My deepest apologies for the lateness of this post. I was out and about with a young woman last evening—if it was a date, it was the first one I’ve been on since 2005, and so I don’t really know if it was a date or not, so I won’t call it a date—when I shot this, and got home way past my bedtime.
And if I write a big long thing here, I’ll be late for work… Apologies.
D7000. Sigma 30mm f/1.4. ISO400, 1/1000th (AP mode), f/1.4, -1EV. About 30 seconds of slider play in Aperture.
So I spent the whole day thinking about asking a woman I met last week to go do something friendly and nonthreatening (wander around a bookstore or something similar) with me this afternoon.
Needless to say, I just thought about it.
So about 3, after sitting pretty much in the same spot for roughly 11 hours—minus the 30 minutes it took me to drive to the pancake spot, see all the people milling about outside, and drive home; minus also the 40 minutes it took me to fetch groceries—I decided it was time to make the 365.
But what to shoot?
And what lens to use?
So I strapped on the Tokina—as the cheapest and most battered lens I own: it seemed like an obvious choice—and started shooting randomly.
I shot around, hither and yon (from the desk and its environs to the dining room, a distance of maybe 15 feet) and spotted some nice blurry shiny stuff: the comforter.
So I went into the bedroom and shot the comforter for awhile, with the camera on manual and the pop-up on ttl, and then had a flash of brilliance!
In 1955, Rober Rauschenberg made a rather famous combine painting called Bed. If you’re unfamiliar, go check it out. As I was shooting around my bed, this piece popped into my head (that MA in Art History & Criticism was worth something after all!), and I took a 15-shot panorama of the bed in all its unmade glory, in the dark, with the Tokina in macro mode and well defocused.
I loaded the entire bed-shooting series into Aperture, and spent the next 2 hours building—by hand, mostly—a massive panorama of my bed in Photoshop.
I twisted, stretched, blurred, distorted, and absolutely tortured the pixels. I created three versions, then ran them through Merge to HDR Pro, and then tortured pixels some more.
Every change I made took the piece closer to what I envisioned, but it all fell apart at some point (probably within the first 3 or 4 minutes), and all the torturing of pixels in the world wasn’t going to fix it: my photoshop kung-fu is laughable.
An interesting idea, perhaps, and I might go for it again some day. But not today.
And so I found this one. It’s pretty enough. It’s got something of the rule of thirds going on, and it has elements that move the eye around, but it’s not what I aimed for, due to a lack of technical skill to match up with my artistic vision, and the whole shooting session was not what I hoped for due to a lack of something else: call it guts or drive or verve or something, if you want, but it’s something else too.
So this shot all comes down to lack, is made of lack, by lack, and for lack.
It’s still pretty, though.
D7000. Tokina 35-200mm f/3.5-4.5 AT-X, in Macro Mode. ISO100, 1/1.3th, f/4. Pop-up flash in TTL at -1EV. About 35 seconds of processing in Aperture, after 2.5 hours of playing around with various failures in Photoshop.
Truth be told, it’s a bit muggy for my taste, but whatever. And there was a neighbor or a friend of a neighbor that was out smoking, and that I didn’t notice until she started talking on the phone. I wonder if she wondered “what is that___ guy in 106 doing?” but bet she didn’t even look up from her phone.
Anyways. I shot a house today, and planned to give the realtor and owner a bit of free advertising, but I really didn’t feel like messing with those pics just now, so I made this one instead.
And making this one was quite a process…
D7000. LensBaby 50mm f/2 Muse (Plastic). ISO100; 1/640th, 1/160th, 1/40th; f/2. HDRified in Merge to HDR Pro, photo filters/levels adjustment/luminance layer (thanks to Chris Marquardt for the idea to clone the layer, convert to b/w, tune, then convert to a luminance layer. It added just a hint of Idon’tknowwhat that worked nicely here), then a vignette and tiny bit of slider play in Aperture.
The fear has me today.
I would like to say “I’d like to go for a walk through the neighborhood, snap some pictures, maybe pop down to the park and shoot those strange, ingrown trees that I drive past every now and then” but, really, I have absolutely no desire to leave. The prospects are too scary.
No, I’ll likely not be harmed; neither is it likely that I’ll find myself in any trouble, or be asked any questions, or even be noticed by anyone.
A dog might bark at me, and I might be momentarily startled, but that’s not what bothers me.
