...Don't put it in your mouth.

What I love about the digital camera is the way it frees me to attempt things I would almost never have wasted a roll of film on. Mistakes on film cost a dollar or more per frame. Mistakes in digital are free—just delete and recompose.

Here's an example of the kind of crazy experiments that the digital image makes possible.

While in Princeton, I noticed that the television in my room has a rather extreme curvature in the picture tube. Due to the arrangement of the room, all of the typical viewing positions—bed, chair—were situated at an angle that made the distortion of the curved glass quite apparent.

Interesting.

Human figures, in particular, look quite unusual. You have to turn off your mental correction circuits and look a little closer, pay a little extra attention, but what you find is a fast-moving world of surreal elongations and magnifications.

I decided to try considering any human figure that appeared on the screen as my "model", and aim for some good pictures. It's not as easy as it might sound.

I set myself the limitation of avoiding anyone who was conspicuously famous, which ruled out almost everyone on the actual programs. That left me with commercials as my primary source of talent, and with the fast-paced editing en vogue in the commercial advertising world, capturing a subject requires very quick reflexes.

So, anyway, here are the results. I'm sure this infringes copyright in all kinds of ways, and it's nowhere near my finest artistic output. But I do think there are some interesting images.

It's becoming an addictive pastime, this effort to look at my surroundings with new eyes.

It's interesting that as a photographer, I'm accustomed to looking at most things without letting my vision be clouded by preconceptions of "tree" or "flower" or "person". Yet at home, I tend to automatically see a box, a mass of rectangles, an uninspiring collection of right angles.

However, as recent evidence will demonstrate, the average room is anything but uninspiring.

The hotel room would seem a more difficult subject, given the inherent mundanity and sameness of its design. I do think the results here are not as interesting as the apartment series, but again there are some surprising details for the attentive eye.