Bryon DeVore Photography: Willow Wind Community Learning Center: B/W Bonanza!

Welcome to the Bryon DeVore Photography blog. This space is a place for me to keep in touch with clients, post new work and to share bits about how I go about things here with the photography business. I generally post a few photos from each session, but after a few years of keeping this blog, I know that counting on me to be consistent or regular in any way is probably not going to work out well for anyone. I love to hear from visitors so please drop me an e-mail and be sure to come visit me on Facebook!

Friday, March 18, 2011

Willow Wind Community Learning Center: B/W Bonanza!

My photography business has been built upon a certain style of natural light, natural expression work. There are very few photographs on my website or on my studio walls that aren't outdoors and lit 100% naturally. So when crazy bad weather hit last week when I was scheduled to photograph the many dozens of children at Willow Wind, I was not super thrilled to say the least. Add to that extremely limited indoor options, we were forced to go "bare bones", studio lights on a white backdrop. Going through the photographs these past days, it's almost like I've been working on someone else's photographs... it has been uncomfortable and a little nerve wracking, but ultimately I'm super happy with how things came out. I especially am fond of the the photos edited into a really high-contrast black and white that focuses the viewer to really have nowhere else to go except straight onto the children's faces, their eyes and their expressions. Here are a bunch that I'm really excited to share.

ps: thank you to all the children and staff at Willow Wind for making my time there last week a real pleasure :)

I photograph people. I try to capture moments and fleeting expressions; REAL moments and REAL expressions are always the goal... easy on the "cheese" as the teenagers say. That said, I've come to believe that there is something basically untrue about "capturing" people in an image and that there in-lies the big challenge for a photographer. Real moments and expressions don't stop and can't REALLY be frozen, they are fluid and fleeting... gone before they finish happening. The camera freezes something that wasn't really meant to be stopped. But those unreal stoppages of time can be so beautiful, so emotional... and strangely to me, very, very real. How odd this art of people photography... not so much creating, but capturing, stopping the unstoppable and then surrounding that moment, that expression with the real art of the photograph, the background, the crop, the angle, the color, the parts that can be created. But being there when the moment or expression happens, having your finger on the shutter release at that exact second... that is a form of art as well.