What I Think

This series of photos represents my latest project at the New England School of Photography. The title of the post is the title of the project as it was assigned by the professor. We were told to shoot what we think. Professor Armor said, "This is where the rubber hits the road." Implying that, for once, the class should really think about their photos. Well, too late for me. But I caught his drift. Some of us need prodding along the path of contemplative shooting: he is asking for images that stretch beyond shots of the family cat playing with the computer wheel mouse in front of a cat oriented website.
So how did I get to these shots? As always, I'm struggling with something and currently it's a question of how satisfying photos can be in a creative sense seeing that they are, essentially, limited to capture mode. That is, how much creative input do I have in the photographic process?
Teacher doesn't think photography is an art form. In fact, he seems to think it dangerous to even discuss such a thing, going on and on about the beer requirement for such a discussion (which is fine with me.) So I'm in the shower thinking about how I can be more involved in the process, squeezing shampoo in my hand, then squeezing more and more into my hand and taking the bottle farther and farther away from my hand and seeing the stream of shampoo and thinking maybe that would be a good shot.
So I pursued that with honey, coffee and wine as the liquids all with different viscosities. I used a flash to stop the liquid (we saw some really cool photographs a student took at MIT's strobe lab, so that's where that comes from,) then I rotated the image 90 deg CW for a skewed perspective. Again, the prof went over the effect of rotating reflections to produce novel images and I chose to put that to use.
Finally, I've been wanting to incorporate Beatty's use of dyes in water for some time so I applied that technique on the remaining three shots.
More later... And an edit...