Photography: Intentional Camera Movement

I shot in full manual mode on my DSLR for the first time the other day. It allowed me to experiment with intentional camera movement (moving the camera while using a slow shutter speed) and abstract photography.

To be honest, I have mixed feelings about these photos, especially the first one. They look different when uploaded to different social media sites, and as thumbnails vs larger versions. As a thumbnail, the first one especially tends to look much too dark. Expanded, the lighting is more like I intended it to be. (Don’t get me wrong, I intended it to be under-exposed for mood. However, I didn’t mean for it to be so dark that you couldn’t make out the colours).

Turns out that the size and brightness of my screen determines whether the first picture looks like a moody painting or like a bunch of barely-visible smudges.

So…I don’t know. Mixed feelings, I guess.

Poetry: Unchained Eulogy

you would have been thirty-six
yesterday
if you’d lived
past valentine’s day
always and never
are both
for you

Flash Fiction: Artificial

In the future, perhaps there will be a robot with my name. With my face. A robot who loves like me, cries like me, thinks thoughts of the same shape.

Perhaps it will be a writer, in a sterile city of steel. My words would sound on, though my flesh has ebbed away. They would not come from my mouth, but one exactly like it, in a world where blood is a relic and humanity an imperfect memory.

Perhaps that is immortality. Stretching across eternity, my parts remade, re-oiled, recycled. A perfect replica to void my grave. A me that I won’t know. Perhaps it isn’t.

Our future is made of pixels. A cure for every disease. A smile for every tear. Plastic sunshine.

Perhaps our future is a manicured dream. Perhaps it is a perfect reality of quietly whirring machines and empty graveyards.

Perhaps it is not ours at all.

Flash Fiction: The All-Seeing

Ominous eyes watch from the trees. They blink in the sky too. When I hold my hands under the tap, their baleful gaze rises from the water.

Failure, comes their sloshing. Don’t bother, they blink from above. Tomorrow is another yesterday, they rustle from the trees.

They had a lot to say, but they’re like that sometimes. I leave the window open an inch, because I know they like to wander when they’re lonely.

I dim the lights, and welcome the embrace of pillows like fallen clouds. I spare a smile for the trees and the night sky.

“Goodnight, my friend,” I say. “I shall see you tomorrow.”

Photography: Dewdrops Like Rubies

I snapped this with my phone this morning. It rained overnight, leaving behind a magical oceanscape of dew (most of which my mid-range Galaxy phone’s camera, understandably, couldn’t do much justice to).

I like the way the colours turned out. Deep red with a touch of glimmer…the whole thing makes me think of rubies.

Photography: Time Capsule

The shutterbug has bitten once again. I’ve yet to take out my DSLR again (though, as I keep saying, I’ll do it tomorrow), but I’ve been digging in my photo archives, and I found some surprising things. Namely, images sitting there unedited for 7+ years, gathering digital dust.

Did I not see anything in them 7 years ago? Did I mean to work on them, but forgot? Who knows. I see something in them now, so here they are, surfacing after a 7-year slumber. The first and last pictures were taken with an old mobile phone. The others were shot with an entry-level Canon DSLR.

Coming back to it after so many years, my approach to photography has changed. I used to think it was just about capturing as realistic an image as possible. I had no idea of all the things my DSLR could do. I was, believe it or not, shooting on auto the whole time.

I want to try more creative things this time. I want to shoot in full manual, and experiment with slow shutter speeds, intentional camera movement, and multiple exposures. I want to create art.

I hope I remembered to take the battery out 7 years ago…

Flash Fiction: Ghosts

Each leaf, she said, was a ghost. It lived bright and sun-speckled, its days spent moving the sky like blue paint, its nights giggling among the embers of the dying sun. It blazed like it was forever. Then it fell with the autumn light. It was ephemeral. Liminal.

I was a child then, and I didn’t know many big words. I asked her what that meant. Liminal.
Do you hear them giggling still? she asked me. Turned her gaze to their paper-light. They will pass on soon.

Many leaves have fallen since then. I walk that same forest alone, and I hear her words still. I think I understand.

In some places, the veils are thin.

Ghosts linger.