Black Sheep, End of Year Walkabout

12/31/2017

Tempe, AZ

Instead of focusing on the entire walkabout, this time I'll concentrate on a particular aspect of it, which was one of the many different things I experienced about the pictures I took.

This picture in particular is what I have come to call la "Oveja negra" or the ugly duckling. This is one of the photos I took my time to explore, and at that moment I didn't feel that I "got the shot", at least not the one that I tried to find, if that makes any sense.

To put in context, most of the times, my process into taking pictures, is basically walking around, and if anything strikes me as interesting, even if I don't know exactly what it was, even if all I have is a gut feeling, I raise the camera to my eye, and I start exploring the scene through the dark rectangle of the camera...zooming in, out, focusing and unfocusing, tilting the camera, walking around it...its different sections..including or excluding objects, colors or lines...etc.etc.

At times when I do this I come out the other end of it, feeling a sense of achievement, that I got the shot. At other times, well that is precisely why I call it the black sheep...because I come out the other end not entirely sure what I was looking for and with a sense of incompleteness, a missing something.

On the last walkabout of the year, it happened that I invoked upon myself a challenge I somethings offer myself, which is to work the black sheep in post-production with the same diligence I would other photographs and continue to explore them. Sometimes I find the shot I wanted during this post production phase, or merely the fact that I came around to editing some days later, and then seeing the shots on my computer screen I'm like "there it is!"... sometimes I come out the end of that editing phase, still not sure..and so if I'm to take the challenge a little further (as appropriate for end of year endeavors), I decided to explore these pictures in the "sharing" phase, or the publishing phase, perhaps I can find a shot here as well.

Why? Because I recognize that sometimes my own process, or my own expectations, impose certain constraints over the creative process, and sometimes other sets of eyes can look at it, and help me see things differently and find the shot.

What do you think?

Andres Gonzalez