Light waves

What's the story behind this photo? I'll tell you.

It was another busy day at work. I had not taken a fallback morning photo on the walk with the dog, and I had nothing to look forward to photographing at home. So my last chance was shooting some lights from the roof of the parking structure before driving home. Normally, I shoot out of focus streetlights and car lights that end up looking something like this: tookapic.com/photos/570458. But today, I did not have my "real" camera, so it was down to whatever my iPhone could produce.

I bought a couple of days ago an app for taking night photos, NightCap. One of its features is the ability to shoot long exposure shots that create light trails, so I tried that. Unfortunately, I realized that the phone had to be pretty steady, preferably on a tripod, for the light trails to look good. Rather than fighting it, I embraced the jaggedness of my light trails and after a few experiments came up with this photo. Well, not exactly this photo. The red wavy lines are break lights on the freeway, the blue and white lines are headlights, the yellow on the right is a building and the green and white rectangle below it is a road sign. It would all make sense if I showed you the original, but we are only uploading one photo a day, and this is the photo I am uploading. It is not the photo that came out of NightCap.

What I ended up doing was putting it through the Prisma app, which turns normal photos into works of art in the style of various famous artists or art school. There is a Van Gogh, a Mondrian, a Degas, a Roy Lichtenstein, Japanese anime and everything in between. I saved about a dozen versions of this photo, and this is the one I liked the best, though several other ones also look very good. I honestly could not tell you which style this is supposed to represent. If it was a normal photo, maybe the style would be more recognizable, but this was not a normal photo to begin with.

So with all this said, is this a complete waste of time, mine and yours? Is this not "photography", not even "art"? Or is it both? I like looking at it, which in the end, I think is all that matters. What do you think? I would appreciate any comments.

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