One month of daily photos, and strange things will start to seem urgent. Running around, late at night, brushing teeth and thinking about sleep, I will stop. Oh no. The photo.
As usual, January began with wide-eyed optimism and a remarkable faith in calendars and plans. In fact, you can read all about these plans here and here, and you will find that I was excited to finally became a camera person, Someone Who Takes Pictures. (Incidentally, I am very fond of the way that Erin articulated a similar idea, the bold wish that photography was What She Did.)
I certainly do take pictures, now, but here is how it goes:
Okay. Time to take a picture. It is very late at night.
That sure is a nice set of socks right there. They are different colors.
Okay. I will photograph them at different angles, very very close up so that they fill the frame. Hmm. They are blurry. Okay! They are artistic!
And then:
Oh no! What was it that I decided, again? One of my pictures every day in January had to contain a human? Do I count? Is that against the rules?
Wait, I made the rules!
Okay. I will take a photo with egregious flash, camera held at arm's length, and smile widely.
This happened actually just about every day. So now I have many, many close-up photos of household objects, and also many, many pictures of myself smiling widely and bathed in the harsh light of a strong flash.
Sometimes, though, I did go outside. These timid steps into the great outdoors yielded photos like this one, of a black motorcycle on a porch. The railing was light blue, and the concrete was light gray, so it all seemed very right.
(I go outside often, actually, but the eleventh hour right before I sleep is normally spent indoors. And the eleventh hour is when I take photos. Thus: socks, dinner plates, file cabinets.)
As I wrote on that second day of January, I love looking at the world through a photographer's eyes. Maybe the motorcycle was my bravest photograph of the entire month—the owner of the house backed his car out of the garage just as I scuttled away, shy of capturing his belongings on imaginary film. It was not very brave, I mean. But I wouldn't have taken the photo otherwise, and I was very happy that I had a reason to notice an old motorcycle on a porch, and to take it with me.
2 comments:
i like the picture of the bike a suzuki 650 i believe but first and foremost i just love your picture you are truly divine
wayne
I have a crush on U
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