Here’s a pattern I’ve noticed for a while: I generally don’t have a lot of interesting pics on Sundays. I play volleyball (or try to) in the morning, go home, eat, nap, come back in the evening. And I end up mostly just taking photos around the gym. Some of them are great, of course. Like this one, which could have come straight off the cover of some lurid gothic horror novel, with the haunted moors and the family secrets and the locked room you must not enter…!
So… I need to either (a) get off my butt and go somewhere else on Sunday, or (b) not be so self-conscious about taking photos around the gym. Either will take effort. And what the hell, how about we do both?
Like for example, asking if it’s okay to take pictures of the eye machine thingy when getting my eyes checked. Hey, why not? The optometrist said yes, and showed me a drawer containing the dozens and dozens of individual lenses that go in the machine, and are used in eye clinics that can’t afford them. That was cool. And it just goes to show, it never hurts to ask. I’m not sure I would have had the nerve to do it this time last year, when I was just starting out, but now… Well, now I’ve got da noive (to quote the Cowardly Lion). It feels good.
At some point on Tuesday I got the idea of walking out on Burrard Bridge to take a picture of Sunset Beach. I used to do that for a while, in the summer of ’08, after I moved downtown and was still working at Waterstreet Technologies down in Gastown. Oh, apparently I continued, on and off, until 2010? Neat. Anyway, I had a hankering to reproduce that, and to see what it looked like in the dark. It looked pretty good. I was especially fascinated by the little island of light around the ferry dock…
…and so the next day, I went down there to take a closer look. I wasn’t feeling well, but this would keep bugging so what the hell. The dark Seawall was a bit intimidating—there are supposed to be lights!—but I got a satisfying view of Burrard Bridge and a nice closer view of the dock, taken from the dog beach at the foot of the bridge. I was nervous heading out on the beach by myself… maybe it would have been safer to bring a buddy? I’ll have to think about that. Nothing happened, and there was adequate light so I knew no one else was nearby, but you never know.
And now I’m thinking: this daily shot of Sunset Beach, is that something I want to pick up? I could do it, too. Something separate from my daily pic hashtag… still on Instagram so I can’t do an album, but I could do a special hashtag, yeah? Honestly, I’m afraid I won’t have the discipline to do it every day (or I guess every weekday) at the same time, but I said that about my dailypic and look where I am now!
So, who knows? It’s definitely something to mull over. No rush. I’ve got all year to tweak the format.