What a washing machine might see…
3 minute read
May 24, 2020, 11:06 AM
I’m currently working on a photography project where I’m going through my old photos from the period before I started using Flickr seriously, which means stuff prior to around September 2013, with the goal of putting more stuff from the back catalog on my Flickr feed. What I’ve noticed is that of all of the photos that I took, I took a lot of stinkers, but there is a lot of good stuff that got passed over in the past, mostly because the Life and Times and Photography formats tend to tell a story through the photos, with various levels of narration, and if an otherwise good photo doesn’t help to tell that story, it typically won’t get used. Flickr is a different format from Schumin Web, and photos tend to be viewed individually rather than as collections, though that capacity does exist. So photos that are good but otherwise irrelevant to the story will “work” there. The recent Journal entry about my trip to Hampton Roads is a good example. That entry used 79(!) photos from the four-day trip, and there was a lot that I didn’t cover because that was already an obscene amount of photos for one Journal entry, and I already found pacing to be a challenge when writing that one, wanting to cover a lot but not go on for too long.
In any case, I found a group of photos that I did on February 26, 2013 that I never used anywhere. I set a camera inside the washing machine and the dryer in my apartment building, and set the shutter timer, and posed for the camera. I believe that my intent was to use one of these as a splash photo, but I ultimately didn’t like any of them enough to run them on the front of the website, so this whole set got shelved. I think that I rejected them primarily because it was rather late at night, and I wasn’t really looking my best. However, in going back through these for the Flickr project, they made me laugh a little bit, because the even though the concept was a bit ridiculous, the results aren’t as bad as I thought at the time.
So here they are. First the washer:
And then the dryer:
I trust that you now understand why I decided not to run any of these photos on the site. It was a good enough idea, but I was definitely not looking my best in these shots, and the smile in the last shot seemed forced. Also, it is worth noting that for the first two dryer photos, that is one of my old college yearbooks being used as a platform for the camera. I haven’t cracked one of those open in many years, but whenever I need a heavy object to hold something down, The Bluestone is usually the first thing that I reach for, because while they’re pretty boring yearbooks, they make a great paperweight.
So there you go, I suppose.
Categories: Photography