09-08-10 – The Camera Made Me Do It

Oh yeah. That fits. Which of your friends (that are not photographers) would see how beautiful that is?

Oh yeah. That fits. Which of your friends (that are not photographers) would see how beautiful that is?

I have a lot of things to fit this theme. I really have taken to looking at things differently since I got my camera. Last week my Aunt asked me “What ever possessed you to take a picture of a bunch of straws?!” Well, they were colorful, had a fun shape and a repetitive pattern. I asked her if she liked the photo and she said she did. Of course she’s my aunt so she’s kind of bias, but still; I like that I can make someone look at an ordinary object a little differently.

My original thought for this one was “WTF? I don’t have ANYTHING for this week”. Then I started parsing my archive and was shocked by how many photos I have of cracked walls, broken windows, discarded toys, strange signs, architectural oddities and just plain junk that I looked at and thought “Wow, that looks cool, let them take a picture of that”. Now I know why people stare at me when I am down on my knees on a busy street, leaning sideways trying to frame something they don’t even know exists.

One would think this behavior would not be THAT strange in New York.

I wouldn’t count people out completely..not say if it’s a macro shot or some weird angle that you probably wouldn’t view someone from. Know what I mean?

i was over on the gulf coast today and came across something and another something and combined them for my shot. while i like the results it was set up. will that count?

I’m glad to read some of the other comments; it’s makes me feel my selections are more on topic. Regarding U-man‘s “Probably, as long as the camera made you do it”, I have that in spades. Don’t know if it’ll play well, but it’s a macro of the pages of a yellow pages phone book left outside in the monsoon elements all summer long. Why? Because I thought at the time ‘I bet if this thing got wet and dry enough times the pages would get all funky and I could make it work in a picture somehow.?’

Don’t know how well it works; but it’s definitely the camera that made me do it.

Probably…as long as the camera made you do it.

i most likely would have taken a picture of the first object* but it combined with the second was a juxtaposition too good to pass up. and while i have stuff from my archives for this contest i was hoping to find a new image.

*when i shot film there was the tendency to take a picture or two of out of the ordinary. with no cost constraints shooting digital i have gobs of images that are very close variations of each other. or that simply wouldn’t have been taken on film.

what i don’t understand is why cameras have a delete feature. unless the image is completely out of focus or otherwise unusable why wouldn’t you wait until you could download it and see it full size before deleting it? flash memory is cheap and unless you are on extended vacation with limited memory …… well you can see where this is going.

i once had a friend tell me his granddaughter went to europe and shot all her vacation photos at 640 pixels to save space on the memory card. WTF? a few grand for the trip and they couldn’t pop 25-50 bucks for additional flash memory? to say nothing of not being able to make a decent print later.

Hmm, so is this a theme for “Odd stuff I saw that I took a picture of”, or “stuff that I wouldn’t have done if I didn’t have a camera”?

For the second one, setting a fountain pen on fire with a butane torch would be one example.

Either is OK but I would lean toward the found photo rather than the made-up photo. One of the main (albeit fuzzy) ideas of this this is to show how we photographic oddballs look at the world a bit differently.