Daily Photo birthday--how it happens

Daily Photo is two years old today. Every day, I post a photograph that I took that day. I’ve missed one day in two years.

In Art and Perception, I posted a piece about my sometimes profligate creative process. I shoot a lot of images. It’s how I understand what it is that is attracting me, or how I solve a visual problem in front of me. This method of working is sometimes misunderstood as an indiscriminate machine-gun approach to imagemaking. For me, nothing could be further from the truth.

Over on Flickr, I’ve posted the photographs I took today, all 34 of them. Almost a roll of film’s worth. Here I’ll talk about how I did them.

I decided to walk to lunch today. As I work at home, I usually want a change of scenery midday, and often eat out. I took my camera.

A truckload of sheetrock was parked at the McMansion being built on the corner. I saw the pattern of the gypsum board a block away, and took a few shots close-up. The final shot I stopped down to f/16 to increase my depth of field. In the next block I saw some newly laid out rocks, and I quickly made three shots. I found myself lining up the edge of the sidewalk with the edge of the frame on the final shot (I don’t necessarily decide, oh, this is how I’m going to frame this shot, I usually just watch myself doing it). I exhausted my interest in this pattern, made a couple of single shots, then walked on to the bakery counter at a bookstore about 10 blocks away and got a sandwich. On the way in, I noticed that in about a half hour, the sun would be illuminating the mural on the side of the building, and that might be fun to work with then.

Ate my sandwich, read the Stranger, got my weekly titillation from the "Savage Love" column, checked my horoscope ("Libra--You need intimate contact with unreasonable beauty, sweet anomalies, beguiling ephemera, inexplicable joys, and small changes that inspire reverence"), and sure enough, when I walked out the sun was grazing the mural. I spent ten minutes extracting pieces out of it, then worked the leaves against it, waited for a passerby to be in the shot, then went to the Jewish bakery to pick up a challah for Shabbat dinner tonight.

Ahead of me in line was a black hat Orthodox Jewish man, with long grey beard, and I contemplated what it would take for me to take his picture. I let it pass. When I left the bakery he had exchanged his black hat for a ball cap, and was driving away in a snazzy silver convertible sports car. If only I’d had left 20 seconds earlier! I thought. You miss way more shots then you get.

In the next block I saw a pair of bare legs sticking out of the passenger side of a parked car, with bright red shoes on the feet. Oh yes, I thought, don’t go away. I looked through my camera (105mm max zoom—where’s my 400mm when I need it?), and quickened my pace. I was sure I was going to lose this one too. But she stayed there, sunning her legs. Two quick frames when I was close enough to have a decently composed shot, one with the road and cars, one with them cropped out.

When I came alongside, I stopped and said, "Hey, I got a neat shot of your feet hanging out of the car," and showed it to her. She laughed, and I said, "This will probably end up on my photo blog tonight," and I handed her a card. "Can I take a couple more?" I took a slightly more controlled shot, as a friend came by to talk to her. I didn’t know it at the time (probably because of the damned 96% view in the 5D), but in one frame there was a cropped out hand to mirror the two bodyless legs. Accident is my trusted, dear friend. There it was—photo of the day.

Comments

[romanlily]

This is really neat, Doug. As someone who's decided to make a go of a taking and posting a photo a day in 2007, I've often wondered about the process you use for getting the daily photo. Thank you for the inspiration.

[stephen connor]

Ain't photo-life fun?

[Rich Reusser]

Well done Doug. While I shoot most everyday I lack the dedication to get them from the camera to the blog.
I'm betting I'll eventually run into you around town. In the meantime I visit your blog during downtime here at Harborview.

Rich