# 6350-52 / common places • common things ~ I'm a shooter

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I'm a shooter

he's a shooter she's a shooter we're all a shooter
aren’t you happy to be a shooter too?

I AM BEGGINING TO COBBLE TOGETHER A FEW words, re: the introduction essay, for the Philosophy of Modern Pictures project / book. The above words-tip o’ hat to the early Dr. Pepper I’m a Pepper tv commercial jingle-are the leading candidate for the essay title.

The use of the word shooter derives from the aforementioned mentioned-a previous entry-interaction with a young hipster-body jewelry, “cool” hair style + color, et al-bartender in an upscale restaurant bar who asked me if I was a “shooter”. I was confused-was she asking if I wanted a shot of bourbon? was I packing heat? Noting my confusion, she pointed out that she had noticed my cap with the KODAK logo. Thus informed of that, it gave me license to answer that, “Yes. I’m a shooter.”

Apparently the younger generation thinks it cool to be a shooter. That being the case, for purposes of the book, it’s good enough for me.

Re: we’re all a shooter - OK. I get it. Not everyone is a shooter inasmuch as not everyone has a picture making device, However, with the fact that 1.7 trillion pictures are made / taken (whatever) a year and that there are 8 billion humans on the planet, the average number of pictures per human is 125 per year. And, this might be a bit of a surprise, 92.5% of pictures are made with a picture making device which can also be used to make a phone call. Only 7% are made with a “real” camera.

FYI, while the book will have some facts, figures, history, re: picture making, the emphasis will be on how, as the result of the ease of making “good” pictures-i.e. sharp, correctly exposed, referent in focus and the like-the boundaries of what can be pictured and how it can be pictured has expanded like never before.

canon of proportions (AMENDED) # 1-2 ~ Thinking inside the circle

hotel window view ~ Cherry Hill, NJ (embiggenable)

red berries ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - ItAP (embiggenable)

A few days ago I was contemplating da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, or, as it is sometimes called, the Canon of Proportions. It occurred to me that, while da Vinci's drawing was his solution to the Vitruvian Man problem (which had eluded mathematicians and geometricians for almost 2000 years) - how does the human body fit into both a circle and a square? - the circle and the square play a big part in my picture making idealogy ....

.... to wit, all lenses project a circular image which, in the particulars of making a picture, is then cropped by the frame imposed upon a light sensitive substrate by a camera's given format. In my case, that format is a square and the square is integral to my way of seeing.

Consequently, in my Canon of Proportions, my square is extracted from the center of a circle - da Vinci had to offset his square to find his solution - for the "perfect" proportions which best suit my eye and sensibilities. So, here I am again making pictures about the medium of photography and its (non-gear) apparatus.