Yo kids!
So I actually committed enough to this idea to go out with my camera on an odd pajama'd foray in my alleyway for a lil' snapshot creativity. I actually was hoping to get a photo that I'd been picturing in my head for literally years, featuring this tree on the grass strip dividing the street that intersects the alleyway. It lines up perfectly with the view down my alleyway and looks pretty cool, lit up by the streetlight and framed by the dark alleyway. So to precede the sloppy weirdness that follows this paragraph, I did have a plan. I would like to claim that, in my defense.
Once I found myself intrepidly positioned in the centre of the alleyway, clad in my stripey pajamas (because my original plans for the evening had involved falling asleep and didn't take into account a restless itch to art something), I raised my chalice of photography, the ol' FUJI X-A1, in a toast to me and my artistic vision. "Tonight, we feast on film-et mignon, my friends," I said to my many and varied friends, gathered in the Great Hall. The candles were doing that cool thing where they float above us and everyone was beaming at me, because I was standing where Dumbledore usually stands. Except one thing: the tree of destiny could not even slightly be detected by my chalice. My ornate goblet, how could it fail me! I mumbled a few awkward words about failure and lost dreams to conclude my toast, and sat back down. The crowd gathered along the long, wooden dinner tables supped their mead in silence. Or I guess butter beer. I don't know, my motivation to keep the Harry Potter reference going died along with my artistic aspirations.
Yes, alas, all my camera could pick up was, well, nothing. Just darkness. Amazing what the eye can see and the camera cannot! Once again, biology is superior to machine. Man cannot hope to mimic what evolution has perfected. Thinking vague thoughts about blind watchmakers and the fact that I didn't have my phone on me, I wandered further and further down the alleyway until my camera could pick up some light, which it then could not focus. Night shooting: it's almost like objects need to have light upon them to bounce off of them and then be received by some sort of light-receiving device like a retina or some shit so that it can then be visually perceived. Like perhaps vision is necessary to see things, I guess is what I'm saying.
Anyways, finally I reduced my artistic pursuits to blurring the street lights by fiddling around with my aperture settings and I got this bad boy:
Because when you don't have a tripod, embrace the chaos. Whoa, so arty! I actually am oddly fond of this because it's one of the first ones I took, so I super fucked it up because I didn't realize what would happen when I set the f stop to 22. I was very surprised that it took ages for my camera to process what was happening in front of it, and I was actually worried that I'd caused it some irreparable damage by challenging it too much (c'mon, you know the feeling when you have 20 tabs open on Chrome and then you try to open Powerpoint too and you're like shit, I've really done it this time), but turns out it was just doing what I had asked it to. Problem was I didn't realize what that was until I took a look-see! Anyways, I like that this photo was both born of and appears to be sheer randomness. There is no intentional composition or technique to it. In a sense, it sums up my entire approach to photography, which is to twiddle knobs in an uninformed fashion and then press down the button at the top and see what happens. Because honestly, I feel like I try too hard to do everything else the "right" way - arranging my future plans responsibly, studying diligently, handling my working roles professionally - and this is just fun to totally mess up and do weirdly!
So be ready for more purposeless, unintelligent and generally misguided photography pursuits in the future. For that is all I shall give ye! Hear hear!
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