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Photographers often feel the need to run off to exotic locations to make pictures. But there are great photos to be made in your own backyard. Joshua White has proven that over and over again in recent years with his ongoing project, A Photographic Survey of the American Yard.
White has spent the past two years using his Apple iPhone to shoot found objects like leaves and bugs he’s picked up in his yard or neighborhood. It sounds overly simple and quite boring, but the results are beautiful.
“One day I was walking around my yard in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where I used to live, and saw one of those tree helicopters and it caught my attention so I laid it on a purple garbage can and photographed it,” says White, 32, who now lives in West Jefferson, North Carolina and teaches photography at Appalachian State University in Boone. “That’s how it all got started.”
His process is simple. Nowadays he uses a piece of white foam core instead of a trashcan as his background, which he places in shade. He sticks whatever he’s shooting on a knitting needle to elevate it and eliminate shadows. Most photos are taken with his normal iPhone lens, but he’ll use a Photojojo Macro Lens if he needs to zoom in.
Once the image is shot, White opens it in iPhoto on his iPhone, crops as needed and makes the background pure white. Then he exports to Snapseed, where he coverts the image to black and white, then sharpens and tweaks the exposure. From there it’s back to iPhoto to double-check that the background is still pure white. The last step is uploading the pic to Instagram, where he applies the Earlybird filter.
“Sometimes I question my choice about Earlybird, but I’m 500 pictures in so it’s too late to change now,” he says.
Almost everything White shoots is dead. Although he’s willing to kill a fly for a photo, he draws the line at higher life forms like a frog, which he shot live. “I just kept picking up the frog and setting it back and taking a picture,” he says.
Besides their aesthetic appeal, White likes the photos because they’ve helped him rediscover the sense of wonder we all have as children. He says he grew up fascinated by bugs and nature and likes that he’s stopped to appreciate these things again. “I try not to be corny,” he says. “And nostalgia is a bad word, I don’t want my work to be nostalgic. But I don’t have any problem with the idea that when you were a little kid this stuff was awesome and it still is.”
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