I’m always fascinated with details. There’s a beauty in simple things that we might miss when we just look at it in a glance.
Technically, I shoot using my Fujifilm XT10 camera with XF35mm f1.4 lens attached most of the time. I really love how this fix lens can deliver a sharp and clear image, especially when you take a close up shot.
For me, there’s an art of ‘notice the unnoticed‘ in photography. We tend to ignore a lot of things around us because they are not extraordinary for us. It’s very different when we travel somewhere, to outdoor nature for example. The beauty of landscape will be something that instantly please our eyes.
However, if we want to look at those ‘not-so-interesting’ things differently, we might be able to get something nice from them. For example, a cup of coffee, flowers in your garden, your toy collection, your watch, raindrops on your car window, pile of books on your desk, anything. If you adjust your angle right, or if you can adjust their placement right as well, you will get something different from those ordinary, orthodox things.
Even though we might not always be able to turn every single regular stuffs into pretty things just like magic, looking at details of objects that we see in everyday life might be able to train our sensitivity towards ‘photography-material’ scenes.
I still remember there’s this one time I uploaded a pic that focuses on a pair of sneakers that were worn by someone on a train. “It’s only a picture of shoes, but why does it look pretty?” said someone in my instagram comment box.
It’s an exercise for me, especially for the eyes. This helps me to think, what angle that works for different objects.
Taking this into philosophical approach, to see things closer means we force ourselves to understand things better and to see things from a different perspective. The question is, do we want to look closer to our surroundings?
