This week’s SOAR! photography exercise is all about going wide and capturing the Setting of your story.  I’m so crazy PROUD of our SOAR! Recipients!  Ali put her photo assignment into a VIDEO (the outtakes videos is especially fun!)!  Click Here to WATCH! Rachel’s wonderful Setting examples are HERE!  And below is Charisse’s honest post about her journey with shooting the Setting.  I love this sentence she writes; “life gets in the way and the big picture takes a back seat to the smaller things that are directly pulling on me at that moment.”  If you have a second, leave these SOARING ladies a comment or two.  We are almost to the half way mark of our SOAR! year, and they are plugging away with such dedicated, hard work!

Great, FANTASTIC job ladies!!!

xoxo,

m

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More Than a Pretty Face, Charisse Rhodes (2010 SOAR! Scholarship Recipient)

This week as we go wide with our images to capture a bigger part of the story, I noticed that my inclination for detail and my tendency to focus on the face also reflected how I often see life. While I am definitely aware of the much bigger picture of life around me, sometimes it’s easy to focus on the microcosm of the small bubble of happenings that directly affect me. I don’t know if this happens to you, but basically, life gets in the way and the big picture takes a back seat to the smaller things that are directly pulling on me at that moment. While I love focusing on the beauty in people, the things that surround me and sometimes the mundane things that happen in daily life, not taking the time to capture the bigger picture that encapsulates that moment creates only a partial time capsule.

This week life for me was a bit challenging. Nothing I would not get through, but enough of a challenge that I found it harder than usual to quiet the little voices challenging me as to what I am doing here? What am I trying to accomplish? What makes me think I can to this “photography thing”? Honestly, I hit a small wall. I found it even affected my approach to this exercise. Funny thing was, last week I even had a conversation questioning how frequently I was using the images of my girl for some of these exercises even though as a model, she is cute, convenient and fairly low overhead. How does the universe work when we put ourselves out there? It answers us! This weeks photo exercise asked us to use the same to subjects from our details assigment. Well, that would again be my little girl. So I acquiesed and captured a few of her favorite settings.

She prayed for, did a report about and waited patiently for a little dog she could love. Well she got her wish and this little dog has turned our lives upside down! But she is loved. Still being trained, she is confined to the kitchen when not being watched rigorously. Even though there are gates, she manages to escape on occasion.

Dirt is her thing. The dirtier the better. I often wonder how she cleans up so well. White is not an option. So for the last two years we have gone with the trend and put that skill to work gardening. I love how she wears my gloves which are way to big for her. She would much rather use her hands, but since we are working in compost, I can’t handle it so she wears them to pacify me. If I don’t keep an eye out, she would dig up our crops and plant them over and over again.

I also went to the mall in our city’s “Race for the Cure” breast cancer awareness day and had a great time capturing some details that I saw there which caught my eye. I even got daring…had to challenge myself outside of my little “wall” moment and took some pictures of strangers with their permission. It was a blast. To hear more about that, head on over to the SOARORITY forum. But while you are there, please share your images of the settings you’ve captured. We love hearing from you all. The ride is more fun with a party!

*Charisse

Remember, when you hit a wall…knock it down so you can live your best life!