If I were to catalog my entire photo collection, I may well find out that I have more photographs of my garden than anything else.
The garden is my default subject. Part of this Daily Photo discipline is that I get myself into the Zone and find a photograph, every day, no matter the circumstance or my mood. My circumstance, when I'm not on an active assignment, is usually parked in my basement, in front of a computer monitor. There are days on end when my carbon footprint is quite small, when I don't leave the neighborhood. Sometimes I don't leave the house.
Nonetheless I am quite busy these days. At the moment I am plowing through some 1600 video clips from St. John's College, putting together a series of short videos for a "virtual tour" website. I have at least three more video editing jobs in the queue after that. I have not had a day off in a long time.
Still, the Daily Photo beckons. And the garden is the most convenient environment to find it. There are birds at the feeder, if I want to put a long lens on. Usually, I put on a 50mm macro, which makes any small area potentially interesting. Typically, I find my photograph in about 10 minutes.
Usually in the afternoon, when I am exhausted by the computer, I go outside, and wait for something to drag me hither. The other morning, I opened the door to go on an errand, and the sunlight was wafting through pieces of the garden in fragments, broken by the tree across the street. A blast of a beam was falling on a dew covered alium, and I stood, stunned by the beauty of the moment. I grabbed a nearby camera and went to work. Usually, however, it's gray, and drizzling, and I stand waiting for a summons. The azalea is about to pop (I keep photographing it, unsuccessfully). The weedy columbine, which has spread everywhere, beckons. The aliums, they're almost too easy. So is the dogwood, a fantastic pink specimen that had I known would be so stunning and perfect in it's vase-like profile, would be in a way more prominent place in the yard. There's always the Japanese maples, but I feel done with them. What is new around here?
I actually try to not repeat myself. I fail at this all the time--you can detect the same solutions to the same subjects across years if you look through the Daily archive. But gradually, new approaches, perhaps out of sheer exhaustion, show themselves in the daily review. In this way I grow my repertoire, and I witness the expansion of my visual acuity and the need to solve the same problem in some new fashion. It is how I progress.
It has been years since I had some Big Project, some compelling subject (that required a passport) as the center of my photographic life. Now, it's the quotidian that matters most to me, the ordinary, daily experience of my life from which I extract a daily dose of beauty.
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