Mike Broadway – PhotoBlog

Austin Surreal

It was a case of use it or lose it, vacation time that is, so I took Friday off intending to go downtown with the camera. The day was overcast and the light flat so I postponed; Saturday morning brought the hard shadows and warm tints that I had wanted so off I went. Excluding some productive vacations, it has been 15 months since I set out to take photographs: the final step in my aesthetic recuperation.

I am happy with the results but aware that I might be too easily satisfied. Thom Hogan recently wrote an article on his site, titled “One in 76” (scroll down his 2010 News and Comments archive and you will find it), in which he says that he does not like coming home with a lot of good shots but nothing that shows he pushed the boundaries. Historically my keeper ratio has been similar to the 1 in 36 that Thom describes; my ratio yesterday was about 1 in 8 suggesting I wasn’t trying hard enough.

I have a lot of photographs of people entering or exiting a large frame like the one shown here. It’s something of a formula: find an interesting background such as a street mural or White Sands, New Mexico, or Calgary Beach, Scotland, and wait for someone to enter from stage left or stage right. This is the pattern followed by no less than 6 of the 15 images I have posted from yesterday’s expedition. It’s a good pattern, I like the images aesthetically and semanitcally, but it’s a safe approach that keeps me well inside my comfort zone: utilizing longer focal lengths and avoiding the risk of up close eye contact.

If I am to turn Saturday morning downtown into a series, going back multiple times, then I will need to go outside that comfort zone and grow a little. If I don’t then I will just end up with 16, 24 or 32 “keepers” of the same thing in different colors.