Speckled [2016]

I took about 3500 photos last week, but was allowed to post 7, fine. Today was my first day back at office after being gone for a week. My car broke down. I owed ten people 20 things. Photography did not enter my mind. Well, it did, but not long enough to produce a single photo. I don't want to shoot the wall for a streak at 11:13 pm.

As I was catching up on a week's worth of podcasts, I heard two remarkably similar thoughts in two unrelated podcasts by two very different podcasters from two very distinct generations. One was the No Name Photo Show hosts talking about the over-capturing epidemic, referring to this Petapixel blog post: petapixel.com/2018/01/02/the-o... Same as me (check the New Year resolution thread), one of the hosts said he wants to shoot fewer photos this year.

The other was Brooks Jensen on the LensWork podcast expressing his belief that anyone who has been active in photography for the last 10-12 years (I have been photographing for 35 years, give or take) can safely quit shooting and spend the rest of their days editing and publishing photos they have already taken.

I started thinking that if I get out of this 365 project alive, I am going to dedicate the next 365 not to shooting a photo a day as much as publishing a photo day -- from the photos I have already taken up until now that I have never published. To give it some structure, I would look for a photo taken on the correct day but in the past.

Well, the opportunity presented itself, or rather pressed itself upon me, even sooner than I thought.

Rather than shooting a wall, here is a January 22, 2016 photo I took of a pepper shaker at the restaurant called Bagels & Brew (brew as in coffee) I have been going to for breakfast every Friday morning for, well, apparently, at least two years.

A couple of things about the shot.

I was into Instagram at that time. I shot it as a square in order to visualize the composition, rather than shooting regular and cropping in Instagram. Instagram now allows uncropped photos, landscape and portrait, but back then it was all about the square.

I remember how excited I was about my find. I thought for a brief moment that the restaurant created this beautiful visual rhyming of the ground pepper and the table surface on purpose. I could not believe people were not going wild for what was right in front of their eyes: no one else was snapping this photo but me. That find actually made me believe I have developed something of a photographer's eye. I still can't always see, and can rarely capture, such interesting juxtapositions in the wild, so to speak, but provided with an unhurried and relatively private moment at an outdoor restaurant table I did pretty well -- in my humble opinion.

Whether it's as good and pretty as I believe it to be, I promise it's better than any wall I could have shot tonight for the streak.

#morning #nature #food #cooking #monday #glass #drink #seed #january #spice #health #no-person #feedbackplease