wandering around first thursday

Took a few First Thursday photos yesterday, and here are a few of those few. I though I'd try something a little different. I'm not usually into street photography, and I'm never entirely convinced it's a good idea. But I figured, First Thursday is an art(sy) event, so cameras (and Cartier-Bresson wannabes) are to be expected, and people go to these things to see and be seen anyway. I'm certainly not going to argue that I created any Art yesterday. I approached it primarily as a technical exercise, actually. I'd been reading a bit lately about the hyperfocal technique, in which the right combo of focus and aperture ensures that everything beyond a certain distance is in "acceptable" focus. Then you can just wander around clicking the shutter, point-n-shoot style. You could, conceivably, do that without looking through the viewfinder. Which is what I did, partly to be unobtrusive, and partly for the sake of serendipity (more about which in a minute). Without practice (i.e. like me yesterday), most of what you get with this technique is feet. Which I guess would be great if you're doing a series on the feet of Portland, or I suppose if you just have a thing for feet, or whatever. To try to complete the effect, I used a vintage 60's Super Takumar 35mm f3.5 lens, switched the camera to monochrome, and cranked the ISO up to 3200 to try to simulate grainy film a little.

So I think I got a handful of photos this way that don't completely suck. As far as I can tell. Which I admit isn't very far.



I figured it was past time to try something different, because I've been in a rut lately, creatively, and in life in general, nothing but work, sleep, work, sleep, with weekends devoted to the endless demands of clingy elderly people. Photography and blogging are my usual escapes (which is why I so rarely write about work, for example), but those have suffered too. I've been running on autopilot for some time now. My formula, of late, has been "add more of the same, rinse, repeat". More photos of flowers, usually. Some of them aren't too terrible, I think, but they're still basically more of the same thing I've been doing for, oh, for several years now. And the blog, don't get me started about this humblest of humble blogs.



Now, ok, trying a slightly different photo technique isn't really the path out of staleness. Sure. And if I suddenly discover what the real path out of staleness is, I'm there. Until then, enjoy the photos, or whatever.