Corny Creativity

As I continued to sketch for inspiration, my ideas became more and more odd, or I guess to some, more creative. My next idea was making things extraordinarily life-sized. I took my camera down to my kitchen for breakfast in the morning and started snapping away at the things that were left out on the counter: a salt shaker, a bunch of bananas, a fork. I found that the closer I zoomed, the more interesting the compositions popping up in the replay screen became.

I began sketching in my notebook things that would look interesting blown up ten to twelve times their size. My mind eventually circled around toothpicks. Just like May said about the water bottle, toothpicks are a very ordinary thing, it's a piece of super soft wood, sharpened at both ends. But when blown up, what would the composition look like? The appearance of wood grain at that level of zoomage became interesting as well as the linear spatial effects a pile of those suckers would create.

And what if I played with the number of toothpicks were in each picture? How they were organized? The amount of light each image was exposed to? I began proposing that I could collage these pictures to create a bigger picture (after all isn't that what we're always supposed to shoot for? The bigger picture?). Tree-inspired names began to come to me...Woody Allen anyone?

And then you look back and ask: Creative? Yes. Corny? Oh heck yes. But that's what you get when you're an Iowan native.