I’d strongly suggest looking through the photos first.

This is an old piece I wrote regarding a photo project I did a few years ago. I decided to upload this in light of exposing a photography website. I only lightly touched some of the language, so for the most part this serves as a view into my tongue from two years prior. I profess that I am not the best photographer, so please keep that in mind when considering my points; these are the words of an absolutely-no-formal-training, teenage, amateur photographer–this entire piece may be most (only) pertinent to those with similar lack of backgrounds.

The inspiration for Backyard Banality is fittingly pedestrian. The idea coalesced in May: a May after my university results had come and gone, after some meaningless exams, and after most of the other time-thieving parts of my life were rapidly whisked away–I was left to wait for college to come and collect me in half a years time. In short, I got really bored. So I started thinking of things to pass my time with, and with this train of thought I arrived squarely on photography. I’ve coddled a love of photography for quite a while but I hadn’t really done anything with it. Yeah I knew a bit about a camera, and the “M” mode wasn’t synonymous with “malevolent” anymore, but I still didn’t feel like I could comfortably consider myself a photographer. I could shoot, sure, but so could just about anyone with a phone. I had tasted what that mean to me, to be a photographer proper–I had taken some shots that even I enjoyed looking at, but only a couple. I want more of those; I wished to further refine my compositional eye, and the only way I knew to do that was through practice. So I devised this project.

That’s a lot of background, but I feel it adds a bit to the meaning of the images and one’s understanding of the project on a whole. I needed to improve my composition, and in that spirit I thought to dramatically simplify my setup–cut the flashy subjects and cool gear and get right down to taking a proper shot. I went out almost daily into the dinky garden with an a5100 and clicked to my heart’s content. I snuck in a couple shots with a 55-210 (82.5-315 FF), but most were with a Sigma 30 2.8 (45 FF). In the spirit of keeping things as simple as possible, I shot in JPEG: everything you see is SOOC, though I did mess around with some of the built in profiles sometimes (mostly at the end, when I started to get a bit bored/creatively drained). There are some shots I wish I cropped, others I wish I crushed the blacks more, or deepened the DOF–but I didn’t, and the time has passed, so onto the next shot. I found that over the course of this project, my success rate climbed rather drastically as I took more time ensuring my framing and lighting was as I wished it to be, lessening the feeling of needing post-processing to fix easy mistakes.

I staged 5 shots: the first rather obviously, is the flying rock shot. If you look to the right of the frame you’ll see the stone I chucked a couple shots prior which I couldn’t nab the focus of. The 3 pictures of the white flower surrounded by dead flowers and leaves were slightly staged as well–I turned the flower to face the camera as well as clearing out some ground. The last staged shot is the one with the flower looking through the foliage. I took a couple shots without the flower, and they lacked focus, so I brought it in. I tried my best to stage as few shots as possible; for one, I’m not used to shooting like that, but also because the goal of the project as it was initially conceived was to make do with what I’ve got, and staging obviously runs counter to that. However, these shots are markedly improved with the changes I made, so in the name of art I set aside my a priori priorities and allowed for some adjustments.

I’m proud of these shots, but I’m not deluding myself into thinking that any of them are extraordinary in any way. They’re boring, somewhat; photos of leaves and plants and rocks can only be so interesting when you’re not a pro. However, that’s rather the point of Backyard Banality, I suppose: to revel in the aesthetic pleasure of the normal, the regular, the good old same old never gonna get old stuff that–while not groundbreaking–is still perfectly enjoyable, if done right. Obviously whether I’ve done right is up to you, the viewer, but I for one have learnt the most I’ve ever learnt about photography in these past couple months than all the (admittedly not that long) time I’ve been shooting. More than anything, I found this project to be quite enjoyable, and I’d strongly suggest that any photographer who, like me, feels like they are losing their edge, or are missing some key “focal point” of their photography, something that really clicks, to try it out. Go out to a relatively small, ideally nearby area every day (hopefully at varied times), and start shooting. I found it a bit tedious/boring at first–“what could I possibly shoot in such a small, empty garden?”–but after a short while you’ll find that you’re finding these wondrous shots, these shots of the banal that incredibly, become beautiful.