There seems to be a lot of oxalis on this blog lately

Yeah. Don't quite know the why on that.

To be honest, when I go out in my father's yard with my camera I don't go out with the idea that I'm going to take... oh, say fifty pictures of lilies that day. It's more the idea of looking for neat shapes and patterns.

And yes, the insect/spider photos count as neat shapes and patterns too.

If I had to explain to someone what I was trying to do with my photography, my first reaction would be what do you mean "my photography"? The pointless stuff that I put on the blog?

If the someone then actually managed to get me to admit that the photography was not entirely pointless because if I wanted pointless photography I wouldn't even bother to look at where the camera was aiming when I took a picture, I'd probably still have trouble answering the question of what I'm trying to do with my photography.

Am I trying to do anything?

I mean, there's a couple of ways to look at this, right? The more typical me way would be to say that I'm playing with a toy. I'm taking an autofocus camera and trying to make it do things that it's not designed to do (like, say, focus on a spider that it doesn't think it can see). It's simply making images, that's all. Like when I was a kid.

Ok, I should explain what I mean by that. When I was a kid in the pre-digital era (yes, boys and girls, back in the stone age), I loved taking pictures. Of anything. Didn't matter what. That stopped when I got old enough to have to pay for my own film processing, though. Cheapness won out over random images. Now that digital cameras have eliminated the whole processing thing, maybe I've just gone back to being a kid playing with a toy.

On the other hand, you can't (or maybe you can, actually. I can't, though) deny that the photos you see on the blog aren't random. They may be pointless, but there's been a bit of thought put into them. Some things end up cropped in certain ways that might seem odd, true, but even the cropping isn't random. I'm putting things out there in the specific form that I want you to see them in.

So what do I want you to see? Well, that takes us back to what are you trying to do with your photography? and I'm really not entirely sure about that. What you see here has, I guess, pleased me in some way. Sometimes it's made me look at mundane things in a bit of a different way, sometimes I've found (or think I've found) an intriguing pattern, and sometimes I just think it's pretty. Anyone searching for actual meaning might be tilting at windmills for all I know.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I do have a hidden agenda. So hidden that it's a secret even to me.

Maybe there's a point to the pointless photography after all.








And now, ladies and gentlemen, the blog will, before your very eyes, turn into a pumpkin....