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12/3/11

Out of Focus

Weaving between the lines...

Rebel against perceived failure to create something new and different.

As a child we were told to color between the lines; as an adolescent learning to drive we were told to drive between the lines; as an adult if we paint-by-number we have to stay within the lines. The implication from childhood upwards is clear that staying within the boundaries is good and going out of them is bad. We are told to learn from our mistakes but are then also punished for them rather than turn a misdeed into a good deed.


In photography a blur is a mistake, an accident, something that shouldn't happen if you stay in focus. It is an aberration that supposedly makes a good photograph bad. What happens though if we decide to take that photo and play with it, as a small child does with finger painting before learning the rules, through editing and processing?

It is an occasion to let our creative minds wander and smear stuff around just as that little kindergartner does with paint and paper and no rules. What does it matter if it isn't a master photograph with all the qualities we are told make a good exposure? Sometimes experimenting with post processing a photo doesn't always work out but surprisingly more often than not, if we fool around some, we create a great picture. It is entirely different, inimitable and likely a more interesting one than originally intended, unique art of our own we probably would not have thought of. There's a lesson about life in there somewhere.


These photographs after being downloaded weren't what I had originally visualized within the lines I had drawn in my mind. My preconceptions of what the photograph was supposed to look like within the original lines in my head didn't work out. Rather than perceive photographs gone wrong as bad and let the opportunity to learn from a miscalculation go by I tried turning them into something good. Never waste the probability of getting a lucky break.