making the amazing….mundane.

Sometimes I think I shoot better with mundane subjects. Because when faced with an object that is unusual, I often lose sight of my goal of making a creative and interesting photograph, and I just photograph the object for what it is, straightforward and unoriginal.

While going through a batch of photos from the past weekend the other day, I noticed how disappointed I was with some of my photos. Sometimes when shooting an object, I seem to shoot it from the most unoriginal, boring, documentary-style humanly possible. I don’t know why I do this.

Then I was looking at some shots later in the set, when I started experimenting with things like shallow depth of field and coming in very close and tight on my subject, and I was very pleased with these photos. This is style I enjoy putting to use in my work.

But then it dawned on me what’s going on here. Take this photo here of this amazing gurney from Sunday:

Boring as anything. Uninteresting angle- straight ahead. Garbage in the left corner that detracts from the subject. Semi-distracting background.

And then I have this shot of a bed which I also took Sunday, later in the day:

What’s the difference between these two subjects? It’s so obvious. That first subject, the gurney, is amazing. It’s amazing to see such an old and rare piece of medical history in person. Patients were strapped to this cart and wheeled around from place to place. I can
imagine attendants holding down patients in the middle of a psychotic episode on this cold metal platform. And now here it sits, completely quiet, rusting, aging peacefully after so many years of turmoil.

This piece of equipment is amazing.

And in my excitement and enthusiasm, I take a picture of this object- forgetting to apply myself just slightly more and get a visually more interesting photo. I’m too busy marveling at this piece of history.

Then I have a shot like this:

Which is fairly mundane subject matter. A rusty file box filed with old employee time cards, out on a desk in a coalbreaker. What to do? And because the object is much more unoriginal…every day…I think I am not distracted by it, and so my creative wheels turn just a little more to get a better exposure, a more interesting angle….something to
make the photo captivating.

Now that I am aware that I do this, I’m going to start trying to take a step back when working with unusual subject matter, and throw out the first couple ideas for a photo that are obvious approaches. Hopefully my results will end up better.