grated cheese bokeh
This image was taken Saturday night at our friends' home. Their daughter (the blurry child in the background) turns four at the end of this week, and unlike last year, my yin and I will be unable to attend her birthday party. Producing these blurred backgrounds – at least with a stock lens kit – is more challenging than one might think.
The dog, however, was unimpressed.
As the night progressed, a Scrabble game appeared, and I took the opportunity to add exposure and composition to the mix. This idea was stolen from a photograph I once saw in either Tricycle or Ascent.
wisdom, overexposed and losing focus
One thing I like about this photo is its ability to communicate complex ideas with mundane objects. So, while the referent in this photograph is nothing more than a board (bored?) game, its true subject is the effect of time and context on our understanding of knowledge. This idea could undoubtedly be developed more thoroughly by staging additional words, but we were there to play Scrabble, not photograph philosophy or explore the epistemology and teleology of space-time.
Speaking of, during our game CNN reported the world had not, in fact, ended as predicted by some millennialists and true believers. This didn't come as a surprise to me, but I was somewhat perplexed by why the network was reporting on it at all. It seems that, simply by being alive and watching television, the viewing public already knew that the rapture hadn't come; therefore, this information seemed both redundant and unnecessary.
But this is beside the point.
The point is that the experimentation reached its pinnacle last night. My yin and I had spent the afternoon filming a short, simple hatha yoga video for one of her clients; and although the camera performed admirably, I found myself running into several potential future problems. So, once we were finished, my yin went to overdub vocals while I searched for tutorials on how to smooth out pans and build a makeshift Steadicam.
The amount of information is truly overwhelming, though, and I soon found myself frustrated. It's tantalizingly easy to fall into the Black Hole of How-To, so much so that one can spend more time looking at instructional videos than developing his or own expression. Certain in this knowledge, I walked outside, set up my painfully inadequate tripod, and pointed it our front door:
I stared at it a little harder, waiting for it to open.
I remembered the words of Gaston Bachelard, which I would not read until before sunrise the next morning:
"Words... are little houses, each with its cellar and garret. Common-sense lives on the ground floor, always ready to engage in 'foreign commerce,' or on the same level as the others, the passers-by, who are never dreamers. To go upstairs in the word house, is to withdraw, step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream, it is losing oneself in the distant corridors of an obscure etymology, looking for treasures that cannot be found in words. To mount and descend in the words themselves - this is a poet's life. To mount too high or descend too low, is allowed in the case of poets, who bring earth and sky together. Must the philosopher alone be condemned by his peers always to live on the ground floor?"
Then I realized:
Images are no different than words...
and perhaps even more so.
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