Backing Away from #everyday

[Photo: “Newscoop,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I like several things about this photo, which I won’t detail here other than the one more or less insignificant detail I briefly mention in the post.]

In the last several weeks, I’ve been nibbling away at the fringes of the fast-food meal of what passes for my writing aspirations. In the meantime, a hungry little insect has been nibbling away at the me who’s been nibbling away at the fringes of etc. To wit: photography.

The specific trigger here, or rather now, is the daily Instagram series (black-and-white, with occasional splashes of color) I’ve been running since October 2017 — specifically, the approach of Day #1000 in the series.

My Instagram account is here; the hashtag I’ve used for the series is #everydaybandw… which, alas, is also in use by a other photographers. That’s “alas” because Instagram has never supplied a means to search/filter by both the account and a hashtag. So the only practical way of seeing #everydaybandw photos specifically by me is to view my account page, and tap on individual pictures in the grid. (Note: some of those in that series are tinted black-and-white — e.g. this one — or contain “color splash” effects, like this one.) You can also see a selection of my favorites from the series over at SmugMug, with the caveat that it’s updated only occasionally. (If you want to see all #everydaybandw photos, by anyone, try this. Most of those right now are mine, but not all of them.)

Now, there’s nothing inherently special about reaching Magic Number 1000 (or any other — even Magic Number 1). But I’m at a point now where I think I’ve got about all the satisfaction I can out of a series of “one black and white photo a day, of everyday scenes/objects/moments, which have been shot, post-processed, and posted with minimal effort.” At the time the series began, I desperately needed to spend some time “outside my head,” as it were:

• The Pooch had died just a few weeks before.
• I was still working a full week, every week, with no paid leave of any kind…
• …which was taking place — largely by my choice — in a small, enclosed, windowless office I shared with no one at all.

I also had pretty much ignored the whole digital-photography thing, and — although I’d loved photography in general since the 1960s — had not even picked up my film camera gear in probably 15 years.

So the daily photo mission forced me to do something — however glancingly “creative” — not on a specific schedule, but every, single, day.

…and then of course, recently, I’ve had all this opportunity, suddenly, to structure my time anew somehow. Over the last three months, I’ve started to run out of gas on the #everydaybandw journey for a couple of reasons.

First: I’m not getting out and about anywhere in particular much. Thus, I’m carrying a camera and/or phone with me over the same routes, day after day, and I’m running out of things I feel like photographing. There’s always something; and even when there’s pretty much nothing, there’s always a fresh way of seeing it. But I really need more somethings which I can see 100% afresh.

The second and bigger reason I feel I’m ready to move on: no matter what the subject, I’m treating photography too casually for my own taste. I get the basics, even (especially) the basics carried over from the analog-photograpy world: focus, exposure, shutter speed, ISO, lighting, depth-of-field, focal lengths, and the interrelationships among all those pieces. But I need to get deeper stuff about photography: doing artificially long exposure times, for instance; time-lapse and stop-motion photography; using off-camera flash gear effectively. Furthermore, I need to get this new(ish) type of photography — to really understand and take advantage of more than a half-dozen of the hundreds of things my “real” camera can do (all the types of automatic functionality; shutter- vs. aperture-preferred exposure; bracketing for focus and exposure; panoramic photos; 4K mode; etc., etc., etc.). Those things won’t give me (for the most part) new subjects; I’ll still be limited by external circumstances in that respect. But they will increase, and increase dramatically, the ways in which I can see the same subjects.

Beyond what I can do with the real camera — or my phone’s camera, for that matter — I am really feeling the need to “get” the post-processing of digital images by more than superficial means. In specific, I need to “get” the use of Adobe Lightroom (technically now, “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom”). I’ve dabbled in it, but honestly, I’ve never known what the hell I was doing. And I feel the need to get that for real — so I can look at a photo, even in straight-from-the-camera, pre-JPG RAW format — and know immediately what I have to adjust, and by about how much, in order to bring it close to what my mind’s eye imagined when I hit the shutter button.

As it happens, the photo at the top of this post is the first one I really spent any time on with Lightroom. (Caveat: I began with the JPG, not the RAW.) I tried to understand what I was doing each step of the way, and to understand why that wasn’t working, and so how to remedy those flaws (as I saw them) then and there, rather than post-mortem — post-posting, I guess. It’s not a great photo, but it’s notably better in my eyes than the original.

So I’ll go ahead and post to the Instagram #everydaybandw hashtag in a little while; it will be #991 in my series, and it will be “Newscoop,” the photo which heads this RAMH post. I’m not sure what the #1000 photo (on June 22) will be, of course, but I may just make it a collage of four or six of my favorites from the series, rather than try to come up with an extra-special final subject.

And then I’ll back away from #everydaybandw, while not stopping altogether: I still love black-and-white more than color, and “everyday” will continue to preoccupy me (as it must). But I just don’t want to do ONE thing, over and over, and — most importantly — to do it without care.