8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Tag: black and white photos

Chapter List

  • Photographic Oddity

    I’ve written a few times about the black and white photography that accompanies the posts on this blog.  What I haven’t mentioned as often is the shades of vulnerability I encounter in that act of taking such non-traditional photos in public.

    Let’s define something: I think of a traditional photo as something that someone out in the wilds of a public space might expect one to take a photo of, like say, a scenic view, a bit of shapely architecture, a group of people, an animal, flowers, or some kind of public performance. Everyone takes pics of these things. They are quote… normal.

    A non-traditional photo is something else that usually falls outside of that category: say, snapping pics of a crack in the pavement, a macro of the textured bark on a tree, a storm drain cover, a street sign, one’s own feet, or even the whorls of clouds in the sky. Not everyone points their camera at these sorts of things. They are, um… less normal.

    My black and white photography tends to stray almost exclusively into the non-traditional realm.

    And having partaken in increasingly frequent acts of non-traditional photography over the last few months, I have noticed that with every click of the shutter I have been putting myself into a weird sort of public performance and place and vulnerability.

    I stopped while walking through Paris in August (when we were there on vacation) pausing to point my camera at a mailbox. Parisians who for the most part went about their lives indifferent to my existence on that trip, instead turned their heads and payed a bit more attention to my non-traditional moment of photography.

    It draws more attention to take odd photos than to take photos of things people expect to take photos of. People’s heads turn. There is a moment of “what’s that guy doing?” and then they move on… but still a moment.

    It didn’t bother me, of course.

    It was just a curiosity of consideration, and I couldn’t help but ponder what was going through the minds of commuting Parisians as some curious Canadian snapped serious pics of the relatively mundane in an otherwise massively photogenic city like that.

    I was a standout, an oddity, and temporarily creatively vulnerable to something I can’t quite put my finger on.

  • Reality Thirst

    As insurmountable as the social media algorithms often seem to me, occasionally I break through for a few moments and sense the craving beyond.

    I started taking a lot of black and white photographs lately. If you are reading this post where I published it, on my blog, you may have noticed that each is accompanied by an often-unrelated black and white image. There is nothing particularly secret or hidden in the connection: I just like taking photos and was using the effort of writing here as a place to showcase some of my other (very human) work.

    As I was taking all these photos it occurred to me that I should be sharing them with others besides the handful of readers on this (very new and very obscure) blog project: so I started a fresh Instagram account, gave it a silly name, and started uploading monochrome pics, including many of the ones you can see at the top of these posts.

    Viral is the wrong word. 

    But there was certainly a gush of unprovoked interest in my photos.

    Raw. Simple. Often just fuzzy macros of textures from my yard and neighbourhood, these pics are not works of art. But neither are they slop. They are intentional snaps and observations collected from micro-adventures by yours truly. 

    And people flocked, are flocking, seem to be continuing to flock to follow and like and comment on those pictures. 

    It was a side effort that spun off from the main effort that has become orders of magnitude more public than the original. 

    People, it seems, are craving, yearning, thirsting for something real and interesting.

    This post was original posted on of poets & processors.

  • Monochrome Me

    A month into a photo project that is forcing me to post more black and white photography left me pondering an important question about the niche: what is so great about monochromatic images?

    I tried to wing this to the camera. I turned the camera on my own face (to practice some of that voice work on camera thing I’ve been doing) and attempted to talk about light and shadow and tonality and contrasting subjects, all of it in a meaningful way that didn’t make me sound like a tourist explaining that this thousand year old monument was neat-o, huh?

    It occurred to me half way through filming that while, yeah, I love the vibe of black and white photography, what has been captivating me about it as a photographer lately is that it is a kind of simple constraint.

    As I wander through my fourth decade of photographic hobbyism I find myself wrestling with a paradox: I could go buy more expensive equipment, travel to interesting places, and photograph amazing sights with pixel perfect clarity—like everyone else.

    Or I can find a voice of my own.

    I can try to stand out for my own style.

    Try to tell my own story.

    Try to to turn the camera into something more than a photocopier for the instagram top ten list of popular photo subjects and instead shape it into a mirror for me.

    And it isn’t (just) about the black and white.

    No.

    Rather, it’s about shaping the experience with the camera, locking in the effort to a set theme, or sticking with a single lens for a span of time, or putting the camera into monochrome mode and… and… AND… finding constraints that challenge me to break out of the perfectionism trap.