There I Fixed It #5

I am sharing two photos that were taken at Ernie's Midtown Pub this  past Tuesday. They will be the final photos in this series, There I Fixed It.  I  am eager to return to using zoom lenses and sharing color photos. Maybe, it is fitting that both photos for this week contain reflections because I am trying to review what I have learned during this brief experiment.  

Nikon 35mm

This first photo is of Ernie's bar with the liquor bottles reflecting in the mirror.  The bar mirror reveals part of the decor within the pub which consists of framed posters and vintage black and white photos of the city.  The pub is housed in two adjacent older buildings which still retain their old walk in display windows providing lots of natural light.  

The second photo is a photo of a framed poster hanging near one of those windows.  It caught my attention because it provides an example of what I have learned during this series. This photo has a funky liquified effect caused by the glass protecting this poster.  What you don't see is the actual poster beneath that glass.  What you do see is the outdoor street scene reflected on the protective glass covering that poster.  From the direction I photographed the poster, the outdoor street scene was the dominant image but two steps to the left and the street scene vanished revealing only the poster.

 

My black and white only experience reminded me of how I crave color in photographs.  To produce the images I wanted,  I felt limited by predetermining whether an image will be color or black and white.  That decision is best left to the photographer only after confronting their image.  I used to think that all good black and white images must contain true black areas and some true white areas hosted by many shades of gray blending with the white and black extremes.  Last week's photograph of a pasture scene in the middle of a blizzard had no true black or white areas.  All the tones were within the grey range because blizzards, fog, smoke, etc. tend to limit our range of vision and really make everything within them tonally similar.

I learned that shooting with only a fixed lens was confining.  It was awkward to see potential photos missed due to immediacy and access issues.  Those scene within the larger scene shots were missed because it took time to move my body to a different location.  I missed being able to easily feature a given focal point within a scene. On a positive note, using only a fixed lens reminded me of how lazy a photographer I can be.  By not being more inclined to move to a different perspective to gain an even better perspective, I risk missing opportunities to see something unique.  That particular piece of learning resonated with me by reminding me of how I need to re-adjust my perspective mentally to help me better understand others who may hold different viewpoints on matters not relating to photography.

Sooner or later we all will feel stuck in a photographic rut.  We look for something more than what we currently do or see around us.  My name for the series, There I Fixed It,  had a hint of sarcasm in it because I didn't expect that this experiment with my photographic routine would lead me to a dramatic aha revelation into my photography but it brought me to reconsider some attitudes and photographic routines.  As I exit my black and white period, I feel like joining Paul Simon singing the chorus of "Kodachrome".    But the photographer in me is not quite ready to sing that "everything looks worse in black and white".