It was raining outside on Christmas afternoon at Spencer Alley when I took a couple of idle pictures (using only available light, like I am used to) while at the same time what I was really trying to think about was what I could do better than formerly later in the afternoon and early in the evening over at the house of Mabel Watson Payne and her parents, where I knew I would be trying to take pictures in low light with a lot of motion, in conditions as unlike the conditions above as it is possible for conditions to be. In the camera manual I found a way to use a "slow" flash that I hoped might be less abrasive than the full-on flash I have attempted and hated on wintertime indoor occasions in the past. As things turned out, the new flash technique was almost as bad as the old flash technique and the only pictures from the whole day that could reasonably be said to satisfy me were these two. But they are empty of people, and even mostly empty of significance.
Am in the midst of doctoring up the mainstream Christmas pictures this morning (so that I can post some version of this Major Holiday with potentially recognizable human beings as presences) and am wryly annoyed with myself for relying too heavily on a single experimental technique that turned out to be not particularly promising. In fact, trying to minimize the blur and overbrightness through cropping and color adjustment is such arduous labor (because the pictures are so bad in the first place) that I needed to take a break and put these two up (as if salvaged from some simpler, prelapsarian world) just to convince myself that the camera itself is not and was not broken and cannot be blamed.
