what was I thinking? (pt 54c)
Sunday, January 10, 2010 at 10:24PM ;)
click 'er for bigger
Some photographs are perfectly obvious upon viewing at any distance of time. The sunset was gorgeous, the animals were adorable, whatever. This one is more of a problem. What was the reason for the approach to the subject?
It wasn't the scenery I was looking at while wandering around in two feet of snow. The blanked out ground was erased from the composition, creating relationships between the visible elements that are not ordinarily evident. As mentioned previously, somewhat flippantly, I was most certainly attracted to the repaired crack in the concrete block wall, which signals movement of the ground beneath the corner of this building. It jags its way down the wall into the top of the fence, which leaves the two dimensional surface in an almost solid plane that turns 90 degrees and offers a barely opaque plane that disappears out of the frame, creating a tense imbalance. I think I actually saw all this while framing the view. And even more, that eludes me now, some three weeks after the fact.
For some other fascinating views of a walk in the snow, totally different from these, look at where Mauro Thon Giudici has been recently.
Reader Comments (2)
Hehe... it's interesting (and also fun and/or frustrating) to look back at your pics from a "session" and wonder what was going through your head at the time (or what wasn't going through your head). Sometimes I fall into what I call lazy photography where I wander around with a camera and can't really focus on anything in a meaningful way. I just can't find the motivation or that one thing that jumps out at me and captures my attention fully. And the relationship between really cold weather and lazy photography is directly proportional :-)
TJ-
Thanks for stopping by, haven't seen you in a while. My question to you is: if you're practicing "lazy photography," and not really paying attention, how do you know when to release the shutter? There has to be something that attracts the eye or mental associations. What sorts of subjects do you come back w/ when you're in this state of mind?