Session 6: Mother's Day Flowers
This experiment with photography as leisure is proving to be less about learning a new skill than about documenting random items around my house. First it was my Bonsai tree, then a whiskey glass. Last week was an old kids camping chair and this week it's Mother's Day flowers. There have been a couple of cool photos, things I'm happy to have made. But I'm not pushing past the abstractions created by modern smartphone photography to get at some missed essence as I hoped to when I pivoted to photography from baking. I'm just sticking a box out in the sunlight and praying the chemical-reactions-that-be grant me a photo that is intelligible. I think it's time for a change.
This coming week I'm going to build a new camera. This one will have at least two lens. I'm hoping for nine. We will see what happens. The goal of the next camera won't be some lofty pursuit of understanding photography. I'm just want to make something with a lot of lens and see what comes out the other end. The point is madness. If it fails, so be it.
What I did learn this week
For the last couple of weeks I've been doing one minute exposure outside on mostly sunny days. After having a problem with my developer because the water was too hot and then a failed second photo (though I've been able to improve it with some photoshop), I tried dropping down to 30 seconds and it worked much better. The result is at the top of this email. The two failures are below.
