Let’s call it a fling

For the bulk of 2011, I stewed in the idea of starting an online store.  It’s a project I’ve since put on the back burner (pun, yay!) but I just came across the photos I took while I was working on it.

I’ve never been much of a photographer but I was attracted to the prospect of honing my skills as part of the process.  I’d recently gotten a little digital camera, so that was a start.  On a flight somewhere, while flipping through the Sky Mall catalogue, I came across a Tabletop Photo Studio and thought to myself, “well, perfect, I definitely need this!”  And then I did what I imagined no person every really did with an item seen in Sky Mall magazine: I actually ordered it.

I soon found myself fully equipped with an extremely modest product inventory, a teeny digital camera, and a miniature tabletop photo studio, which as it turned out took up much more space in my little NYC apartment than the catalogue picture ever let on.

I spent many hours playing with the product positions, testing out the lighting and trying to make some sense of the various settings on my camera.  Though I was enjoying myself, all in all, I thought the photos I was producing were complete crap.

I started doubting whether there was any point in continuing to work to realize the overall concept.  It started to feel like maybe this wasn’t meant to be my thing.  And slowly the stuff I’d purchased to play around with was making me feel claustrophobic in my own home.

So I began to pack away the products, and to figure out once-and-for-all how in the heck that inflatable photo studio fits back into its space-saving case.  When Christmas came around this year, before heading out to shop, I went back to the merchandise and began to parse items give as gifts.

And though, as of now, the whole concept was just a fling, I quite enjoy looking at these pictures.  The tagline for the store was to include the notion that “everything has a lifespan.”  Now the same concept applicable to the project itself.