TJ Hirst

“Most people stand back and try to get most of the body. When you focus on what you don’t normally pay attention to—hands, feet, eyes—the details show different things.”

Minna Dyer looks for the unexpected details in individuals when she shoots portrait photography. The challenge comes not only in seeing those details but in getting the person to open up and allow her in to capture them.

Her most photographed subject is her daughter, Hannah. She probably has 30,000 photos of her. “She is the person most used to having the camera in her face. I’ll take her out and get 100 photographs of her, easy.”

Hannah opens up. But one day she didn’t. She was hiding behind her hair. When Minna took some shots, she remembers thinking, “She didn’t want me to do that.”

She uncovered more than the detail of Hannah’s eye, it was the look in her eye—or even more importantly, the emotion it conveyed.

“We have so many different expressions and emotions, but they are not always noticeable. I can see something in someone that they might not regularly show. I find things to draw it out. Usually, when someone lets themselves shine, it unfolds. If I can capture that, then it’s there. Photography captures a moment in time and freezes it.”

Minna’s artistic eye developed in her childhood watching her own mother paint and draw, then copying her and “trying to do what she did.” Confident that art was to be a part of her life and her learning, she pursued several forms in high school and college and graduated with a degree in art education. Even though her only regularly-paid art job was as a chalkboard artist in the Seattle area, she continued developing her skills.

She later moved to New York with her husband. After her second daughter’s birth, she needed a creative outlet and started the business side of her photography, Miriam Lovell Photography.

“The artist in me needs to create something. I love to create beautiful and interesting images. We all need something to accomplish and achieve. That’s what photography is for me.”

Her creative process doesn’t just begin or end with the photograph. For example, when she has a family photo session, she meets and talks with them first, developing a personal rapport and trying to understand their interests and desires. Then, she researches and plans the location and possible shots. Following the shoot itself is editing, proofing, and organizing. She sets up a web gallery for them to view and choose prints, and she may design a layout for a book of photographs.

But the photo shoot is the fun part, even when the unexpected happens. One of her best shoots was with a 5-year-old boy in Brooklyn Bridge Park—in the pouring rain. He played for the camera in way that he might not in a group. Minna invited his mother, who hadn’t planned to be photographed, to gather the leaves with him, and she shot a series of mother and son laughing and playing together in unplanned moments.

The wonderful moments of emotion may be fun, loving, tender, silly, touching, beautiful, or reflective, as the natural light of the window revealed during a session with a friend facing a difficult time. In all, the details express life, and “photographs capture the essence of life.”

Focus on Details, Part I is the first in a series of posts from an interview on portraiture with Minna Dyer of Miriam Lovell Photography. View photo cards and her gallery of photographs at her website. Learn from her regular photo assignments on her photography blog.

Part II will be published on Wednesday, May 28, at TJ Hirst.com. Her images are copyrighted by Miriam Lovell Dyer of Miriam Lovell Photography. Images cannot be used without express written permission.

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

My husband wants a pause button for life. If he hits it, everyone else stops and he can catch up on all the tasks he needs to complete. We did see the movie, Click, but I don’t think this is necessarily what he has in mind. He just wants to complete his responsibilities and not miss life in the the process.

I can relate. The things I do are important to me; I choose a purpose and the actions to get me there. But, I want to diminish the nagging feeling that comes when I sit down to relax and suddenly recall the rest of my got-to-do lists. And I want to reduce the frantic pace that I set for myself thinking that if I hurry up and complete the tasks at hand then I will be free to relax and enjoy the moment.

I now know that the tasks are never finished and they never will be. Does that mean I don’t do all these worthy things? No, but I did need to discover my pause button with the challenge to give myself an hour of solitude.

I spent my hour alone in one of my favorite places—my garden. Listening and looking retuned my senses. My pace slowed. Time slowed.

Being became as important as Doing.

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Did you Try It With Me? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Being with someone is part of the purpose of the May Reading Challenge, which is to read to or with someone before next Tuesday, May 27. Do you want to Try It With Me?

