At my feet

A photo-essay about how I learned to look down.

When I photograph it is almost always with one of my bulky technical cameras. When I photograph I have a specific purpose in mind. I have an idea and a desire to express it, so I collect the gear I feel will best help me in that and I head out — usually to a studio. You see, I almost always photograph people — models — and I prefer to control the entire environment. Light, props, background: I arrange all these things deliberately with intent.

When I go for a walk I rarely take my camera along like I used to do when I started out photographing my world. And lately I have started to feel that I just might be missing something. I long ago learned that there are many benefits to breaking out of my self-defined box now and then and working in new ways, or revisiting older neglected ways.

Shake the dust off. Is that it?

I persuaded my wife that a compact camera that I would be inclined to take on my walks would be an ideal Christmas gift and so she bought me one. It’s an older model Fuji X20, a camera that was recommended to me by peers when I discussed with them my wish-list of features. It had to be small of course, must have a viewfinder — optical preferred — should have an adjustable focal length lens.

You might suggest that I could use my smartphone camera to take spontaneous photos, but for me that is no solution. I always grapple, wrangle, argue with and ultimately lose the fight to get acceptable images from my smartphone (so-called). Between the extremely wide angle lens that it has, the difficulties of persuading the thing to focus on what I want it to, and controlling it without accidentally closing the camera application, it is just a personal nightmare for me so I refuse to use it.

With camera in my coat pocket then I set out waiting for inspiration to strike. Walking quickly through the park near to where I have lived for fourteen years, deep in distracted thought about this and that, I failed to see anything interesting. Of course there’s plenty of interest all around, but I could only see — nothing.

Somehow though, and I suspect my wife’s suggestions helped with this, I started to notice some interesting patterns and textures at my very feet. Here I am walking along staring at the ground and, hey, look at that: cool stuff!

Here are some of my findings.