I might be approached for some food money, or beer money, or directions, or by someone who sees something they want me to see too, and such encounters would likely go by without any great distress.
I know that if I pretend that I’m supposed to be doing whatever it is that I’m doing, and if I look like I’m supposed to be doing whatever it is that I’m doing (taking a walk), nobody will bother me about it, and it’s unlikely anyone will notice me at all.
These sorts of rationalizations are of no use whatsoever.
Correction: these sorts of rationalizations only serve to make me feel even more deficient.
I hoped this project would help me find some pathways out of the house, and I have ventured out a few times: the first was uneventful, save for a barking dog and some people who waved at me from their porch; during the second, some policemen were accosting a pair of African American gentlemen about my age, and as I approached one of the officers asked if I made the 911 call, and I felt angry and guilty and fraudulent, and moments later, a friendly latino gentleman warned me to ‘better watch that fancy camera around here’; the third time I turned the corner and ran into a pack of middle-school aged girls, walking home from school and you wouldn’t even believe the terror that gripped me as I walked past them and made the quickest possible return to the safety of my cave, while attempting to remain nonchalant.
As a result of that last outing, more recent excursions have been far closer to home: out into the courtyard, or maybe down the alley, but never anywhere where I might run into friendly people or laughing children.
It takes a funeral to get me out to see friends. Invitations to dinner or for drinks, going away parties, soandso’s back parties are all insufficient.
Going out to breakfast with my mother: by all appearances, I’m having a great time. Believe me, it’s a carefully constructed and controlled mask.
Photo Meetups are horrifying affairs, and I’ve arrived to more than one only to speed away when I saw the size of the crowd of friendly people with whom I share a hobby.
Introversion is one thing. I wonder if this isn’t something else. I should probably visit a doctor or find someone to help me, but that would require opening the door, and it’s assured that I would be discovered, found out, realized, and the prospect, the mere thought, is absolutely terrifying, beyond anything I can imagine. It’s the way I felt about deep, fast-moving water for several years after those lifeguards pulled me out of the river and I hacked up all that water. It’s the way I felt about roller coasters after I flipped that car. But it’s different in that it has no basis in reality, no ultimate event that I can point to and say “that. That right there. That’s why I am this way.”
I feel moderately better now that I’ve flung this out into the void. Thank you, void.
D7000. LensBaby 50mm f/2 Muse (Plastic). ISO100, 1/15th, f/2, -1EV. ~40 seconds of processing in Aperture.
Well, I like this picture, but I don’t think its quite up to the standards I’ve set for myself. I would go back to shooting, but I’m too busy second-guessing and doubting myself at present to do anything but second-guess and doubt.
It’s alright though, because I think this picture, perhaps desaturated a bit, would make a nice gatefold image for a prog rock record or maybe a hippy-type jam band, so that’s win, for sure.
D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. ISO100, 1/6th (AP mode), f/8, -1EV. Maybe 1 minute of processing in Aperture to help bring some drinition of forms out of the fog.
Since you likely don’t see what I see here, the subtitle likely makes little sense.
So you should make up your own story about what’s going on here, if anything. Deal?
Thanks!
D7000. Nikon 75-150mm f/3.5 Zomb-E Series. ISO400, 1/50th (AP mode), f/3.5, -1EV. ~6-8 minutes of slider play in Aperture.
This picture started its life as 57 separate pictures, each produced with the Nikkor 24mm f/2.8, reversed on a D7000, all at ISO400, 1/2.5th or 1/3 of a second, in AP mode, at f/8 and -1 EV.
With that, I got approximately 20mm depth of field total, which translates to maybe 1/2mm per frame at most.
I’m fairly positive that I couldn’t handhold this, and so I very much wonder how the live-bug-eye shooters do it. I would guess by using flash, not shooting in raw, and firing on continuous capture at 8+ frames/second or better, while perfectly controlling their movements backward and forward to capture the half-millimeter (or less) of those eyes. This must be especially tough when shooting on extension tubes.
Anyway.
I could’ve made some modifications to the final image to remove some of the obvious falsehood of it, but I really like the somethingsnotquiterighthere-ness of it.
And I could’ve done better with the framing and general composition, but there are converging lines and all sorts of trickery to get your eye moving around a little bit, and, anyways, this isn’t meant to be an art piece, or a portfolio piece, or even a particularly good photograph. This was a test. This was only a test.
