“The rules are simple,” writes a photographer who goes by muggezifter (roughly “nit-picker”). “I put the self-timer on 2 seconds, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as I can.”
Over at the aptly-named blog Running from Camera, muggezifter has collected dozens of photos, mostly taken in his adopted hometown of Rotterdam, where he follows just this rule. Check out his excellent Flickr set here.
As I conducted a very modest amount of research for this post, I discovered that this idea has actually been done before. Photographer John Divola released a book in 2007 called As Far as I Could Get, which appears to be the inspiration for muggezifter‘s blog. (He links to Divola’s work prominently.) The major difference is that in Divola’s book, the photographer sets the camera’s self-timer for 10 seconds before taking off.
For any of you aspiring photographers out there in Blog-land, I know a sure-fire way to get your photo featured as Gadling’s Photo of the Day. Step 1: Set camera’s self-timer for two seconds. Step 2: Push button. Step 3: Run away. [Step 4: Don’t forget to upload your photo to the Gadling Flickr pool.]