Hi, my name is WrongsideoftheCamera.  This is a nom de plume.  If you try hard enough, you can find out my name.  Actually, it probably isn’t that hard, but I like to use my nom de plume to create mystery.  And so no one comes up with the brilliant idea to camp out in front of my house.  Anyway, I like to take photos, in case you haven’t noticed, but my ultimate dream is to shoot for Vogue.  I’ve read the magazine since I was a teenager and have always found the photos to be interesting.  I feel like my photography skills would be an asset to a magazine as esteemed as Vogue.  Please consider the photos below as my portfolio submission.

Sincerely,

WrongsideoftheCamera

And that ladies and gentleman was my cover letter to the editor of Vogue Anna Wintour.  Nah, seriously.  I love fashion and to be able to photograph it would just be grand.  Really grand.  Today I went to the Museum of Fine Arts, coordinates Boston, Massachusetts, planet Earth and I saw an exhibit featuring the sartorial creations of a man named Arnold Scassi.  Scassi, in case you don’t know, designed Hollywood outfits and the extreme confections Mrs Reagan wore in the 1980s.

The great thing about going to museum to see clothes is the fact that you can sit and look at the fabrics and the cuts up close and this makes you look at the clothes in a different way.

First, let’s look at the regular type shots from the exhibit:

And then I decided to get Avedon:

And now to the close-ups of the fabrics:

Museum shooting can prove to be a challenge.  These are priceless works of art that need to be protected, so not too many museums are well lit.  Add to the museums that actually allow you to shoot in them.  Now the Boston Museum of Fine Arts belongs to the category of “yeah, we won’t bother you if you want to shoot in here.”  I mean look at the entry below with the girls photographing each other in front of paintings wearing their interesting outfits.  I’m pretty sure they don’t care.

Now me I like to get people milling about in the galleries and of course the arts themselves.  So some of these feature people, others not:

Sorry for the darkness.  I took my mini-cam with me today and let the python have the day off today.  He needs a rest after all the snow.  Anyway, onto the main part of our show.

Life imitating art:

However, these people did not need a permit to shoot this photo shoot inside the Museum of Fine Arts.  I really don’t understand. The story: I go over and see these two girls in these insane looking outfits taking each other’s photos in the museum.  I thought it looked like kind of crazy, but then I took their photo too:

Mind you it was 18 degrees outside and every conceivable surface in Boston is covered in icy slushy insanity.  Well, anyway, in post production, I decided to edge the photos out.  I wanted them to look weird.  Did I succeed?:

Yeah, I am right now exploring the theme of extreme conditions causing us to rise to never levels of consciousness.  In other words, the cold is driving me nuts.

Photo:

What do you think?  I don’t mean to compare myself to him or that I am nearly as good as he is.  Its just that this reminds me a lot of Monet, whose work I’m not even a huge fan of:

Photography takes up a significant part of my dreams.  My day dreams, not the ones where members of the British Royal Family appear in various capacities.  And what I am thinking about?  For a while I’ve thought “wouldn’t it be great to go to some kind of ungodly cold/hot place and photograph it, I mean really photograph it.”  Not just the surface stuff but be there, trudge through it and photograph it so that the people looking at the photo actually feel like it was to be there.

It also suddenly struck me that in my journalism career, I never would have wanted to endure anything close to this kind of stuff to get a story.  I wouldn’t have endured crazy conditions or anything like that just to get the story.  Don’t get me wrong.  I am a rough and tough kind of a person, but I never would have gone out into a war zone to get a news story.  To get a good photo, I’d so do it.

But here I am just talking about rough weather conditions.  Rough weather that makes you slightly insane, like what I experienced today.  As I may have mentioned in my previous entry, the weather around here lately has been a little cold.  OK, really insanely cold and I just can’t take it anymore.  What possessed me to walk through this crap is beyond me.  The point of my walk wasn’t to take the photos.  It was to run an errand.  The photos that ensued were just pure luck.  As I walked I got so cold I started to feel like I was going to faint or like I was about to walk out of my body.  Like I was entering some new level of consciousness where I hadn’t been before.  Happy to be there, needless to say.

Let’s see the results:

Get ready.  Here comes a long diatribe about winter.  Yeah, I know I should follow the words of my spiritual and comedic hero Mark Twain and just forget about actually wanting to change the weather, instead of just talking about it, but alas I cannot.

Winter, how I once loved you.  How I once loved the fact that when everyone I was in, I was out enjoying you.  I was out in the snow, enjoying the cold, the ice.  How I used to run under the lights, thinking there was more snow there, when it turned out it was just the reflection of the light.  How I once I loved that I had you all to myself.

But at some point, my love turned to hate for you winter.  You took away all of my cute shoe options, you made all pants get covered in melted salt miasma.  I have fallen down in your ugly grip and my heart has stopped on ice slopes brought on by your ugly coverings.

Winter, I must deal with you, the only way I know how.  By photographing it.

Here is not my summery contentedness: