On accidental photography

It was dark and it was cold. I have not been out to photograph Queens Quay for months, so I’m taking this opportunity to document part of the street at night. It’s the first time I’ve done this shooting at night, and also the first time I’ve used my cell phone for the photos.
My stiff fingers struggle with the phone camera settings. This phone wants to be smarter than me and realizes it’s night – therefore, it wants to switch over to “night” mode, whatever that is. I’ve never used it before, so that adds to the complexity of what I’m doing. Occasionally it drifts off into panorama mode; this is ironic, since what I want to do with these shots is make panoramas. I want to experiment with one thing at a time, so I’m constantly switching it back to “normal” mode.
Sometimes weird things happen with the camera, and tonight is no exception. I have a few wild and crazy images – buildings lying on their sides, both sides of the street in the same image, lights flying all over the place. A good example is the image from last week’s blog post. I liked this effect, so I’m trying to replicate it – without a whole lot of success so far. The problem with accidental photography is that it’s … an accident, not necessarily something that can or should be repeated.

I messed around with some of the more promising images in Photoshop, printed them and hung them up on the wall for a few weeks. My conclusion: not great. But it was only when I was showing someone a painted mixed media piece with rough-cut edges that I realized I could do that with my digital prints as well. This is the result.