Elevating the Ordinary

I've been shooting alot of different things during this Light Hunters course-people, animals, the sky, fruits, veggies, random flowers and weeds and the like. It's interesting that when you are focusing on things like light, shadow, texture, blur, back lighting and so on, that you can photograph the most ordinary things and see them in the most extraordinary ways.

The photo above is of my husband's wellies, left to dry on our back porch. They've been sitting there for ages and I walk past them every single day. Yesterday, I paused to photograph them and this was the result. I like how they are caked with dirt and how you see the verdigris colour of the chipped paint on our porch. I like how the boot in the foreground is mostly in focus and the one behind is blurred. This photo is special to me-in its own way, it's a really a portrait of my husband.

I decided to try shooting photos at dusk last night. The light in the sky going on 10 p.m. is this odd shade of blue, that I have come to associate with summer on the west coast. I captured this silhouette of our laundry line as the light was fading from the sky.

We have this telephone poll out front of our house and it's just a mess of wires. I liked how in the evening sky, the tangle was back lit against the sky, making it seem even more obvious. This image was shot before the one of laundry line, so the blue of the sky is a different shade.

I read this this morning and thought it expressed exactly how I've been thinking of the work I've been doing for Light Hunters:

  “To me, photography is an art of observation. It's about finding something interesting in an ordinary place... I've found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.”

~Elliot Erwitt