May 12

As I drove home last night from work, I noticed that the moon, low on the horizon and peeking from between clouds, was strikingly beautiful. This was in Jamaica Plain, and there was no good vantage point to pull over, pull out my camera, and get a photo.

There's also the problem of getting a good photograph of the moon. It's tough when it's almost full, because it's so bright and the sky is so dark.

I turned right onto South Street near Forest Hills Station and found a gap in the trees through which I could shoot the moon. This was half manic inspiration and half pragmatic photographer; since the moon was low on the horizon, it would work to silhouette the trees if I positioned myself right, and since I wasn't likely to get a crisply clear, perfectly-exposed photo of the moon (especially with the clouds lit up all around it), those silhouettes were what was going to make this shot.

This shot was taken at 12:28:10 am, the last of a series of shots. As soon as I saw it on the camera screen, I knew I had the Photo of the Day for today -- with 23½ hours to spare!

132/365 -

March 12

It's going to be a long day -- and night. My coworker Chris, who normally covers the overnight shift, is on vacation, and it fell on me to cover his overnight shift tonight. I arrived at work this afternoon at 3 pm and will leave tomorrow around 7:30 am.

On the plus side, working the double-shift overnight lends itself beautifully to this photo idea. Here's the building where I work, in daylight and darkness. I marked the space on the sidewalk where I placed my tripod legs, thus getting close to identical shots about five hours apart. Placing them side-by-side in Photoshop was simple enough, and while the match isn't perfect (it's very windy outside and hard to keep the camera steady on the tripod), it's close enough.

I'm interested in seeing my photo of the day for tomorrow; I've made plans, but if I'm too tired to stay awake and go into town it's going to be a crap shoot what I come up with.

71/365 -

February 23

There's just no way to get a good photo of my desk at work.

I thought I'd give it a shot today -- again -- by taking several photos and stitching them together. It's an interesting concept and I've really gotten some pretty photos using a free program called Autostitch to create the final image. I used the program on January 14th to get a photo of snow graffiti on my car, and took some fascinating photos while on vacation in Virginia.

Of course, a beautiful panoramic shot of a mountainside with wispy clouds in an azure sky is a far cry from photographing a desk from five feet away in incandescent lights. And even though it took several tries to get it where it is, and it's demonstrably not perfect, at least I'm putting effort into making it interesting.

54/365 -

February 19

The idea to photograph a negative strip, render the digital photograph as a negative (thus making the negative strip in the picture a positive), and then post the results, is more difficult to accomplish than it looks. Above is my best effort at a visual double-negative.

The idea for this little bit of experimentation came to me like an avalanche. Literally. A bunch of photo envelopes from 2002 cascaded off my bookshelf onto the floor today, and as I was picking them up I noticed the inimitable Wilma von Shwink smugly smiling at me.

Fortunately, the avalanche was not large enough to bury me or the dog -- and the cat was out of the room at the time. So I can say this truthfully: No animals were harmed in the making of this entry.

50/365 -