Project 3 Results: Texture in photographs

Here we are, back in the saddle. The Wichita Flickr group went on a photowalk in Old Town this morning, and I joined them for a couple hours. A couple of folks lamented the hard light of a cloudless winter day, but I saw it as an advantage for this project.

The goal of this assignment was to show texture.

My favorite is this utility pole covered in old staples... Old Town has a lot of bars and there are often ads for this band or that stuck to the poles. The flyers come down, but nobody bothers to remove the staples. I think what I like most about this picture is the random pattern the staples produce.

I also like this one as an example of contrasting textures. Not related to assignment, but I'm proud of myself for remembering to control my depth-of-field to blur out the unappealing background. There were other shots earlier in the walk where I'd forgotten to take that into account.

Project thoughts:

As usual, there was no clear direction, just a discussion of texture with the assignment implied. It almost seems too easy... bricks, wood, sand, just about anything will give an abstract texture, and I shot plenty of those things. If I'd re-read the project page more closely this time around, I could have given myself more focus with "texture in context" and "contrasting textures" and so on, as discussed in the overview. As it is, I didn't go out with that in mind, but I'll have to dig further in the text to come up with this kind of more focused direction on future projects.

I did manage to avoid, on this second try, what I complained about in Project 2: getting bogged down with "blank canvas" and trying too hard to be artistic.