afternoon light was brilliant. Unwilling to let it go to waste, I dragged a friend with me and we went on a crazed photography adventure that included the art studio, dead trees, and a graveyard that we had to pass many creepy townies to reach (I refrain from calling people creepy until they say or do things that make me nervous... they did, which is why I brought a friend).
In any case, I got some fantastic images like
this one and
this one and while looking through my memory card's contents, I had a stroke of genius that I should combine my final projects into a short story that has something to do with Lucy and a book that illustrates the thematic story. No children's picture book, that; I was fully aware of how dark and creepy both would end up being, but it was so sunny out that I couldn't resist.
After many spontaneous changes, I ended up with a 15 page story and a small hand-made book illustrating Psalm 23.
The whole combined project, the two most important grades of a semester, was of a creepy nature, but ended up with a lovely moral and was inspired almost entirely by one randomly taken image of a skeleton in the drawing studio. Formendacil helped, though he's probably unaware.
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Do you see your posts as images before you write them, like photos readied to be played out?
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I combine image and word in my thought, striving to capture the image as clearly as if I held a camera in my hands with perfect lighting and an unmoving model before me.
That's easy, when you're photographing Lucy or others like her... she doesn't move.
What's more fun is to work in such a way as I would if I was making a movie. With constant characters, it's like having a moving stream of images at the speed of a Sony Handicam's capture rate. You can watch their life stories play out in real time, showing everything that seems important until you have a full story in a series of images, all transitioned beautifully into words and phrases that describe action as well as light and motion ever could.
Cameos are more like a cool indie flick made of stills. You can start with one post: a solid image, and describe it ad nauseum, if that's what you want. Next post can easily be something vastly different, and you continue on with enough transition for clarity and continuity, but without worry over what happens in between. Even if you know it, why put it in? Cameos are more thematic than continuously created.
You can Ken Burns Effect your way in for a closer look once you've started, or you can even introduce your character zoomed in with a description of her startlingly blue eyes, eyes that look out at you as though from worlds away, aware of both you and things beyond your imagination, and you can slowly expand into more of her character: a dreamer, an uncertain wanderer in a land of strangers, seeking for adventure like those her grandfather, now dead, once told to her... afraid to find it, afraid not to; all the same image, just portraying it one piece at a time.
So yes, in short... photography is like a vile disease that makes my writing illness that much more deadly. If I had any sense, I'd drop my crazy shenanigans and get a real job.
