Cleveland by the Lake
Way back when I bought my bike, my friend Tony said "the best bike is the one you actually ride." Cameras, it turns out, are similar, in that the best camera is the one you actually have when you want to take a photo. I'd bought a good camera for my European sabbatical in 2015 and it was great, but after that trip I rarely took it with me unless I was traveling, which means all sorts of serendipitous things weren't going to happen.
You'd think that finally joining the world of smartphones four years ago would have solved that problem. However, I didn't really start taking my camera with my every time I left the house. Many weeks it only left the house on Sunday. It wasn't until last year that I took it with me most times I left the house, and even then it was usually stuffed in a bike bag.
I haven't been biking this year, and most of my few drives have been to the supermarket. However, back in May I started walking to the lake most days. I wander down to Lakewood Park, usually in the early morning. I always take my phone with me, mostly to make M worry less, but since I had it anyway I started snapping a picture of the Cleveland skyline from the path along the break wall every time I got down there. I'd text it to M and forget about it.
Suddenly, I had a 22 photos of Cleveland right around the sunrise on my phone. Now, I'm one of those people who likes to delete photos as soon as he's done something with them (which M finds weird), but it seemed sort of wasteful to delete so many photos of the same thing. All of a sudden, I was doing a "Photo-a-Day" on Facebook. I'd post them in an album entertainingly (to me) called "The Same Picture of Cleveland Over and Over" with no more than the date and time and the very occasional comment. Then I'd delete the photo from my phone. Now I've got 96 pictures of Cleveland up (or in a few cases, pictures of a bank of clouds obscuring Cleveland) and five more cued. I've posted every day (and even twice a day early on) so my backlog has shrunk when the walk doesn't happen.
101 photos is far more photos than any of my Sunday series here on LiveJournal had posts, which given the minimal effort of taking and posting a photo is not terribly surprising. It's especially entertaining because the last two years I considered doing a "Photo-a-Day" blog as a resolution, but decided I couldn't figure out how to do it effectively. Here, I've sort of fallen into it. I'm not herpdaddy or kylecassidy for either frequency or quality of the photos, but I get by.
To be clear, this is not some major lifestyle change that will continue forever,. As long as the weather holds up and Birdie's schedule aligns, I'll keep doing it. Beyond that, I'm not going to go to great lengths to take this photo. Still, I'm pretty confident that with even normal weather I can push the total up to more than 120, which is a solid 1/3 of the year. To get to 180 days I would have to go basically all the way to Thanksgiving with minimal misses. That seems improbable barring a very warm dry autumn and a very cooperative Birdie.
So I have I learned anything by doing this? I pretty much just point and shoot, with a little zoom and some time spent framing. The most beautiful photos I've taken are mostly because that day the view happened to be particularly pretty, not because of some photo magic on my part. I'm not playing with filters or anything like that. Heck, I didn't even try holding my camera in portrait mode until somewhere in the high 80s. It's safe say to that this has not magically made me a better photographer. As with so much of my life, I don't do it better than anyone else, I just do it more consistently. Sometimes, showing up is enough to make you seem impressive (see also: LiveJournal since everybody else left it).
Since all the photos are of the same thing, I have considered the idea of making a photo mosaic with all of them at some point. I probably won't have enough to do something too impressive, and it's hardly original, but on the other hand there are free sites to do it, so maybe it's worth a shot at some point.
Oh yeah, those of you who are friends with me on FB can see the album here, although at this point I assume that basically any of my real-life friends who are reading my journal are coming to it from my crossposts to FB!
PS - Arrogance is tagging your own post about your photos as Art!
You'd think that finally joining the world of smartphones four years ago would have solved that problem. However, I didn't really start taking my camera with my every time I left the house. Many weeks it only left the house on Sunday. It wasn't until last year that I took it with me most times I left the house, and even then it was usually stuffed in a bike bag.
I haven't been biking this year, and most of my few drives have been to the supermarket. However, back in May I started walking to the lake most days. I wander down to Lakewood Park, usually in the early morning. I always take my phone with me, mostly to make M worry less, but since I had it anyway I started snapping a picture of the Cleveland skyline from the path along the break wall every time I got down there. I'd text it to M and forget about it.
Suddenly, I had a 22 photos of Cleveland right around the sunrise on my phone. Now, I'm one of those people who likes to delete photos as soon as he's done something with them (which M finds weird), but it seemed sort of wasteful to delete so many photos of the same thing. All of a sudden, I was doing a "Photo-a-Day" on Facebook. I'd post them in an album entertainingly (to me) called "The Same Picture of Cleveland Over and Over" with no more than the date and time and the very occasional comment. Then I'd delete the photo from my phone. Now I've got 96 pictures of Cleveland up (or in a few cases, pictures of a bank of clouds obscuring Cleveland) and five more cued. I've posted every day (and even twice a day early on) so my backlog has shrunk when the walk doesn't happen.
101 photos is far more photos than any of my Sunday series here on LiveJournal had posts, which given the minimal effort of taking and posting a photo is not terribly surprising. It's especially entertaining because the last two years I considered doing a "Photo-a-Day" blog as a resolution, but decided I couldn't figure out how to do it effectively. Here, I've sort of fallen into it. I'm not herpdaddy or kylecassidy for either frequency or quality of the photos, but I get by.
To be clear, this is not some major lifestyle change that will continue forever,. As long as the weather holds up and Birdie's schedule aligns, I'll keep doing it. Beyond that, I'm not going to go to great lengths to take this photo. Still, I'm pretty confident that with even normal weather I can push the total up to more than 120, which is a solid 1/3 of the year. To get to 180 days I would have to go basically all the way to Thanksgiving with minimal misses. That seems improbable barring a very warm dry autumn and a very cooperative Birdie.
So I have I learned anything by doing this? I pretty much just point and shoot, with a little zoom and some time spent framing. The most beautiful photos I've taken are mostly because that day the view happened to be particularly pretty, not because of some photo magic on my part. I'm not playing with filters or anything like that. Heck, I didn't even try holding my camera in portrait mode until somewhere in the high 80s. It's safe say to that this has not magically made me a better photographer. As with so much of my life, I don't do it better than anyone else, I just do it more consistently. Sometimes, showing up is enough to make you seem impressive (see also: LiveJournal since everybody else left it).
Since all the photos are of the same thing, I have considered the idea of making a photo mosaic with all of them at some point. I probably won't have enough to do something too impressive, and it's hardly original, but on the other hand there are free sites to do it, so maybe it's worth a shot at some point.
Oh yeah, those of you who are friends with me on FB can see the album here, although at this point I assume that basically any of my real-life friends who are reading my journal are coming to it from my crossposts to FB!
PS - Arrogance is tagging your own post about your photos as Art!