Everything is a Subject

Today I listened to Saul Leiter talk. He was a famous photographer known for unconventional and extremely creative compositions. He did a lot of street photos. He said something I agree with. He said there was always something to photograph.

I agree with that. I think that a good photographer should always be able to find a subject, even if it’s a sock or a bar of soap. You just have to be able to see what it can become. Believing this doesn’t make it easy, however.

Today I was in the shower, and I saw the light coming in through a glass block window high on the wall. I wondered if there was a way to turn that into something.

I took a few shots with an 18-50 mm zoom, and it was no good. I couldn’t get far enough away to get much in the photo. I decided to try out a very odd lens: a Laowa 9mm zero-distortion lens. I got it for travel. I thought it would be good for shooting indoors. It goes down to f/2.8, which is better than the zoom, so I thought it might handle low light better and also fill an optical niche.

I got one or two shots I felt were worth editing. It would help me learn to edit, and for all I knew the photos might turn out to be better than I thought. I have learned that you don’t know what you have until you edit.

Well. Thats an exaggeration. Sometimes it’s clear you have garbage, but often shots that look like they could never be redeemed turn out to be acceptable. The right crop, the right color adjustments…you might save something you think was not worth shooting in the first place.

I picked the shot I thought was closest to good, and I turned it into this:

WordPress will not upload a file produced by Photolab, or at least it won’t for me, so I had to save this a second time using a website. I don’t know if all the quality will be there. This was already reduced to 700 pixels in width, which was bad enough. It will do for blogging.

It will not win any prizes, but it’s a lot better than what I started with. It doesn’t look like a soccer mom made it by dropping her camera in the bathroom. You can tell someone thought about it and tried to get the best composition possible with the raw material. There are several shapes that interact with each other to make a composition.

It’s not what I hoped for at all. I wanted to make something from the light coming in the window, but then I got all excited about the brooding black and white look. I can get some sunstars if I edit it differently, but I haven’t done that yet.

I might do it again from a different perspective.

I guess I could call it “New Year’s Hangover,” although I didn’t have a hangover when I shot it. Imagine some guy lying on the floor of his shower, unable to believe he has to stand up and function.

I also shot a bottle sitting on the edge of the bathtub. I had an idea. Shots of people walking away look good when they are next to things like walls that shrink in the distance. I thought maybe I could play around and get something similar from a bottle sitting next to a wall. I came up with the following photo.

It’s not what I wanted, but I enjoyed fooling with it. I think I need to shoot it over again from a slightly different angle. When the light is right. Not now. Then maybe one day I can find an extremely short person to take the bottle’s place. He will have to be about 9 inches tall.

I will continue shooting in the house, and I should be able to get some very nice pictures in the workshop, where there is so much interesting junk.

Maybe if I plan these things a little better, I can get some shots that are really good.

MORE

I wrote something incorrect earlier.

I posted a black and white photo of my shower, and I said I had managed to get sunstars out of it earlier. It turns out I was confusing it with another photo which I like better. The sunstars are still in the other photo, and I will post it below.

I think this is the image I wanted to publish in the first place. The angles are more dramatic, and that glass block wall on the right adds interest.