Daily Practice 21/365

Title: "What would Edward do?"

I've been re-reading Edward Weston's Daybooks. His almost constant enthusiasm for his work is quite motivating and inspiring, and it's quite informative to read his descriptions of how he made images. He did an extensive series of still life images with a variety of vegetables, bones and other ephemera. It is clear from the Daybooks that he spent inordinate amounts of time selecting appropriate backgrounds, orientations, point of focus, depth of field. His series of pepper images are probably the most famous of the still life images, and he describes his excitement in finding new peppers of distinctive shapes. I wonder what Edward would do now - the fruits and vegetables available to us at the local grocers are boringly uniform in shape and size. One would be very hard pressed to find 3 peppers of truly different shapes these days. Reading the daybooks got me thinking of exploring in Edward Weston's footprints, and I made a start today with a cabbage. My intention is to get organized to do a series with the 4X5 and/or 8X10 cameras, but I got my feet wet today with the macro lens on my dslr.