The boyfriend and I took a lit­tle road trip to Fort Bragg a few week­ends ago. We really had no idea what to expect : we had seen some­thing about a beach made of bot­tle glass that seemed inter­est­ing, and that was excuse enough to rent a car and get out of town for a bit.

While the town and the glass beach turned out to be a bit of a dis­ap­point­ment, we were deter­mined to have the best pos­si­ble time we could, and that meant tak­ing pic­tures of *some­thing*. Out on a hike, bemoan­ing the uni­form beauty and tex­ture of trees, I recalled a blog about yoway­owa­cam­era, a japan­ese girl who does a photo diary of her­self lev­i­tat­ing in weird sit­u­a­tions. I was like, hey, that could be a fun way to take advan­tage of this oth­er­wise mun­dane scenery.

It’s proven to be one of the most addict­ing things I’ve ever done with pho­tog­ra­phy. I’ve been drag­ging the boyfriend around Oak­land, con­vinc­ing him to jump with expen­sive cam­eras in his hand. “ACT NATURAL!”, I’ll scream, ask­ing him to leap for­ward while hold­ing a FM-3 with a speed­winder to his face. Some­times it works, some­times not so much. But it’s a great way to play with con­cep­tual pho­tog­ra­phy, use peo­ple in your shots, and cre­ate an inter­est­ing thing to look at.

I really want to take this to more pri­vate mun­dane places : shop­ping malls, cof­fee shops, BART, gro­cery stores. I think it works best when there is the jux­ta­po­si­tion of an every­day activ­ity done while lev­i­tat­ing. It helps if there are props, and if no one in the back­ground is pay­ing attention.

This has got­ten me think­ing of other sit­u­a­tions one could con­coct to cre­ate magical-realism pho­tog­ra­phy. Can­not wait to jump around more!