I tend to be very harsh towards mall culture. It may have something to do with the fact that a large portion of my life includes customer service. It may also have to do with having that exposure to the bad decisions of mall management.

This is from the Quaker Bridge Mall near Princeton, NJ. For decades it was a rotting, seedy, greasy pit of early 80s nostalgia. Now it’s a rotting, seedy, greasy pit of early 80s nostalgia with a fancy coat purchased from Short Hills on it. If it weren’t for the Apple Store, it’d be replaced by a Costco.

So how does this attitude enter into this photo? For starters, New Jersians don’t forget their community, and certainly, most of us in this area don’t forget what Quaker Bridge was. This ridiculous posh furniture has no place there next to the outdated marble of Lord & Taylor. The location of this seating area is in the middle of nowhere and seems entirely out of place.

The colors of the furniture are drab compared to the one item that doesn’t belong to this mall: the forgotten bag.

Again with the exaggerative HDR effect, but this photo is also a composite of about five different photos from the same position. Birds were merged from each shot, clouds were borrowed, but the giant bird in the clouds was the result from the HDR application.

Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s dumb. I just like the apparent perspective here caused by the wall tile.

From my Facebook comment:

I’ve actually been thinking about doing a series of photos that are mostly dark. As in, no highlights, just levels of darkness. We usually think that a good photo has a lot of contrast and a clear subject defined by what light reflects. I want to try getting a story or a feeling with no discernible objects whatsoever.

Still have every intention of pulling this off, someday.

At the beginning of the POTD project I tended to overdo the HDR effect. This is mainly because of the Canon S100. The camera is such an overachiever, but it’s still only 12 megapixels, and the lack of clarity means that sometimes being illustrative is the best way to get an amazing photo. This is an excellent example. It feels like oil on canvas, and the bird has its color exaggerated to fit the tone.

There’s a point where you get so close to your subject and so distracting with the editing that there is a delay in your brain’s ability to identify objects. Here, we have a simple bacon and cheese pizza. To one of my Facebook friends, it’s a nuclear explosion.

Back to another photo outside of Princeton Airport, but this time right up to the fence surrounding the terminal. I make some amateurish mistakes with overblown highlights after editing and messing up the angle, but I nail what I wanted in the color. Again, I play with the idea of man interrupting nature, but in this shot the “nature” of the sky is tainted because of a metallic feel in its color. So, even though the fence is the subject of the photo and the sky is supposed to counter its lifelessness, the sky instead loses its own sense of being natural, sympathetic to the manufactured structure.

She didn’t care much for me standing over her with a camera pointed at her, but at least she didn’t quite have the gumption yet to stop me.

My wife loves taking “light painting” photography. It’s simple in execution: shake the camera while holding down the shutter. It’s not rocket science, but the resulting images can be super perplexing and vividly disturbing in its abstract display. With this photo I intentionally left the shutter open for five seconds to see what would come out, and this shot had the best combination of color and composition.

The S100 may not have the clarity of a high-megapixel SLR, but it certainly knows how to catch detail. If you want to experiment with HDR, there is no better camera to start with. The cardboard compressor, found near the dumpster at your local shopping mall, can really produce a color palette of human waste without actually containing any dirt at all.