I have always had an interest in soft focus imagery, so it stood to reason at some point I would explore the out of focus image. I played around with it a bit in my film days but given the hit or miss nature of the process, I wasted a lot of film. Plus, it rarely worked in black and white. While work on an annual report for a client, I suggested this method for the cover. I could make a bright, colorful image that spoke to the concept, but had a nebulous, abstract feel. I discovered it was a lot of fun and I set about making it a personal investigation. It seemed to work best around twilight, with streetlights and automobile head lights on and faint light in the sky. If it was rainy or having just rained, even better to enhance reflections. Circles of confusion is a physics term about the nature of point light sources passing through optics, like a camera lens. The trick for me was to create imagery that was just sharp enough to envision a sense of place and not some badly focus image or a composition of colored dots. During the early days of the pandemic, I was weary of being on the street at night with my camera. So, I had a friend drive me around so I could photograph from the safety of my car. Those images became rather haunting to me. It was like some post-apocalyptic world. What had been playful before, became eerie. I never quite know when a body of work comes to a close , but the out of focus world of the pandemic days seem like a good place to come to a pause.
