Seeing the Network

I went to the San Diego Zoo yesterday, with my wife and kids. There's a moderate amount of milling around in lines, pushing kids around in strollers, and so on. Also, I make no pretense of being a street photographer.

What I did do was try to be aware of the mesh, the network of relationships the people. Just simple things that we all perceive, there's no magic here. This person is happy in this moment, that person is irritated with their spouse/lover/friend, that child is bored, those people are all looking at the panda. The difference was that I was trying to be conscious of it, to silently articulate what I saw, and to make some effort to photograph what I was articulating.

It's a tiny step removed from "that's interesting" or "that's visually arresting" but I think it's interestingly different.

Here's some pictures. I could make a bunch of excuses, but I won't. I will simply acknowledge that they're not very good, and that the reasons are many, not least among them that I'm not very good at this. Too damn many pictures from behind.

I will say that I was 1000x better at this yesterday that I have been in the past.