One of the things I am trying to think about when I make a photo is the storytelling element. I think the title is one of the very important elements in the storytelling that goes on in photography. The viewer doesn’t have much else to go on, there is the title and then there is the image. It is up to the viewer to create the story in their mind.
With that in mind, I was looking at the image above that I took the day after our Ice Storm. I kind of liked it and thought I would upload it to Flickr. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t think of a title. I thought of my standard “state the obvious” (ice on branch) but I’m sick of stating the obvious. I wanted to come up with something better than that. I decided to do something else, since my brain was being uncooperative. I would let fate title this photo.
I turned iTunes on random and thought, “the first song that comes on, the first line of that song, that will be the title of this photo. I don’t care what it is.”
So I pushed play and Metallica’s One came on. I listened to the beginning musical lines and thought “wow, if I could title this photo with music this would be perfect” because have you ever sat and listened to the musical introduction to this song? It’s really beautiful and sad and it seemed fitting. But then the first lines played: “I can’t remember anything, can’t tell if this is true or a dream.” It was perfect.
So I have taken to doing this exercise lately when I upload photos to Flickr and it’s been fun – a nice creative exercise for my brain. The two random things together seem to create an interesting story. Sometimes the lyric is quite appropriate, like the one for the photo above.
Many of the songs that come up are songs that I have only heard a few times. I download a lot of music that I forget about. Doing this exercise has reintroduced me to songs that I’ve been enjoying lately.
I thought, for fun, I would put together a playlist of these random songs and post them here as a blog post. At the end of the post is a gallery of the photos if you are interested in the seeing them as well.
Blatherskite 