It's a nice hang...

My favorite wine bar in downtown Asheville is the one at 5  Walnut, so imagine my pleasure at being able to set up shop in their art gallery for two months. I am there as much as I can be, but even when I'm not, the gallery is open whenever the wine bar is open, which is daily from 2pm until late night. 

I am exhibiting works from three different series - "Asheville - A Contemporary View" and "Urban View" as well as a series of the Biltmore Estate. I am selling prints, framed and unframed, as well as posters, so please  stop by anytime to take a look. Since I don't have any new work hanging on the walls right now since I've been busy with other endeavors, I wanted to create a stop motion video to show at the gallery that would involve many of the local characters both in my life and the life of 5 Walnut. So, I've been shooting scenes of whoever shows up for the past week, leaving the "models" to their own improvisation, and boy have some of them come up with some original ideas! I have had so much fun photographing the locals but am having almost as much fun editing the hundreds of images, laughing out loud  as I work by myself at my computer.

We are going to have a reception to show the gallery and the video on Thursday night, July 28th from 8:30 - 9:30, which is the night before Bele Chere begins so Walnut St. will be closed. I hope you can come.

My Annual Trip to Rancho La Puerta

I just got back from yet another blissful week at Rancho La Puerta - this is the best "working vacation" I take all year. While the format is the same each year that I go - I give a presentation on "Self Expression Through Photography", teach "Digital 101" and "Photographing People in Nature", and lead a photo walk with demonstrations, I seem to feel obligated to shake things up each time. I constantly recreate the self expression talk, based on what I've been experiencing and thinking about over the past year, and this year I included samples from the HATCH mentors we had last April, Sylvia Plachy and Gerald Slota, as well as work and a video by JR, the photographer/graffiti artist who has "pasted" his huge images in various unlikely settings all over the world. If you have the time, I highly recommend that you watch this video about JR on the TED page, which shows a talk that JR gave about his acceptance of the TED prize - $100,000 to make the world a better place. Lofty goal, huh? I first read about JR in the NY Times last year, and I find his work to be immensely inspiring.

I had more students than in years past, and really enjoyed working with them all. I love it when people run up to me at dinner and show me the photos they took, using the tips I had given them in class - what a kick! I was talking to my liason at the Ranch, Victoria, about creating a "photo week" at the Ranch when I go next July that is more photo intensive, forming our own group for a sunset photo hike, private dinner, slide show of student work, photo contest, etc. The Ranch will help me promote it, and in turn I will try to get a group of people together that want not only a wonderful relaxing vacation, but that want to learn how to take better photos too. Best of all, we will be able to get special discounts as a group. So, if you are interested in staying informed on this, please sign up to follow my blog and I will post any info I have about it here.

This year my trip felt busier than usual, and I had to "schedule" down time to just relax and read my book (fantastic one by the way - "Cutting for Stone") in one of many beautiful resting places - the gazebo, the hammock, the pool...you get the picture. I enjoy hiking most mornings up the mountain through the desert terraine, among wild horses, cows and wildflowers, followed by a delicious organic breakfast and various classes such as yoga and body sculpting. My friend and author, Kathleen Flinn, was the guest chef at the Cocina Que Canta, the cooking school at the Ranch, and I was able to take her cooking class, in which we made all kinds of wonderful things, including whole wheat artisan bread, homemade pasta, fruit tart with whole wheat crust, and other yummy dishes. We also made time to take some headshots of Kat for her upcoming book. Hopefully she will come to Asheville's Malaprops Books to promote it next fall.

Here are a few scenes from our hikes and around the Ranch.

LYNNE HARTY PHOTOGRAPHY: Self Expression and Other Lofty Endeavors

LYNNE HARTY PHOTOGRAPHY: Self Expression and Other Lofty Endeavors: "Now that the tsunami of HATCH Asheville has hit and receded, I am reflecting on the warp speed pace I've been living the past few months. Si..."

Self Expression and Other Lofty Endeavors

Now that the tsunami of HATCH Asheville has hit and receded, I am reflecting on the warp speed pace I've been living the past few months. Since my last post in April, I have spent a dreamy week in Paris,  taught my first beginning photography weekend workshop in Cashiers, refinanced my house,  thrown a party for 150 people, shot two books, and gotten married. No rest for the weary! I realize that I seem to thrive on having many balls in the air at once, but maybe I've pushed it a bit this time. I have two weeks to get ready for my annual week at Rancho La Puerta where I will be teaching some beginning photography classes, but I will also be allowed time to enjoy quiet, the smells of sage and thyme along the paths, dessert mountain hikes, delicious healthy food, swimming in the black bottom pool, and my favorite activity there - going between the ice cold plunge pool and the hot tub. That is truly an exhilarating experience.

