Pfotograffy

Takin’ pitchas is hard.

I have friends that are photographers. My friend Steve LaBadessa is an excellent photographer, for instance:

I’ve seen him work before. It’s a complicated thing to get a casual photograph.

Rick Lee is in my Blogroll. He’s terrific too. He has the ability to frame the mundane in an interesting way. Nothing is boring to look at if he looks at it. Our blogfriend Ruth Anne’s brother Paul Gero is a good photographer too.

When I got married, my wife and I were broke, and had to think outside the box a bit about everything. We hired a newspaper photographer, a friend of Steve’s, I think, to take our wedding pictures. He worked for a day’s pay and turned all the negatives over to us, unlike wedding photographers’ usual M.O. of charging you every time you want a print. The pictures were better, and more candid without being amateurish.

Candid without being amateurish is what all people strive for in modern photography. You don’t pose, exactly. You do, but without the appearance of posing. Jay Leno wasn’t just strolling through that garden, after all.

I need to take pictures that are like really old pictures now. People used to pose like they were fruit in a still life. People had to stand stock-still because of the long shutter times, and got in the habit of arranging themselves and staring right into the camera. I love photos like that. People almost never look at the camera like that now.

I used to take what are the equivalent of faux-candid pictures of my furniture. I’d just place them in my house and take a picture. I’m told that my photographs are OK for what they are. My equipment is old and not very useful, and I am not trained.

I’m working towards having the furniture stare out of the picture now, like the newlyweds. No context. Nothing deflected. Plain. It’s really hard to photograph the furniture properly and I’ve got to master it.

Funny thing about the sepia people gazing out of the photograph. They’re still looking right at us. No candid shot, real or a set-up, ever does that. The squares always win.