A year and a half ago I started the Daily Photo. Every day I pick up my camera, and every day I post one of the photographs I took that day. I have reached a milestone, one of those neat odometer-turning moments. Today I posted the 500th photo.
The work in aggregate forms a synchronistic sequence of my daily life. The point I make often is that extraordinary photographs are rarely the result of extraordinary circumstances or exotic locale. They are the result of attentiveness to the ordinary moments of your life. The Daily Photo has become my discipline to pay attention to my mundane circumstances and extract the most interesting photo I can from it.
It is part of the daily rhythm now. If I haven’t made a photograph by mid-afternoon, I make myself take a break from the computer and look at what is interesting around the house. I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the sunflowers lately. I’m loving their trajectory into senescence.
I have a habitual routine to my photo processing now. I download the card, often to the laptop so I can sit upstairs or in the garden. I use Photo Mechanic to ingest the files, and I immediately trash the bad ones before I have second thoughts. Then I open up Bridge. The first thing I do is batch rename the keepers with a date and sequence code. Today’s photograph is 20060924_005. Then I add my copyright info to the batch in the metadata pane, using a template that automatically enters all the information. If I were a better person I would caption everything at this point too, but I’m not. Then I open up the whole batch in Adobe Raw Convertor and process all the files. Again, I do everything in batches. Everything gets a custom calibration depending on the camera body, then a batch color temperture, then the exposure corrections. When I’m done with that I look at the now-processed images in Bridge using the Preview pane, and I star the semi-finalists, usually about 5 or 6 photos. If Robin’s around I’ll ask her which is her favorite, and sometimes I listen to her. I have an action written in Photoshop, with a keyboard shortcut, that converts the file to the right sized jpg, then I upload it to the site. Typically the entire routine takes about 20 minutes.
It was a low-key day today. I was a little under the weather, and barely left the house. The garden became today’s subject. Here is what I picked from. 
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