Day 91: A quarter at the half

Today is the summer solstice, the beginning of summer. I hope. It's the half-way mark in the year. It also makes the passing of the first quarter of my photo-a-day project (approximately). I made a few notes at the 10 % point, so maybe it's time again to revisit those thoughts.

I think pretty much all of what I said then remains true. With the extra time that's since passed, I've settled into a bit of a rhythm and in some ways I'm finding it less difficult. However, I'm keenly aware of the fact that I have a lot of daylight to play with here, and that it's easy for me to postpone picture taking until the end of my working day. Somehow I still need to work it into a regular day, and usually the earlier the better.

The biggest surprise to me is how the project has morphed. I originally envisaged taking everyday scenes, snapshots with a story, and not paying too much attention to getting the photo "right". But I've slowly realized that I'm not satisfied with that and I've moved into trying to take a "good" photograph every day. Here, I define "good" as a photo which causes me (and hopefully others) to stop and look closely and explore the scene. I've found that out when sifting through a couple of dozen scatter-gun attempts at finding a daily photo. The ones that stop me in my tracks usually end up being the winners, even if they're not the most colourful or detailed. I've been pleasantly surprised on several occasions and have often ended up passing over a photo I thought would be great in favour of something more subtle. The challenge is undoubtedly going to be maintaining that through the dreary winter.

For the next six months I'm losing light, so here's the western sky at the end of the longest day of 2011, taken from Kitsilano outdoor pool. I've wanted to get a nice picture of the Tetrahedron peaks for a while and I'm finally happy with this one.

Peach sunset behind the Tetrahedron peaks