Project 365: the magpie’s eye

Before I had all of your most excellent suggestions on how to carry on finding interesting pictures every(!) single(!) day(!) I was relying on some of the Flickr groups I’ve joined for inspiration. One of them is the monthly scavenger hunt, where they give you 20 clues or categories and you have the month to find suitable pictures. You can take a new picture for every category or, if you’re a little bit lazy like me, mine your archives for padding in a few choice places. I played last month, too, but only got 16 out of the 20 categories done before I ran out of month. But last night I took the final picture to round out my first complete monthly scavenger hunt!

(You’ve seen most of these already, I know, but the only ‘prize’ I get is the satisfaction of gloating that I finished, so I’m milking it for all it’s worth! If you click the mosaic, the image on Flickr has a list of the categories and a clickable link to the images everyone else used for that category, too — if you’re curious! And Roz, I had to laugh — I had the picture of the wrought-iron fence around Parliament Hill in the camera already when you made your suggestion. Great minds!)

This one from last Friday was for the scavenger hunt clue “one in a million.” Tristan won one of those “guess the number of jellybeans” contests at our local comic book store at a Webkinz Extravaganza day, winning not only the jar full of jellybeans but a Webkinz gift pack as well. I figured the image worked well on a couple of ways for the theme, both in the sheer number of jelly beans (anyone want to hazzard a guess?) and in the odds of Tristan winning. The colour balance on the picture is off, but I think that’s largely because I have to calibrate our monitor.

You saw most of my pictures from the Gloucester Fair already, but I like this one so much that I’ll include it here again!

(Funny how I took two dozen photos at the fair and had a hard time choosing just a few because I liked them all so much, and other days this week I took a hundred or more pictures in a day only to have not a single one worthy of the project. Dammit, I have to choose a less fickle hobby one of these days!)

I called this one, “Yeah mommy, as a matter of fact I AM about to eat this rock” but Beloved things I should have called it “My kung fu is better than your kung fu!” I like it because you can see the devil in his eyes. This child will be the one that snaps my will like a twig.

I’ve been reading Byran Peterson’s book People in Focus, which talks a lot about the psychology of approaching and interacting with strangers for photography. Feeling emboldened, I approached this lovely woman this morning at about 7:15 as she was readying her ByWard Market stand for the day and asked her if I could take her picture.

“Oh, just a minute,” she said as she hustled behind the stall, “and I’ll get some more water in my watering can.” Isn’t she lovely? She made my morning. The only problem is that I was so flustered by the time it came to actually taking the photo, I didn’t catch the shade/sun line running right through the middle of the picture and the background was so ugly I had to fudge the depth of field in Photoshop to blur it out a bit. Oh well, at least she was sweet about it, and I do love the result.

This is one of those times that a lovely new flower in the garden saved my project at the end of a long day. After more than 100 photos that I didn’t like, I snapped one of this new iris that had just bloomed in my front yard and called it “good enough.” You can totally see why Georgia O’Keefe eroticized flowers in this, though, can’t you?

I finally caved and bought myself an infrared remote for my D40, because I had been thinking about taking this image for so long and couldn’t think of a better way to do it. It won’t be long before these moments are gone and I wanted to capture the peaceful serenity of rocking Lucas to sleep at nap time.

I think I actually like this one better, though! The shot above is closer to what I’d originally planned for the shot, but this test shot I did to check the focus and the composition caught an unexpectedly sweet moment of its own.

The other mothers standing at the fence waiting for the bell to ring were giving me odd looks as I stood taking pictures of the umbrella being spun on my fingertips, letting the rain spatter on my bare head, but I was intrigued by the play of colour in this. Not the greatest shot in the world, but some days just cry for “good enough.”

I really wish I could find some sort of coherent narrative or even common thread in these pictures or what I’m drawn to, but I can’t. I have a magpie’s eye for bright and shiny things, and that’s about the only consistency I can see. But this week’s images to tell the story of this place in my life reasonably well, for whatever that’s worth.