Join in by trying the challenges with me, commenting, linking, or suggesting a challenge. If you want to write a post on your blog about what happened when you took the challenge, I will publish your link. Just link to my website in your post and send me your link. Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

When I wrote Wisdom’s Writing on the Wall I did not know the origin of this commonly used phrase. Months later, in preparing to teach Daniel to my youth Old Testament class, I read about King Belshazzar of Babylon drinking with his lords in a great feast:

In the same hour came forth fingers of a man’s hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaister of the wall of the king’s palace: and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote.

Then the king’s countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.

The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers. And the king spake, and said to the wise men of Babylon, Whosoever shall read this writing, and shew me the interpretation thereof, shall be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.

The king sent for the prophet Daniel who gave this interpretation:

MENE; God hath numbered thy kingdom, and finished it.
TEKEL; Thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.
PERES; Thy kingdom is divided, and given to the Medes and Persians.

see Daniel Chapter 6

The interpretation of the writing on the wall meant that God was not pleased with the king’s actions and that he and Babylon were to be destroyed, which is what happened.

In modern usage we say the “writing on the wall” and we mean that the inevitable will occur. The inevitable is usually negative. Connecting this expression with its origin expands its connotations. For a more detailed explanation go here.

Our heritage shapes our language not only by giving us words to express ourselves but by helping us associate our modern experiences with powerful historical examples.

In this election year, words are consequential. Syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker quoted the words of one West Virginia voter who wants a “full-blooded American” as president. She observed that heritage may be as important to voters as race and gender in this year’s election. She said:

What they sense is that their heritage is being swept under the carpet while multiculturalism becomes the new national narrative. And they fear what else might get lost in the remodeling of America.

Getting Bubba, May 14, 2008
Kathleen Parker

Certainly the President of the United States influences our national identity. But we write this narrative—not only by using the right words but by ensuring that we recognize all the associated implications to our culture.

This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth; but thou shalt meditate therein day and night, that thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written therein: for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous, and then thou shalt have good success.

Joshua 1:8

The word, juxtaposition, befuddles me. On the AP English test for college credit in high school, I was to explain the juxtaposition of two ideas in a literary work. I flubbed it. Ever since, using that word makes me self-conscious.

Ironically, I love it’s meaning, which is to place side-by-side, especially for comparison or contrast. In fact, most of my writing is juxtaposition because that is how I view life. Over the weekend I watched two movies—one night, Becoming Jane, and Ironman the next night. The contrast seems as clear as female and male. But when they are juxtaposed, the packaging fades and similarities stand out.

I often go into a Jane Austen movie adaptation expecting a lighthearted feminine romance. This is how they often appear to be marketed by the movie industry seeking women’s dollars. But that is never how these “chick flicks” play out. From under the flouncing gowns comes the crux of larger matters, deeper matters, which are the hallmark of Austen’s hand. Likewise, the movie that tells her history couldn’t be called just a romance in that way either.

Hers is a story of a woman developing her talent to write while developing as a woman. That struggle enhances her writing in the long run, even as poverty and situation complicate it. Influences encourage her to define womanhood as shallow, “Flirting is a woman’s trade, one must keep in practice” as one woman companion supposes. Or drudgery—from which her mother wants to save her. Or competitive, “If you wish to be the equal of a masculine writer, experience is vital. Your horizons must be widened. ” This challenge comes from her new acquaintance, Thomas LeFroy. Their ensuing relationship does widen her horizons, but her difficult and surprising choices along the way provide depth to her character and the fictional ones she will create.

A busy schedule kept my husband from seeing Ironman in a late-night screening with “the guys”, so we went for date night. The throngs of teenage boys surrounding us in the theater and the previews told me I was in the wrong demographic for this movie. True to expectation, loud music, big guns, and gratuitous sex reeled the men in.

After analyzing the chick flick, I thought I would get his thoughts on the guy movie. Here was his review: Thoroughly entertaining.

But I know my husband, and I know he lives a life beyond that stuff, so I knew there was more. Unlike Becoming Jane, in which the falsity must first be stripped off to reveal her true nature, Ironman clothes the man to build him up. Whichever process takes us to that end result finds us standing the same in the end.

Even though we may not admit it, we don’t mind whose movie choice brings us to that point. My husband wrote this to the newlywed couple to whom we gave a portable DVD player as a wedding gift: To the groom, Watch the chick flicks with her. To the bride, Let him pick a guy movie once in a while.