For yesterday’s DailyShoot, I went abstract with the assignment. Today, I decided to do something different: take the assignment as literally as I could.

For today, the assignment was “Fill the frame of a photograph with a single subject today.” So that’s what I did, but not in the way it looks like everyone else has. Being the dutiful son of a lawyer — seriously, it’s in the genes — I realized that quite a bit of that could be taken in a different way. “The frame of a photograph” would normally be the picture that you take itself, but could be a physical photograph’s frame, and “subject,” of course, has multiple meanings. With that in mind, I decided to take a picture:

Image credit: Me. I sincerely apologize to those of you who were not blessed with an appreciation for puns.

The frame is filled with an actual, physical frame, which is itself filled with the subject — a character modeled after one of those British palace guards, who is, of course, a subject of the Queen of England.

Yes, yes, I know — I, like my lawyer relations, will burn for this travesty, blah blah blah — but I thought it was funny. Unfortunately, the execution worked out a lot less well than the idea; making the guy in Microsoft Paint worked just fine, but printing him out and taping him in was a hassle, and getting a good shot of the result was really difficult. I’m not sure why it was so hard, but I took something like a hundred pictures just trying to get a good one, and this was the best I could come up with.

So this picture was the opposite of yesterday’s picture in more ways than one. Yesterday, I went for an abstract idea, and the execution actually worked out better than my initial idea. Today, I went for a very literal idea, but the initial idea was a lot funnier than the actual execution. Well, it was fun anyway, and there are worse ways to spend an evening than making crappy figures in paint and then slicing them out with a Swiss army knife, as I don’t have any scissors.