Ordinary Places

This is going to sound weird, but I was starting to think that this set of pictures from the pinhole camera was cursed.

A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about how I always try to make an effort to take the pinhole camera to interesting places where there are statues or interesting buildings or pretty flowers, and the pinhole does magical things and makes them look all dreamy and special, so I wondered what would happen if I just took the pinhole to random, ordinary places. Would those places look special? Would there be any value to those pictures? Or interest?

How much interest could I find with a pinhole camera in the Target parking lot?



About that much.

I followed through on my idea, spending a weekend with the pinhole camera riding around on my passenger seat while I did my regular weekend errands. Sometimes I saw a parking lot, pulled the car in, and took random shots of the street:





and sometimes I just took pictures of random things that I saw:



I tried taking several through my windshield, with the camera braced on the steering wheel, while stopped at red lights, but this is the only one that came out clearly:



The others are all pretty blurry, which I think is because the car vibrates when it's running and the camera needs to be still.

While that Target picture is kind of bland, I think some of the others are kind of interesting:





and I was excited to see how the experiment turned out, so as soon as the roll was done I stopped at Walgreen's to drop them off, and was confronted with a sign reading, "Photo Department is Out of Order".

What? For how long? I asked an employee, or, more correctly, I started to.

"I saw the sign on the photo department counter, and---"

"The photo department is out of order."

"The whole department, or just the machine that processes the photos?"

OK, yes, that was totally bitchy, but he did interrupt me, and I had just said that I saw the sign. Did he think I needed someone to read it to me? Based on his response, which was, "Uhhhhh...", I'm not sure he was thinking at all, actually.

The photo processing machine was repaired, days later, so I picked up my photos and CD Rom, eager to get home and post them to my flickr account.

And then when I got home my router was broken and I had no internet for over a week.

Cursed, I tell you. Getting these photos posted was one disaster after another, but that fire hydrant and the Mayo Garden Center photos were totally worth it.