There’s nothing like a trip to a foreign land with a camera in your hand to get you thinking more broadly about photography. It’s not like I need another excuse to shoot, but it would be nice to have some structure to my endeavor.
I have friends who’ve undertaken the now-(in)famous 365 days of portraits project on Flickr, but I’m not interested in being tied to that kind of schedule. My thought, which struck me this morning as I brushed my teeth in front of the mirror, was that the ordinary deserves a place in all this picture taking. That idea is at the heart of the 365 day theme, but the spirit there is a bit different.
My plan is to take four shots of one subject each day, one in color and one in B&W, with each of my two lenses. The focus will be on ordinary objects, those things I see every day but pass by because of familiarity. What are the visual qualities of those things, and does a photograph either heighten or diminish an item’s stature?
I took a lot of pictures of ordinary things as I walked the streets of Isla Mujeres, and when I came home, I found myself looking differently at the ordinary things in my own world. So I’ll create a set on Flickr to hold these new shots and hope the servers don’t crash.