Saturday, February 2, 2008

Motorcycles and Egregious Flashes


motorcycle on porch, originally uploaded by galacticsupersleuth.

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:

Anonymous said...

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

Anonymous said...

I have a crush on U