Happy Accidents...
If I were to be completely honest, a number of my long term projects, or graphic transitions in my work, have either been "accidents" or end of the shoot experiments. This was especially the case in more film driven times, but still persists even when I am shooting digitally. The whole Black Cacti project was actually an outgrowth of an art direction decision, where my art director wanted both a 1/3 left and symmetric version of a saguaro trunk. She actually used the 1/3 left version, and the symmetric Kodachrome slide languished in a file cabinet for three years before I realized something significant was lurking there conceptually, click cacti below for BLACK CACTI. Such happy accidents can really open an artist up to possibilities they previously never considered; not always but definitely sometimes...
A recent example of this is the accidental panoramic photo above from last June shooting out in southeastern Utah in the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument. Generally when I work with the IPHONE camera, I am either using it as a latter day POLAROID, or working in square format for my INSTAGRAM feed. However this time, by accident I hit the Pano button and accidentally created the blog opening photo above. A light went on; there may be something to this... So while I was in Utah, I actually began to take some traditional panoramics with the IPHONE. None of them went beyond OK, but before I start to drag things into my style, I always try to gain some understanding of the traditional approach to a technique or piece of equipment.
My favorite photo from those initial experiments is the photo of Grosvenor Arch above in the Cockscomb. What really appealed to me here was how something so stunningly beautiful, is surrounded by far more mundane surroundings. Commonly, most photos of beautiful places do not traffic in this contrast between the unique and the generic. However, by the end of the Utah trip, my interests in working in pano were not those of traditional landscape, though for the life of me it wasn't clear yet where they lied. All I knew was, I liked the vertical disruption in the image that opens the blog, and I had yet to find the non landscape content I wanted to record panoramically.
A few weeks later though, I came back to the issue of vertical disruption while photographing a swimming pool. I actually took over a dozen photos from the exact same vantage point with varied levels of intentional vertical movement of the camera during exposure. What I found was that the border zone between pure chaos, and maintaining a sense of semblance of the initial subject, was the most affective approach. This yielded an outcome where multiple points of view are pieced together from a single vantage point; sort of a parallel to subject Cubism Light.
To some degree the most successful image so far is the photo of my mom's friend's living room in Florida. I like it first because the content breaks radically with the landscape tradition usually associated with panos, but also because the room creates the composition rather than than the photo feeling like it has been composed intentionally by me. While the pool photos works for me visually, it feels a bit too artful. On the other hand, the living room feels like it tells us something about this space, and its occupant, that would be less visible in a rectangular or square architectural interior. This is clearly a work in progress, and where this goes is still unclear.
