Week 10: picture a song – 2018 Trevor Carpenter Photochallenge

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don’t take my Kodachrome away

This week, we’re going to let our favorite musicians inspire us! Just like poetry, a beautiful lyric can evoke an image in our mind’s eye. This challenge is about finding imagery in your favorite songs and capturing it in a photograph.

This week’s challenge in short

  • Find a lyric that you love; it can be anything, pop, rock, country, techno, or even classical music. It will probably be easier to find imagery in songs that you know well, or that are extra dear to your heart.
  • Choose a couplet, a few lines, the title or a phrase and and use it as inspiration for this week’s submission.
  • Your image can be anything that captures the song: a literal shot of an object, person or landscape that’s in the song; an idea or concept, or even a mood or emotion.
  • Try to avoid literal shots of the song text; this challenge is really about imagery, atmosphere and feeling, not about letters and words. Of course, a link to the actual song is much appreciated!

Here are some examples to get you started.

Led Zeppelin – Stairway to heaven

stairway to heaven

Stairway to heaven – Maaike Groenewege

A very literal interpretation of the title of Led Zeppelin’s song. There’s no further interpretation of the lyrics, just a stairway to heaven. This is a piece of landscape art close to Rotterdam. I tried to give it a bit of a gloomy atmosphere that fits with the music.

 

Boy in the Bubble – Paul Simon

Paul Simon’s song The Boy in the Bubble is about global terrorism and starvation, but at the same time offers a sense of optimism and hope. This picture gives a similar mixed feeling: the plastic ball is meant for play, but at the same time, the long exposure gives a sense of confusion and isolation.

And I believe
These are the days of lasers in the jungle
Lasers in the jungle somewhere
Staccato signals of constant information
A loose affiliation of millionaires
And billionaires and baby
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry baby, don’t cry
Don’t cry

Paul Simon – Boy in the Bubble

 

Fragile – Sting

Fragile

Fragile – Maaike Groenewege

Fragile by Sting: one of my favorite songs, about the vulnarability of human life. And a song that’s so full of imagery that you could easily make a series of photos, rather than just one.

On and on the rain will fall
Like tears from a star
Like tears from a star
On and on the rain will say
How fragile we are
How fragile we are

Sting – Fragile

The way you make me feel – Michael Jackson

This lady’s joy for life is sparking from the screen – she’s dancing in her window sill. The pillow is there to make sure that she doesn’t hurt her arms. It’s the same kind of energy I feel in Michael Jackson’s The way you make me feel, even though the subject of his song was probably a few years younger than this lovely lady in the picture. Love, attraction and dance – something for all ages!

Hey pretty baby with the high heels on
You give me fever
Like I’ve never, ever known
You’re just a product of loveliness
I like the groove of your walk,
Your talk, your dress
I feel your fever
From miles around
I’ll pick you up in my car
And we’ll paint the town
Just kiss me baby
And tell me twice
That you’re the one for me

Michael Jackson – The way you make me feel

 

Ordinary love – U2

ordinary love3

Beach at Zandvoort – Maaike Groenewege

I couldn’t write this challenge without including my favorite band ever – U2. The lyrics of ‘Ordinary love’ for me evoke memories of school holidays, going to the beach with friends, basking in the sun, listening to the waves, with nothing on our minds – and how normal that felt.

Today, with a few more worries on my mind -like all of us-, I still love to go the the beach with Significant Other for a long walk.

The sea wants to kiss the golden shore
The sunlight warms your skin
All the beauty that’s been lost before
Wants to find us again
I can’t fight you anymore
It’s you I’m fighting for
The sea throws rock together
But time leaves us polished stones
We can’t fall any further
If we can’t feel ordinary love
And we cannot reach any higher
If we can’t deal with ordinary love
U2 – Ordinary love
Have fun!

The friendly community guidelines are pretty simple:

  • Post one original photograph (Your Image) shot each week per theme posted on this blog to our active community on our Facebook Group or share our images from our Flickr Group. Tag the photo:  #10thanniversaryphotochallenge #2018photochallenge #photochallenge #tempusaura
  • The shot should be a new shot you took for the current weekly theme, not something from your back catalog or someone else’s image.
  • Don’t leave home without your camera. Participating in the 2018 Trevor Carpenter Photo Challenge is fun and easy.

 

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About maaikegee

I live in the middle of the Netherlands together with Significant Other (who features regularly in my Photochallenge images) and my two cats Bumper and Pebbles (who are also no stranger to modelling). I’ve been glued to my compact camera for the last ten years, still love my Sony RX-100 and switched to a Nikon D7200 in 2015. I love street photography, conceptual photography, macro and still life. You can find my portfolio at www.maaaike.nl

One Reply to “Week 10: picture a song – 2018 Trevor Carpenter Photochallenge”

  1. revjimbo

    U2! Yes. 🙂