prod & ponder

Taken on an impromptu photowalk following Birdcage’s post-Thanksgiving flickr soiree.

It seemed like a good Thanksgiving plan at the time: get out of the house (aka something other than cat pictures) and head down to the mall to catch golden hour on a day when not many tourists would be around.

Unfortunately, I didn’t look at the weather forecast before heading out, and what started out as a perfectly nice day turned ugly just around sunset. A cold front came flying through, throwing temperatures into the teens, or in the single digits if you count the monster wind chill.

So right about now, instead of taking pictures of the sun’s fading light, I really should have been finding a nice toasty bar.

Today I’m thankful for… backups.

The blog’s backend database got corrupted, so I lost the most recent entries, but thankfully not very much.

Speaking of coffee shops… I was reading and enjoying this article on why we come together, even to be alone, that was running on coffeegeek.com (which I visit pretty regularly, because you can never obsess too much over coffee) , and I ran across an image in it that looked awfully familiar. “Hey, is that Tryst?” And then, “Hey, wait, I think I took a shot just like that.” And then, “Hey, I did take that shot!”

Sure enough, the author, Chris Pluger, used this shot in the piece. It was a nice it’s a small cool world moment–bumping into your own photo unexpectedly in a place you go to often is neat–and a cool example of the good karma that can come from putting things out into the creative commons.

For some fun public opinion reading to add context to today’s election results, there’s a new Gallup analysis of shifts in voter perceptions of the Republican and Democratic parties.

I’ve been mulling over semi-abstract shots, composition, spaces, and shapes in images lately. No particular reason, just been curious about it and noticing it more. Anyhow, I’m swamped with work, so no time to really explore it much, but took the camera into the bathroom for some quick visual mulling around.

In elementary school I was voted “most likely to be an absent minded professor.” Solidly on track with that, I’ve taken to snapping a quick picture of where I park in the morning to avoid the otherwise inevitable wandering the garage, looking for my car later in the day. A slightly more interesting shot, this was the view yesterday morning looking outside at the Fall colors.

Abstracts are fun…