Blind Photography: Sibling Assignment #35

I assigned this one. I've been fascinated by a blog titled, "Dog's Eye View". It's kept by a woman who is legally blind and is a terrific photographer. She leaves her camera on auto and, with her limited eyesight, points the camera at an angle relative to her subject that she thinks will make a good picture. She also experiments a lot. She doesn't really see what she has done until she downloads the photo and sees it enlarged on her computer monitor.

She let's her camera see for her.

I experimented with this idea when InlandEmpireGirl, JEJ, and I went to a junk shop near Curlew. You can see one of my pictures, a glass jar, here, that was taken blindly. I didn't look through the viewfinder. I let the camera see the glass jar for me.

Before exhibiting my latest blind pictures, let me say you can find Silver Valley Girl's photos here and InlandEmpireGirl's shots here.

To fulfill this assignment, I decided to focus on an unusual object on Silver Valley Girl's deck. It's a kitchen sink she has turned into a planter. Here is a blind picture of it. It's my establishing shot:




I took about thirty-five pictures of this sink from a variety of angles, trying to put the camera places I'd have to contort myself to achieve, if I were to look through the viewfinder from that angle. Here are some of the results:

From this angle, you can see the tiny statue that rests on the deck. I like the way it looks like the statue has just washed the apple she's holding in the sink. Now it's ready to eat:


In this picture, I like the way the nozzle dominates, even though in the function of the sink, it is dependent upon the faucet:


This sink is ready to be changed from a planter to a functioning sink:


I decided to transform one of the photgraphs from color to monochrome. For just being a picture of a faucet and a nozzle, this picture has a lot of drama. The tree makes the picture dynamic. I get a sense of movement and dynamism in this blind photograph:


I highly recommend this exercise. It helps us see that our eyes and our insistence on seeing things through the viewfinder can be limiting. Taking pictures blind opens up all kinds of possibilites for seeing and for letting go of our usual way of seeing ourselves as the camera's eyes. It's fun to let the camera do the seeing.