When I completed my first photo 365 project (taking a picture a day for a year), people kept asking me what I’d learned, and I kept shrugging and saying something vague like “lots of things.” It was true. I’d learned too much to encapsulate it all in one short summary. Now that I’ve completed my second year of a photo 365 (or 366 in the case of 2012) and am moving into my third year, I feel obligated to try a little harder to articulate the value of a 365. This year I hope to write a series of blog posts talking about each little lesson I encounter as I encounter it. Some will be new lessons for me, and some will be things I’ve absorbed over the course of the past two years that I am learning anew as I continue to lift the viewfinder to my eye.
Today’s lesson: The big picture can happen in a small space.
This is my photo for today, January 2. The title is “Have a litte Grey on this gray day.” It was taken in response to the photo prompt “grey or gray.” The photo prompt came from a Flickr group called Our Daily Challenge.
The black background in this photo is a coffee pot. It is a small, single cup coffee pot. I put the mug on it and snapped a close up with a 100mm macro lens. The macro lens makes the subject appear disproportionately large up close. I also set the aperture to f/2.8, which gave me a narrow depth of field and blurred out the background despite the fact that there was no distance at all between the subject and the background.
I don’t have a studio. I don’t any studio sets. I only have a small space to work with indoors. But in this case, small was all that was necessary. The black background used for this shot is no more than a few inches wide in reality. I could have decided that the shot as I envisioned it wasn’t doable because my resources and my space were limited. Instead, I just started experimenting and realized that my small space was all I needed to get the big picture the way I wanted it.
The kitchen doesn’t have to be tidy, and the world doesn’t have to be cooperating for a shot like this to work. Sometimes it takes a wide view to capture the beauty of any given moment, but so very often it just takes focusing on the one beautiful aspect of an otherwise unspectacular scene to create beauty where you need it.
Additional note: This photo was processed in Aperture by converting to high contrast black and white.
