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Friday Slide Show: Empty Vases
24 January 2025
The days this January have been long and stressful, dealing with problems that have no solutions while trying to keep our head above water. When we get home, we collapse, falling asleep on the couch. But it doesn't help. Yesterday, almost in a fit, we jumped up, grabbed the old Olympus and picked a subject to photograph. It was restorative.
The subject was something we look at every day. The vases in the house. Most of them are Lenox, salvaged from the family home when we couldn't bear the thought they would be thrown away. Pretty things. Small. Some just bud vases. Most have never held a flower, we thought.
They are of various patterns with a sparkling glaze that makes them shine even in the shade of the late afternoon. We stare at them for a long time, trying to decipher their magic.
This particular afternoon, though, we thought we'd set up the camera on a tripod and capture the play of light on a group of them as the sun set. It didn't take long to realize we had the wrong camera and lens for that.
Then we thought we'd take some macros but that didn't work out either. We just weren't seeing on the camera's LCD what we had imagined.
So we resorted to handholding the camera and shooting at a high ISO. The vases were in several locations, only one of them well lit. But the game was composition. We were shooting Raw so we could deal with the exposure issues later.
Overnight it occurred to us that the play of light was not an inaccurate description of what we had been after. But to illustrate it, we would have to remove the color, which had been infused with sunlight, shade and a fluorescent fixture. So we decided to render these in black and white.
We think you can see what we admire about these pieces in the photos of them. There is a certain grace, a way of standing amid the chaos rather than, say, collapsing on a couch, that we found inspiring after all.
