Hawaii Photographer's 5 Steps to Creating with Abandon

I've met the coolest people on Flickr!  Guest blogger, photographer, teacher and world traveler, Archer Kelly submits this post from her home in Hawaii.  Much aloha, and mahalo, Archer!

Times Square panorama

My Grandmother documented her childhood there as a flapper in the tropics

Photography has always been a part of my life.  My great grandfather was a photographer.  His images from the Spanish American War fascinate me; men in simple white tents, somber-looking, dirty, and torn.

Later in Panama when the canal was being built, my grandmother documented her childhood there as a flapper in the tropics.  The walls of my childhood home here in Hawaii were covered with my mother's paintings which came from photographs that she took and had us all pose for.  There are four photographers in my immediate family and the cupboards of our homes overflow with books and books of our images and our memories.

We "feel" the history of photography

I bring photography to young people, as well as being a photographer myself.  They teach me a lot too.  This is the last year we’ll be doing traditional dark room which is bitter sweet.  To open the course I always ask the group to gather round in a circle and we “feel” the history of photography.  I pass around the pictures of my ancestors in cool glass daguerreotypes and sharp tin types, their subject’s stoic faces reflecting the long seated exposure.  We handle the heavy carte postales of a woman with impossibly high hair accompanied by a flowery script that says, “My love is constant.”  The thick silver prints reflect the metal rimmed frames of the tobacco worker, and the shine on the trinity of a young family and their new child.  Sepia-toned card boards of ringlet crowned boys in their short pants, men with their hunting dogs, and ladies at tea remind us of dusty brown roads.  The thinner papers from the Kodak Brownie box show grinning girls in wool swim suits, or a standing baby squinting into the sun with a death grip on the family dog.  We move into the slick era of Argus where cloche-hatted ladies sit on the bumpers of curvy automobiles, and then the explosion of Kodacolor shows our bright synthetic fibers and big television smiles.  The Polaroids mimic the cultural desire for “right now,” and now we move into a pixelated world where digital information creates an almost latent world.

     

I realized the power of the documentary in West Africa

This digital world has been where I’ve been creating for a good decade now.  What a visual feast it is, and with such excess; I can shoot all I want and “chimp” between meals.  What I don’t like I can always alter in “post production.”  I have degrees in Fine Arts and Education.  From Parsons School of Design I did a field study with Mr. Leroy Woodson and LIFE Magazine in West Africa and it was there I realized the power of the documentary.  I also worked for years as a picture researcher and later a production coordinator at two Celebrity Photography Agencies in Los Angeles, so I have been on both ends of the business; pitching ideas and reading magazines sideways.  When I left Hollywood to come home to Hawaii to pursue my own work again, it took some time for me let go of the discipline and rigidity of that formal education to begin to really enjoy creating again.  I had to get free of old ideas.  And when I say create, I mean creating with abandon, from my child-like heart.  Unselfconscious shooting and ignoring the “rules”, shooting so much that I forget the rules.

Dave asked me to write about a few things to share for his blog and so I think I will share some the things I did to get some creative freedom again.

   

Get free of old ideas and create with abandon

1. Travel. I am spending more of my time in the “field” as it were, exploring, rambling, and shooting, staying away from the screen and the fixation with histograms.
2. Adventure. I shoot into the sun, take my gear up to 14,000 feet in the snow, throw it into the air, hang it off a bridge, suspend it from a kite, and bring it to the beach. Stop having the consciousness of scarcity.
3. Experiment “in camera.” I use kaleidoscopes, lawn and security mirrors, Christmas ornaments, spy holes, microscopes, telescopes, and toy lenses, as extensions. Polarized sunglasses, window screens, shooting through the viewfinder of an old Ikoflex, and wavy glass can serve as interesting filters.
4. Innovation.  I love the Technology at our hands.  Alien Skin's program Exposure is one of my favorite Photoshop plug-ins.  It makes digital look like film (the irony) and has an amazing selection of cross-processing and black and white film functions.  Autostitch goes beyond a traditional panorama by combining facets of a scene like a quilt. The Adobe Lightroom has all of those great retro and futro settings.  Play!
5. Old School.  Every now and again I like to change it up and do an “old school” project like making cyanotypes, an oatmeal pinhole camera, and Altoid box, or even garbage can cameras. When I saw “Castaway” I kept thinking what a cool pinhole a coconut would make.

I really do feel most “free” when I allow myself time to explore

My photo journey continues.  In a few weeks I am off to Rome again to wander the streets and shoot.  For the past 7 years I have been finding cheap ticket/hotel packages on the internet and just setting off on a photo safari.  I really do feel most “free” when I allow myself time to explore and I have fresh eyes when I am outside of my comfort zone.  Most of this change comes on the tail of a bout with skin cancer that was a big wake up call (I refuse to allow a freckle to kill me!).  I realized that this isn’t a dress rehearsal and the time is now to do the things my heart desires and to enjoy life to the fullest.  So my message today is; get your dots checked, grab your gear, and go out and get free.

        

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More about Archer Kelly --


"...I am from Hawaii and I am an artist and a teacher. I married my best friend who is a surfer. I am addicted to travel and learning new things. I am curious about the world and I talk to strangers. I don't bruise easily and I think fear is a time and energy waster. I embrace life, positivity, and love. I shrug off martyrdom, self pity, and maudlin nihilism like a dirty coat.  After years of Art School rhetoric, Los Angeles photo agencies, and a brush with death, my cells regenerated and I was free to create again. I am prone to silliness and I like to play."

View Archer's photography on her Flickr photostream.