The classes I teach on photographing people in nature, "digital 101" and the demo sesssions come easily to me - I'm talking about what I know. It's the nighttime presentation that stretches me each year - "Self Expression Through Photography", and every year I feel compelled to re-create it, sometimes from scratch. Maybe, I'm thinking, it's because with every passing year my life changes, evolves in one or many ways, so my ideas change and make me feel that what was true last year isn't true this year. So here I am again, trying to decide how I think other photographers express themselves through their photography, but then I'm forced to ask myself the same question.

I can't say I have the answers yet. I have, however, had the privilege to spend time with two amazing photographers that were gracious enough to share themselves with some "groundbreakers" (up and coming photographers) and a few other lucky people, including myself, and they have added to the self expression stories I plan to tell. Sylvia Plachy and Gerald Slota came all the way to Asheville from New York for HATCH, and I was able to spend time with them both - they couldn't be much more different (I encourage you to look at their websites) - Sylvia is a photo journalist with an impeccable talent for catching not just "the" moment, but oh so many of them. Gerald, a fine art photographer, makes sketches of the scenarios he wants to act out, using his little wrapped in a baggie point and shoot camera simply as a vehicle to capture the intricate and sometimes wicked scenes in his head.

To tell the truth, while I was inspired by these immensely talented photographers, I was also discouraged, as I just don't measure up. I wandered Paris the following week after HATCH looking for those shots that I was sure Sylvia would have seen that were eluding me. I was thinking of the advice Gerald had given me to leave my big fancy camera at home and just use a small camera, to really focus on the image and leave the technology behind. I couldn't do it! Neither one - leaving the big camera, nor finding the clever moments. UGGGGH.

Where's the happy ending to this photo story? That life keeps happening and I keep shooting. I'm no Sylvia Plachy nor Gerald Slota but I have my good moments, and some good ideas, and hopefully I won't stop looking for those moments.  Gerald said that I really lit up when I was talking to him about how much fun I had working with stop motion, and he was encouraging me to begin a new project with stop motion. So, that is the plan....

Now back to the self expression presentation preparation - where's my muse?

Here is a photo of Sylvia, Gerald, the groundbreakers (Matt Brown, Ashley Florence, Alex Palmour and Liz Wells) with Brie Castell, my co-chair for Hatch Photography. It was a great experience - if you missed it, make plans to be at HATCH next year. And here is a shot of my wedding taken by my friend, Dot Griffith.

The Asheville Ad Club Addy's

Saturday night I received a gold Addy award for the book that I shot for  Lark Books called Keeping Chickens - part of the Homemade Living series. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this book with my "teammates" author Ashley English, art director and stylist Chris Bryant and editor Nicole McConville. The gold means I go on to the regional Addy's, if I understand it correctly! I have made some good friends and business contacts through the Asheville Ad Club, so I'm certainly glad I joined. Below are some of the photos from the book that I submitted:

Digital Photography Coaching

I had my first day of one on one photography training yesterday with the delightful Corrie Woods. Corrie and her husband, Jay Lichty, are in business together selling the beautiful hand made guitars that Jay crafts - their business is Lichty Guitars. Corrie photographs the making of each guitar in Jay's studio, the final products as well as the various musicians that come to try out his soon to be famous guitars, so Corrie needed a few tips on getting the specific type of shots she needed. We talked about lighting, composition, depth of field and working with people. We also discussed naming and archiving files, choosing what type of file to shoot (jpg, raw, tif)  and different types of imaging software. Corrie already has some experience so she grasped what we talked about instantly - I can't wait to see what she does next. I loved the experience! I'm available for this kind of work, so if you or anyone you know is interested, feel free to contact me.

Lightroom Makes It Easy

I have been working on a fun personal project this week - a book documenting my third wonderful year with my boyfriend, Steve. It started out with a simple idea - I would just make a card featuring photos from some our experiences from the past year, but then before I knew it I was designing a cover for a custom made box I recently discovered that you can order from WHCC. Once I had that "shipped" online, I started tinkering with the idea of creating a book. Nothing big, just a simple book. However, in the process of reviewing the hundreds, maybe thousands of photos I've taken, I realized that if I was going to put this much time just editing the photos, I needed a bigger story, and thus, a bigger book. So, two days later, after working at a frantic pace, I finished printing a sweet little collection of images from our past year together - with the goal of doing one every year in the future. Of course, the book was designed to fit inside the box I had ordered.

What made the entire project less overwhelming was the wonderful product made by Adobe called Lightroom. I had just upgraded to version 3, and what a worthy upgrade purchase that was. I was able to create collections that I could quickly drag selected photos to, and I could easily move them around to put them in the right order. The new print module made it very easy to lay out the pages, and I was able to print two pages on each sheet of paper which were centered so that it just required a few chops on the paper cutter to make the pages the same size and correctly lined up. Finally, I took my book to Will at Henco in downtown Asheville, and he quickly punched the holes to make a spiral binding. Voila! Done.

I've already created a new folder called "Year Four" so that I can just drag images there to eliminate the hours of editing next year. Maybe next time I'll spring for one of the WHCC beautiful bound books.