lens-artists – Deanne Dements Photography

Looking back at my work this last few days and realizing how much the 52 week challenge allowed me to grow…. Actually forced me to grow. I learned how to process the photos and actually use my processing program to make them shine. I learned how to run with an idea that maybe one of the other photographers suggested. I learned how to be a bit more patient
I admit this subject originally didn’t inspire me in 2022, and I had a hard time getting into framing.

So I went for the easy classic find a subject and frame it with some trees. I took the photos and moved on to something else. I didn’t do anything special with them I just posted them. I didn’t organize them in files other than the date I photographed them on. I hadn’t made friends in the group yet and at this point there were about 20 active photographers out of 100 who signed up. So the little sideline comments that spark creativity were not happening…. “There was Great Photo… Do you live near there?” It took a while for things to click with everybody. Trying to go back to that years challenge is hard I actually had to figure approximately what date /week the framing challenge was on and pick a couple photos that I thought I might have posted. They were terrible. I wasn’t using my processing program to clean them up with a nice sharper image. I didn’t remove or crop anything. for this post I did run them through the processing program. but first I had to copy them from the External Hard drive to the laptop, then into the processing program, then file them, download them onto a thumb drive and then put them into the file I have on the new computer. Remember that patience I mentioned? I used quite a bit of it this morning trying to find these photos.
And so we move on to the second year of the challenge 2023

By 2023 several of the photographers had clicked and we were inspiring each other. by this time I had set up a small table studio on my back deck and would go out into the cold set something up then pop back into the warm house to see what I had, and posted what I liked the best. The next day I came up with another idea and spent the morning photographing it, and posting my favorite from that shoot.

by day 3 of the week I was thinking of all the different ways I could photograph framing

and because I was now friends with the 15 or 20 photographers left in the challenge I could interject my sense of humor, wanting to know who put a rubber ducky in my cup of coffee… there were lots of side challenges going on and we crashed the site a few time.
The challenge was revived again for 2024 and the same photographers joined again.

This time because I had already done the challenge for two years. I was able to anticipate the challenge, I had been out thrift shopping and looking for things I could photograph for this challenge. the frame and the fake flowers were additions to my photo prop selection.

These swans were also a thrift store purchase that I thought I could use in symmetry challenge but liked so much I used them for framing.
By day three of that week I noticed the mountains framed by the clouds and fog and submitted that as well to the challenge.

Moving on to 2025, I was challenging myself to find a way to make a creative statement by using the processing and editing programs, include my sense of humor and some of the past ideas thrown out by the 5 or so members of the group that had a similar sense of humor.

At one point we had a frog theme going on during one of the challenge years, I had picked up this frog and this frame in my thrifting and wanted to make something with them.

The trolls were now being featured in my challenge shots as well as the dinosaurs.

although this shot didn’t make it into the final collage.
The question in my mind was how to make these three shots work in one shot that featured framing?