The Daily Shoot

As it says over there in the sidebar (at least if you're reading this on the blog), I fancy myself an amateur photographer. It's possibly the only artistic thing I can get close to saying I can do, unless you count hand-crafted code as artistic.

To push myself into trying to photograph something new, something unfamiliar, or something familiar but in a different way, I've been following The Daily Shoot. It's a simple enough conceit: the authors of the site give you a photographic task each day and you have to complete it the best you can. Once you have a photo that satisfies the topic du jour, you upload it to some photo sharing site (I use Flickr) and then tweet its publication with a message to @dailyshoot containing the hashtag for the assignment. They have some automated process that scans Twitter regularly looking for such tweets. For each they show a thumbnail, together with a link to the image. It's not only good for photographing something that you might not photograph ordinarily, but it makes you think about what could be a good subject for the assignment, and it's good to see how other people have solved the same problem.

Today's assignment (#ds91) was "Sunday (Valentine's Day) challenge: What is love? Make an interpretive photo today. Keep it clean, people. :-)". Mine was this:

However I will readily admit that it's not really "interpretive"; it's more literal. Others have done better I think (the one with the "Second Cup" coffee and the coffee cup as an example).

Yesterday, Saturday (#ds90), seemed a little too simple ("Odd or even: Compose an image with an odd or even number of subjects today, and make a photo.") and I kind of blew it with a secondary Valentine's Day motif a day early:

Friday's (#ds89) was more of a hoot: "Continuing the Friday fun theme, make a photo that goes with the title of a book you've read." I posed my fluffy toy hedgehog with a Swiss Army knife to celebrate the book Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes (of which I've written here).

The project for Thursday (#ds88) at least got me out of doors: "We often get stuck in a rut of always zooming to the longest focal length. Break out today by making a wide-angle photo." My photo was of the Briargate Mustangs, a statue of a group of wild mustangs at the entrance to the huge Briargate development here in Colorado Springs. I took it with my widest lens, a 20mm (well, OK, it's a 20-35mm zoom), which for my Canon Rebel XTi is equivalent to a 32mm on a 35mm film SLR. I really need to get something much wider.

I'll be posting subsequent images here as the series develops.

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