There for the Seeing

Anatomy Lesson, 2009

My Fotolog blog is called There for the Seeing. (I don’t post there as often as I do at Flickr, and would stop posting there altogether except that there are a few friends and a few daily glimpses of the far flung world I’d miss.) The blog is called that in recognition of my belief that there’s good material for photography in your own backyard if you just let yourself be sensitive enough to see it.

As I’ve described before, my mode of operation when I’m out taking pictures, especially if I’m traveling, is to concentrate closely and then move quickly to the next thing I want to concentrate on closely. It’s a little schizophrenic, but it works for me. I took a lot of pictures I like, for example, and covered a lot of ground out in the Pacific Northwest recently in just thirty-six hours, time which also included “day job” work, breakfast with relatives and, somewhere in there, a night’s sleep.

A lot of photographers feel like they have to get away from home to take interesting pictures. I sure did for a long time. I wasn’t so arrogant as to believe that I’d taken all the good pictures there were to be had near where I live. But I wasn’t a very good practitioner of my own “There for the Seeing” belief.

So when the economy slowed down and put a damper on discretionary travel, I dedicated this year to being more diligent about exploring photographic opportunities within my own environs. The Surf Series was one result of that. Another was a return to my Summer in the Resort series. I recently added to yet another series of Shriner parade photographs and even produced a book based on that series. (You can preview the few pages of the book here.)

Anatomy Lesson, above (click on it to see it larger), was the result of a specific attempt to slow down. While walking down at the beach one morning, my eye didn't seem to be drawn to much initially. So I went up on the boardwalk, sat down on a bench, pointed my camera at the beach in front of me and decided I’d see what I’d get if I took a picture every fifteen seconds or so. Ten minutes resulted in more than sixty shots. (Okay, so I’m impatient when it comes to counting seconds).

This isn’t the stuff of great art, and if I were trying to make a study of the human form it would be a pretty dismal stab in that direction. But in its own way it drew my attention to all the different body types people have and, by my primitive marks, what their skeletons might look like.