Shared this on Flickr this morning:
POMD: December 20, 2008
8:52am Auhili garden veggie plot
Starting a new set with this photo. POMD stands for “Photo of my day.”
Since my earliest days on Flickr I have been loving the photo-of-the-day sets I have seen on the pages of others, and I have waited for the New Year to arrive, thinking that January 1 would be the perfect time to start a set of my own. This made so much sense in my normally (obsessively) ordered thinking” I like sequence, and I like the routine of deliberately set good habits.
But then there was something about this picture which made me re-think the whole set in the way that would up the ante with me, and lend more quality to it, so it could be part of the collection I call “Learning Photography” versus part of a daily diary.
Sometimes too, doing things daily can force the issue too much. We like to think that every single day can present us with perfect opportunities, and yes, that possibility is there, however life does interfere, often joyfully, and we nalu it ”“ we go with the flow and forget the daily diary obsession for all the right reasons.
So I now think it better for me that I use this POMD set of mine for one special picture a day, as it might happen and whenever it happens, and special to me for whatever different reasons I can describe and share with you. But it won’t be every day; just on those days when I’ve taken a picture that seems to deserve being here. I suspect the hardest part for me will be the choosing, for I am getting attached to way too many photos, no longer caring if I repeat them, but it will also take some pressure off to know I needn’t do the every day thing, and further, that doing so may cheapen the whole.
This first one was taken on December 20th, 2008 when I was looking at the way the winter morning shadows fell in my garden. These layers caught my eye in such a pleasing way, and even though the grass was still very wet from the night’s rain, I lay down flat on the yard to get the picture the way I wanted it, for I so wanted to share it with you! And that, I think, is what photography, Flickr, and a picture of my day as it happened somehow, can deliver for us both” getting momentarily lost in the stunning specialness of some momentary visual feast – or some mental gymnastics where the thinking is what gets beautiful – and craving to share it best you possibly can.
The picture is of the edge of a vegetable garden I have which can most accurately be called “Rosa’s pretending she can put food on the table occasionally.” It isn’t a raised bed, but one where a scrap of lumber keeps the grass out of the bed best it can. Now nearly twenty years old the wood is quite rotted and home to assorted creatures, and it often falls over (as in this picture) when the neighbor’s cat jumps down from the rock wall on the other side of the bed, and nicks it enroute to whatever it’s now chasing in my yard. Usually that damn cat’s paw prints in that bed far outnumber my seedlings.
As for waiting until today, December 29th, to upload it, a) I always seem to be behind with choosing my uploads from the tons of photos I now am taking, and b) quite sure this blog post I wrote yesterday for Managing with Aloha Coaching was an influence: The Virtue of Vitality, which by the way, I could not find photos of my own for!