Excerpt 10

Thinking sideways:

"I had always thought of spiders' webs covered with dewdrops as celestial jewelry, although until a few years ago I photographed them only as if they were architectural forms. I would position my tripod and camera at an appropriate distance, usually filling the picture space with a web in order to show its lines and shape, and use maximum depth of field to ensure sharpness of linear detail. I guess I thought this was the way I should do it, or, perhaps, the way viewers wanted to see it. I had accepted this way of seeing webs as my own.

One autumn morning, when webs were hanging thick in the wet bushes and grasses behind my house, I awakened to the realization that all my photographs of spiders' webs looked the same. They were entirely documentary. Beautiful, yes! Expressive of how webs make me feel, no! There was nothing wrong with what I was doing, but a lot wrong with what I was not doing; so I decided to look at webs in ways that I had never considered before. I didn't know what I was going to do, but simply decided to follow each new idea that occurred to me.

To begin, I placed my camera to one side of a web and focused on the nearest edge. I also switched from maximum to minimum depth of field. Instead of architecture, I saw jewels -- at last I was seeing a web the way I felt about it. This was the beginning of a significant change.
. . .

Next, I crawled underneath a web and shot up at it (no easy matter, I discovered, after destroying sevewral webs!) Later, I hauled my close-up equipment out of the closet -- extension tubes, close-up lenses, and what-have-you, and started using them in combinations that I'd never tried before. I made no effort to preconceive the kind of pictures I could make as I selected, for example, an 80-200 zoom lens to be used with an extension tube behind it and a close-up lens in front. I simply put the equipment together, went out, and started crawling through the grass. I overexposed and underexposed. I put everything in focus, then threw everything out of focus. The fact that many of the photographs might be visual disasters didn't concern me. I wasn't after masterpieces; I was looking for new starting points. I wasn't seeking solutions to old problems, but welcoming new ones."

pp. 27-28