I’ve actually had a Flickr account for a while, now, but I’ve never really used it for much. I just got a new digital camera, though, and had to take the opportunity to take pictures of some of the local nature. The good thing about this is that I didn’t even have to go anywhere. I can pretty much walk right out of my front door and, boom, trees. Pretty groovy.
    Anyway, having taken some pictures, I was suddenly struck with the urge to do something with some of them. So, Flickr.
    In taking these photos, I realized there were a few with a certain, shall we say, theme. One of the things I played with was my camera’s “macro” mode, the point of which being that you can stick it right up close to something to get a very close-up photo. Super. But it got me thinking …
    If you want to take artsy-looking pictures, this is pretty much all you have to do. You just stick the camera right up close to something–it can even be something mundane and boring, doesn’t matter–and take an extreme close-up of it, preferably with the background behind said object all fuzzy and out-of-focus. Just keep doing this and … Tada! You’re an artist!
    Here are some of my samples exploiting this technique.

    This weird, knobby stick thing I found growing out of a tree is one of my favorites, because, if you look at the right-hand side, you can see something that vaguely resembles a creepy, upside-down skull face.
    This is, of course, one of the major differences between myself and some other people. I look at this and see a creepy upside-down skull face. Because I’m more or less an atheist. A Christian would have just assumed any image growing in the side of a tree must be that of Jesus. They would have declared it a miracle, called all the local churches, contacted the media, and the stick would probably have been printed in a couple of tabloids. But, no. I just see an upside-down skull.
    Anyway, this picture also illustrates another aspect of arty photos: Don’t frame the subject in the center. No. Framing things in the middle of the picture is for people taking crappy vacation snapshots. For artists, what you want to do is frame it off-center. Pretend you don’t even care that an interesting-looking stick is even there. Not caring makes you look cool. You want to give people the impression that you were just out to take a blurry picture of the backdrop, and, what do ya’ know, that stick just happened to be there, precisely positioned to just happen to be in perfect focus.

    This is my other favorite. It’s also a stick, but it’s not even an interesting one. This is pretty much a perfect illustration of the whole theme of my post. It’s a twig. It just happened to be there, hanging down from a branch overhead. There’s nothing notable about it. In fact, there’s this great, big, interesting landscape right behind, but, no, I focused on the twig.
    This makes people think. They ask themselves, “Why on Earth would this obviously gifted photographer take a picture of this twig? Why would he ignore the great scenery behind it?” Their minds then run wild, and they start inventing all sorts of theories. They ultimately decide that the picture of the twig is a brilliant metaphor for human life, as people become so caught up in the bad, the unpleasant, the everyday humdrummity of life–unduly focusing in on the twig, as it were–that they completely ignore the wonderful aspects of life and the beauty of the world around them–a la, the great, big, blurry background.
    They would then probably give me some kind of award and offer me a lot of money for my picture. Which would be a little silly since I can print out as many of these fuckers as I want, so it’s not like they’d be getting a one-of-a-kind painting or anything. But, they’d pay that money anyway, buy a print, hang it on their wall, and explain to all visitors about the subtlety of the composition and the profundity of the underlying themes.

… But really, the twig was just getting in the way of my big, pretty landscape, so I took a picture of it, instead.

    Since I’ve got this stuff on Flickr, I reckon you can always go there if you care to see more of my crappy photography. There may even be more of my crappy photography there in the future, depending on if I feel like it at the time.