Making Lemonade, or, turning Whoops into Wow

February 24, 2009 by Lee Hammaker

Making Lemonade

When I first got my Cannon powershot camera from Amazon.com I broke open the box and started to look over the camera with the manual. I quickly realized how complicated it was and wasn't sure if I had made a good choose in buying such a camera. After a few deep breaths I inserted some batteries and started snapping pictures of my little room. I would look at the pictures and quickly delete them, they turned out all blurry and again I wondered if I hadn't made an expensive mistake.

Several days later I remembered what I had read in one of the many books I had bought about digital photography: "Even blurry pictures can be made into good art." I also remembered what my friend Nay had told me her art instructor mentioned oh so long ago, "Do not through anything out." This last comment had created a "packrat" mentality.

So there I was again shooting pictures at random in my apartment and looking a little more closely at them for signs of "arty" worth. There were still precious few but they were good. One night I went out for a walk around 2 in the morning (you can do this in Altoona.)

My Canon Powershot was slung around my neck and I was crossing a bridge. I had some how accidentally pushed the shutter button down while walking along the crest of the bridge. When I got back to my apartment to look at some of the night shots I had taken I noticed the one photo of a streak of light. I was about to delete it when I remembered again about creative pictures. I then started looking into deliberately shaking the camera when taking pictures. Some of them were good, some of them were bad, but some turned out great.

When I got my Nikon D60 I stated to get really creative and set up lights around my apartment and photographing them during the night, shaking the camera just so. I now have dozens of pictures of sparks and light streaks shooting through the picture frame with different colors.

But you know, you can apply this to anything creative. While painting with Corel I made several mistakes and was about to toss the whole thing. I hesitated for an instant and decided to go in a whole different direction. It turned out better.

###

Lee Hammaker has a passion for graphic arts and has been involved in computer graphics for over 15 years. Although he does it mostly for personal satisfaction he does contract out to businesses and organizations through GoFreelance. He has a new website where he is selling some of his unique designs on clothing at Half Infinity Productions. His artwork has appeared on various websites.