A little while back I spoke about trying to make images of common place things, of scenes that I was familiar – even overly familiar – with, instead of constantly wishing for something more exotic. That’s not an easy challenge to rise to, much less to walk away from with good images. And while I still haven’t applied that line of thinking to most of my work the way I should have, I did take a first step.

We have a late afternoon, nothing too impressive, but some nice golden light. It’s too late to try and drive anywhere, I’d miss the light while en route. So instead I stayed in, focusing on images I could make by window light in one room of my apartment. Good for a change of venue and for a change in perspective I went with my new 50mm lens for that super-shallow DOF.

Most of the time I’d cringe at the thought of taking photos of my household plants – goodness knows that the internet is already saturated with photos of people’s pretty flowers. So my trick, to let myself get away with it, was to try and see the plants, the everyday mundane objects around me, in a different way. And I’ll mention that I was inspired in no small part by a video my girlfriend had just shown me, some strange marriage of animation between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney, complete with melting clocks and transmorgifying people.

Sadly I wasn’t able to make things melt and reform, but I am pleased with how I managed to render some subjects that I manage to otherwise overlook. The scented oil with the stick-thingies in it, the spines on a cactus, the trunk of a palm tree. I’m always hesitant to stand up and claim that I’ve made art, always afraid that such a statement is pompous and obnoxious. But I’d like to think that in this case, I did manage to at least show the mundane in an artistic way. If nothing else, it was a fun experiment.