Sometimes, there’s really not much to shoot.

Here’s the story. There I am at a party. I’ve brought my camera, because hey, why not? I’ve been taking pictures of people doing what people do at parties. Talking. Eating. Sometimes laughing. A few loners. People talking in pairs, in groups. And I’m trying to find a new way to do something at which I’m not particularly good while finding a way of making pictures that are inherently dull, not so dull.

Tall pines from the deck.

The host, a retired photographer and videographer, hates parties and was hiding. I was pretty sure he wouldn’t appear until his wife rousted him from wherever he was holed up.

This is a group dominated by professional media people, some retired, many still working. So there were a lot of cameras, mostly Canon, a few Nikon. I’m the only one with one of those funny little cameras, having brought my Olympus PEN E-P3 a spare battery and left the rest of the gear home.

The man with the Canon.

In this crowd, pictures are not taken on telephones or tablet computers. It’s not that kind of crowd. This is not a group in which anyone suffers from techno-envy. We all have equipment. Lots of it, our own and stuff that belongs to the television stations for which most of the guests work. Oddly, no one was doing video. Too much like work.

A hallway.

I didn’t actually know more than a handful of the people at the party except in the most general way. I know the host, the hostess, a few other people here and there. Pretty much everyone there are former colleagues of my husband or related to the birthday boy.

One way or the other, I’m not sure I could get most of the names straight. Even if everyone was wearing a name tag — they weren’t — it wouldn’t help much. The problem is partly because I don’t know most of the guests. It’s also that I have always been terrible with names and faces. I’m nominally better with faces, but hopeless with names.

Still life with cheese remnants.

You can tell me your name and within a breath, I’ll say, “I’m sorry, what’s your name again?” and if it happens more than twice, I’ll be too embarrassed to ask again, so I’ll smile and nod. Life can be a bitch. Parties are worse.

So it’s me and my camera. It’s an event and besides, what else am I going to do?

This is not a really exciting experience for me. About an hour into the event, my boredom exceeded my tolerance, so I set myself a challenge. Find something to shoot in a lovely, but architecturally ordinary, suburban house.

In the corner.

In the end, the choice was simple: play “Word Mole” on my telephone or find something to shoot. I went with photography, although I’m a world-class “Word Mole” player.

Reflections in a high window.

Here are the results. “Seek and thou shalt find” should be the motto of all photographers. I looked. I didn’t just look around, I also looked up and down. I looked in corners, I peered through banisters. I tried natural light and flash, wound up using both.

Kitchen talk.

Motto of the story? There’s always a picture somewhere. Somehow. You have to look for it, sometimes very hard, but it’s there.

NOTE: I re-edited all these using Photoshop rather than Corel and the difference is enormous. It’s a bit frustrating that the only really great photo-editing application is so wildly expensive, but nothing else works like Photoshop. There is a reason why its name has become synonymous with photo-editing. It’s still the best. I just wish it didn’t cost quite so much!

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