This week’s theme is “Up Close”. I proposed we change the theme to this at the last minute since the planned theme was “Emotions”, which just sounded bad. Fortunately, Sabina agreed with me.

I don’t like following stereotypes, but I’m going to ignore that feeling for this theme ¹. I’m going to do what every noob photographer does: use a 50mm f/1.8 lens to blur the crap out of stuff at close range. If you haven’t read Marco Arment’s blog post about this, I recommend it. I’m feel like I’ll be doing everything he lists except for the polaroid frame, and the Helvetica one liner about a failed romance. If I had a bunch of failed romances, I would probably throw that in as well.

Now onto the photograph. I picked this up at Bintang Campbell. I started playing Badminton there with a co-worker in late 2012. I used to bike 3 days a week and didn’t have the legs to go another two, so I took to Badminton instead. It also served as my only source of exercise when I thought it was too cold to bike in the winter (I was wrong about this – all it takes is a bit of extra clothing). I’m not really all that good at Badminton, but it turns out that you can do ok by just running harder than your opponent. I can do this against some, and fail miserably against others. I also have a reasonably good drop shot, so that helps a bit.

Surprisingly, I haven’t edited this photo at all. I couldn’t find anything to do with it that I liked better than the original. This is a first for me. I shot it in broad daylight (it was so bright that I had to squint just to be outside), but somehow (I don’t know how) the background turned out to be black. I think that’s pretty cool.