The Worldwide Photo Walk is almost upon us! I really hope lots of people show up, even if they don’t register. A couple of the other leaders are posting equipment and recommendations, so I figured I’d do something similar, here.
I will be taking a medium-sized photo bag with a short telezoom, a Lensbaby 3G, a flash, and my D100, with a spare card and batteries. For longer walks (think: day at the zoo), I typically only take the body and one telezoom lens to keep the weight down. But this is a short walk, so I don’t mind lugging the extra pounds. I will also have a Slik monopod and micro ballhead for slower shutter speeds.
The local paper, the Los Alamos Monitor, was kind enough to do a special insert for me to support this walk. I’ll scan in the article and post it here soon. Unfortunately, the article makes it a little difficult to actually get all the information you need without reading the whole thing. Still, they were kind enough to give me lots of room in the paper, so with any luck we’ll see a good turnout.
Even though my chosen location is not as exciting as other cities’, I think there’s great potential for getting shooters to find a new way of looking at the world around them. This is one of my basic drivers for doing experimental photography – how to present the mundane in new ways. It’s not just the challenge of the photographer to get a unique angle on something, but of the artist inside the photographer to get viewers to see something new in the subject. A picture of a coin may not be exciting, but a picture of a coin in a child’s hand as they put it into a candy machine tells an entirely different story. Doing the same shot from the perspective of a smaller child watching big brother or big sister makes it even more complex still.
My real hope, then, is to get people who enjoy taking pictures to start to make pictures. What better way than to take them someplace familiar and let them watch how other people see their world.
Check back here in a couple of days – I plan to have a link up to the group flickr site for your enjoyment!
