Life, Still

I joined the Digital Photography School Forums to learn from others and to use their assignments and challenges to help myself see things I might not have considered photographing before. The still life is a vaunted tradition in many media, but I've never had the slightest interest in it till I saw some in the DPS Still Life Challenge. So many different ideas about and perspectives on objects ranging from fruit in bowls to a fork reflected in a spoon...

So I wanted to try it, and composed a few this morning but didn't get around to photographing them; it was not a good day, and creativity fell by the wayside as I tended to more immediate matters. Then, this evening as I was sitting in the kitchen trying to regroup, I looked up to check the time and saw the most perfect, quiet beauty right in front of me: some old dime-store bottles on my kitchen windowsill illuminated by the setting sun. I forgot to turn off the autoflash on my camera, hence the unnecessary blue backflash on both bottles, but I got the essence of that moment, and so here's my first Still Life, reminding me that... life still is, here and now. And also reminding me that a creative moment is no luxury but is sometimes as essential as breath itself.