Garrison Keillor once joked that he had a photographer friend who took “artistic” portraits of people. Keillor said that he knew the images were “art” because they were shot in black-and-white, and the people in the photographs were never smiling.
I think I too might be heading down a path where I could be accused of trying just a wee bit too hard to be “edgy.” I’ve been playing around the past few days, shooting home snapshots of my son Abell's dog, Buddha. I pan the camera during the exposure; I have the flash turned on, so that it freezes part of the image, while the rest is blurry.
To really qualify as “art,” I should probably give these images some kind of gallery-worthy titles--something like “Enlightenment: The Buddha Series” or maybe “Buddha: Reclining Nudes”
It feels a little weird...after 30 years of trying to get my pictures “sharp,” these just-for-fun snapshots are all about fuzzy. As seems to be the case so often these days with my personal (nonprofessional) pictures, I used my Canon SD800IS point-and-shoot. That little toy is nearly always in my pocket (sometimes even when I’m on a professional assignment, using my 5D SLRs.) From that pocket-sized camera comes (maybe, could-be, might-be) “art.”
