Morning Photography

I ran into the office this morning (voluntarily, even though I was given the option of not doing so) because I was planning to come to campus anyway, and since it was a holiday the elevator was turned off, and I had to take the stairs. I probably needed the exercise (if we're being honest, I could leave out the "probably"), and the stairwell was also filled with photographic opportunities:





I was apparently into that tall, tapering shape today.

I took the photograph of the ladder because I've been trying to take interesting photos of ordinary things after last weekend's experiment, and have met with partial success. There are a lot of photos that I haven't posted because they come out looking as ordinary as the objects in them, but I kind of like that ladder, and I really like this cup that was on the counter in the office kitchen the other day:



It's just a ceramic mug, but I really like the shadows on the curves and the lines in the glaze.

After I left the office (I was only there for about ten minutes) I headed over to the university gardens, where it was very cold and the sun was still coming up, so that I could take the pinhole camera for a walk:



I have no idea what I was going for there. The pinhole continues to be hit or miss, with some pictures under exposed (like the one above) and some horribly overexposed or right on the verge of it (like the ones below):





The red at the bottom is where the overexposure started leaking in. If I left the pinhole open longer, then the whole thing would have gone red, like those are about to, and everything in them would have been unrecognizable.

Not that overexposure is the only thing that makes things unrecognizable. This:



and this:



are photos of the same grouping of chairs, from almost the same angle. The pinhole camera is not good with deep shadows any more than it is with bright light.

It's much better in bright light, as you can see from the not-overexposed part of the birdhouse above or from the photo of these frost-covered herbs:



I took some pictures of them with my regular camera, for comparison:







And then I used the blurry, odd quality of the pinhole to get this photo from inside the rusty truck carcass in the back of the gardens:



That's the view through the windshield, bullet holes and all.

When I ran out of film for the pinhole I took some pictures with my regular camera, too:









and then headed to Walgreen's to get the film developed and to try out my new strategy for pre-empting their unwanted photography critiques.

"Hi. I'd like to drop off this film? It's from a homemade camera, and the pictures will probably be blurry and might be overexposed. Please do whatever you can, and I'll pay for the photo CD either way."

I don't know if it was the offer to pay, or the fact that I gave a whole bunch of information up front, but it actually worked. Walgreen's managed not to critique my photos.

Which is fine, since I'm doing enough of that myself.