edible colors by eggleston

I decided to look up the infamous Eggleston today. I looked at his photography a long time ago and was fascinated by the fame of a guy who takes pictures of "random stuff". However, today I found a few very beautiful pictures by him that I'd like to share.

Though he's a master of composition and color arrangement, I also think the fact that he photographs so often has to do with his success. Carrying a camera around all the time and having a constant awareness of the world is obviously very helpful. I've been trying to do that more often with my digital camera. Yesterday I was buying medium format film for a craft assignment and the man at the camera store said, "It's so weird to see someone with a digital camera buying medium format film." Though that got on my nerves a little, I'm quite interested in trying medium format. Eggleston's photographs have such a film quality to them. I think if he took some of the pictures he took with a digital camera and they were totally crisp and digital looking they might resemble random tourist pictures in a Flickr photostream. Not that there were digital cameras back them, but you get the point. There's a rawness to them. Its the same beautiful rawness in minimalistic music and acoustic guitar.

What I'm getting at, is that there's a part of myself that feels that shooting film, learning studio lighting techniques and becoming technically committed to photography is crucial to being a succesful fine art photographer in today's world, or atleast taken serious. But there's a part of me that's married to habits of conveiniance. Leaving things to "luck", not giving film a chance because digital is just so much easier. What I'm getting at is that I'm in college, so I might as well broaden my horizons in whatever ways I can in photography and be a little more open minded about the technical things that scare me and give me nightmares. What this has to do with Eggleston is slight, but since he's such a classical dude in color photography, he's inspiring.

Here's a nice fishy.