GILROY
– If a picture is worth a thousand words, 41-year-old Mandy
Glenn has several encyclopedia volumes stored in her home.
GILROY – If a picture is worth a thousand words, 41-year-old Mandy Glenn has several encyclopedia volumes stored in her home.
They cover her life, her children’s lives, places she’s been and things that she’s done. Glenn has been seriously taking pictures for about four years, but she fell in love with photography much earlier.
Her grandfather and great-great-grandfather were both photographers, and she can remember visiting her grandparents’ house when she was young, seeing the cameras he collected, the photos he had taken and wanting to do the same.
“I like the details of life,” she said.
It shows in her photographs.
Rather than take sweeping shots of a family member’s ranch in Wyoming, she focuses on a bridle hanging on a fence post. When she takes a break from her office work at Portraits by Rebecca – a local photography studio – to shoot weddings, she tries to capture the small details. In addition to candid shots of people laughing and enjoying themselves, she gets the details in the cake icing and of the bride’s shoes.
Glenn prefers candid over posed photographs, but she says that posed pictures have their purpose. For example, she takes studio shots of her children every year, displaying them on shelves in the living room.
“Its fun to see how they change.”
On the other hand, she describes a picture that she has of her grandmother, sitting down and drinking a beer. She laughs and explains that there’s no way that her grandmother would ever pose like that, but that was part of her at that moment and at that time. Then she holds up a pair of pictures, one of her 18-year-old daughter, Michelle, and another of her 14-year-old daughter Stephanie. Both girls are smiling easily, and look like they merely paused in the middle of something that they’re about to return to.
“That’s the sort of thing that I want to capture,” said Glenn.
In addition, she loves shooting in black and white.
“I see the form of something or the shape,” she said, pointing to her son’s 2003 senior prom photo. “It’s not about … if the suit matched the dress, it’s more about the smiles on their faces.”
Despite the amount of photographs she’s taken – scrapbooks are crammed in a shelf under the television, and the walls are decorated with numerous examples of her work – Glenn has taken very few classes. In fact, so far she’s only participated in a four-session workshop with professional photographer Jim McDonald, and taken a black and white photography class at Gavilan Community College.
Now, going back to school for her degree, she said that she had to take the class to know if she wanted to follow photography professionally.
“I realized that I like taking pictures, but not the technicality of making them,” she said, adding that she didn’t enjoy messing with chemicals and adjusting light filters during the development process. A few times, the teacher would point out a picture was “technically” correct, and Glenn said that she didn’t like it as much as one that had come out slightly blurry or a little too dark.
“I don’t always know whether a photo’s been done correctly, I just know if I like it or not.”
