There are a lot of photos I take that don't get posted. I'd guess that about 1 in 10 of the photos I take are worth posting and, even within those, there is still competition which who will make it into my audience's eyes. The rest remain as they are -- whether it's meaningless silver and gelatin on film, or 0's and 1's on my hard drive.
But we all love director's cuts, don't we? I don't know about you, but my inhibitions fade considerably when I'm drunk, which is the case right now on this Sunday night.
I dug through my old stuff and found the above photo. I remember taking it; it was summer of last year. I was with my friends and their daughter Abi on Spring Street after a wonderful dinner and some wine and I noticed there was a woman and her dog approaching, walking towards us.
Abi took notice and excitedly yelled, "Dog!" and reached her hand out for it, so I readied my camera. It would have been a pretty sweet moment if the dog had reciprocated her gesture of friendship.
However the dog would have none of it, and turned the other way. With the connection missed, I filed this one away as a failure. It was really blurry anyway; I was wobbly, shooting with a slow shutter and the sun beneath the horizon.
But now that I look at it again, it's grown a bit on me. I don't normally deep-dive into my own photos for fear of sounding self-aggrandizing, but I'm drunk, so I'll tell you what made me like this photo again:
In spite of the motion blur, Abi's outstretched hand is pretty well defined and so is the dog. I'm big on hand gestures in my photos, and Abi's hand has that forlorn look to it as she tried to get the dog's attention and failed. The motion blur on the pavement adds to the dog's leftward retreat as it evaded her reach. One of my favorite things in this photo is that vertical seam in the sidewalk that slashes the scene in two, as if to create a wall between them.
Abi's touch would go unrequited, both parties going in their opposite directions, never to meet again.
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