Goals

worm's eye view of cat, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

Although dumping massive amounts of data on Flickr in and of itself accomplishes nothing, knowing that I want to save more this month than I had been saving over the past two years makes me feel, I don't know, photographer-y.
I bought a little three dollar tripod, so now I can stabilize my shots without calling up a deep stillness while lying on the ground (see above) or having a box upon which to put the camera.
I know this is a slow escalation of equipment, where I eventually become one of those people with a lensbaby, just trying to think of tiny things to shoot, but I'm fairly safe for now, as I barely use the stuff currently available to me, to say nothing of what I could get on ebay.

Impressing myself (and nobody else)

Bee Martyr, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I'm in an awkward phase where I have a chunk of stuff that I've spent a lot of time and drive space on, and I mostly want to make more and learn more, but this would probably also be a good stage to show off, to get some kind of real feedback on what I've done so far. I had a picture in our little art crawl, so that's one thing, but I've got a bunch of stuff that I like, at least, so that's about the place where people are supposed to say hey, hang this shit up in your grocery store.

I have no real idea of how to do macro photography, I use those automatic digital cameras a lot, so figuring things out is often just an unintelligent screaming conversation. I just pointed the camera and took picture after picture at different zooms until one turned out where you can see the bee and the camera promptly died for want of batteries.

Many this way pass

PICT1458, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I spend a lot of time photographing the highbridge, because I am still mostly an incidental photographer, and I cross the bridge on foot somewhat often. It's probably the biggest structure near my house, or the nearest big structure to my house.
I think about how rusted it gets and how quickly--the rust from the railings pours down over the structural elements, which is, as I understand it, not such a great thing. I wish kids or advertisers or someone with the time energy and resources to repaint the thing more often, would. A while back there was an initiative to put weird, confusing artistic signs around neighborhoods because studies showed people drove slower, if not more attentively, where art was present.
At the very least, someone should write "This too shall pass" on the other side of the railing, as it's a somewhat popular suicide destination in the Twin Cities.

Old things

Chuck, illustrated by Uncle Arnie, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

The idea of an image *belonging* to me in any sense appeals to my senseless photo greed.
Certain two dimensional Prentice family artifacts belong to me and about 7 other people, so I have a continuing interest in preserving them, at least digitally. Things in the public domain belong to everyone, and therefore everyone, although someone has already scanned Moses King's Handbook of the United States (http://books.google.com/books?id=3FE6AAAAMAAJ although perhaps their scans of the smaller images leave something wanting...), and I gave away that old music book, so I don't think I have any original editions of public domain material not freely available elsewhere. But, naturally I have as much right to public domain material that I find online as I do for
something I rescue from the trash and scan myself.
I want to photograph every antique thing, but I don't yet know what the tips and tricks are for shooting small.

What was lost

CIMG0611, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

None of the computers at my immediate disposal have a good relationship with CDs.
So it took me actually finding CDs around and remembering to take them out to the studio to find out that a lot of stuff I'd written off as lost is readily at my disposal.
I've been making fake double exposures, and I'm really loving how I've saved so many redundant or shitty pictures, because trying to make a photo accidental can only go so far, large stacks of photos that are almost good in places but are still kind of pedestrian are exactly what is needed to fake an accidental double exposure, but still get a result that has good definition in places.
There is much to do.

Holgafied--Artificial and very artificial

moon and church, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I am carefully making the appearance of accidents.
This picture has a very different kind of wandering viewfinder--taking each small picture in a panorama obscures how the final product will look. The perspective seems as though it was shot through some special lens because all of the objects sort of lean in towards the nodal point (the camera.)

Shitty photo, revisited

PICT1406, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

Making the fake lomo thing happen is a lot of fun for me. Maybe this style appeals to so many photographers and wannabes because they get a sympathetic masochistic thrill when everything you can plan for has gone wrong in a photo. But when just one thing or two is wrong with a photo, it's not miraculous, it's just the usual, so we delete it or set it aside, without the notion that it could be pink and green and flying through an aquarium, beautiful or terrible or both.