Serendipity
I was interested in trying to find new ways to document the world around me. As a photographer working at a small paper in and area built on routine events and thankfully not a lot of 'bad' news, the chance of becoming stale is there. So we always try to find new ways to use our craft or new stories to tell.
I wanted to see what just happens when I just lift a camera up and fire. I began doing this as I drove around just pointing the camera out the window and snapping off a shot. I was calling these 'drive-by shootings' as a sort of tongue-in-cheek descriptive title. Though many snickered and liked the title, it doesn't seem fitting for a news source. So after many weeks of not really having a working title other than one we couldn't or didn't feel we should use, Serendipity was born.
This isn't just an exercise of photography, but a way to look at life that normally goes by unnoticed. These aren't going to be extraordinary, in fact their strength will hopefully come from how ordinary they really are. Just snippets of a world on the side.
I established a couple of rules. These have to be full-frame no-cropping allowed images. They can be black and white or color, but they're likely to be mostly black and white in order to focus solely on the content and not how pretty the colors are. The color photographs will be color because the color is either the content or a strong part of the content. I can't look through the camera, they have to be from the hip as they say.
I'm not sure how long I'll do this or even how interesting or different the images will be over time, but I think if we take a little time to look at the photographs we might either get a better understanding of who we are or at least try imagine what the subjects in the frames are thinking and doing. Sorta like people watching at the mall or on a park bench.
I wanted to see what just happens when I just lift a camera up and fire. I began doing this as I drove around just pointing the camera out the window and snapping off a shot. I was calling these 'drive-by shootings' as a sort of tongue-in-cheek descriptive title. Though many snickered and liked the title, it doesn't seem fitting for a news source. So after many weeks of not really having a working title other than one we couldn't or didn't feel we should use, Serendipity was born.
This isn't just an exercise of photography, but a way to look at life that normally goes by unnoticed. These aren't going to be extraordinary, in fact their strength will hopefully come from how ordinary they really are. Just snippets of a world on the side.
I established a couple of rules. These have to be full-frame no-cropping allowed images. They can be black and white or color, but they're likely to be mostly black and white in order to focus solely on the content and not how pretty the colors are. The color photographs will be color because the color is either the content or a strong part of the content. I can't look through the camera, they have to be from the hip as they say.
I'm not sure how long I'll do this or even how interesting or different the images will be over time, but I think if we take a little time to look at the photographs we might either get a better understanding of who we are or at least try imagine what the subjects in the frames are thinking and doing. Sorta like people watching at the mall or on a park bench.
