#167 - Still Life

I think most people - at one level or another - have a need to be creative in some way. For some, it may be working with wood or tying flies or painting. Me, I have an almost constant need to be creative. My creativity (such as it is) takes many forms. Often, I express myself creatively through this or my other blog, My Wordsmithing. Other times, I express myself through writing song lyrics.

Sometimes, I try to express myself creatively through photography. Now, I don't claim to be a great photographer. I'll never be confused with Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, or Anne Geddes. Heck, my wife Teresa has a much better eye than I do when it comes to photography. Still, from time to time, things do catch my eye and inspire me to get out my camera. Tonight while making dinner was one of those times.

I was cutting up vegetables for dinner, a little stir fry to go with some rice. I finished chopping up some garlic, then set the knife I was using down on the cutting board. As I did, I looked down at the arrangement of cut vegetables on the board and thought, this looks like a picture. So I decided it should be.

I pulled out my trusty Pentax K-r, slapped my 50-millimeter, f2 prime lens on it, and here is the result. I took two versions, one with and one without flash. let me know what you think.

Taken with in-camera flash

Taken without flash

The angle is slightly different, but the arrangement is the same in each image, both of them taken with a lens I bought on eBay for $25. I ran both images through a program to auto-correct the exposure, and I cropped the flash version a little. Then I re-sized each image to one-fifth its original size for this blog entry. Otherwise, I did nothing to either image.

If I had been thinking, I might have moved the chopped garlic closer to the other vegetables or moved the knife a little further away for the sake of symmetry. Be that as it may, I kind of like how these pictures came out.

I guess if there is a message here it is that one never knows when or where the creative muse will show herself. The question is: will you be ready when she does?