[Photo: “Newscoop,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) I like several things about this photo, which I won’t detail here other than the one more or less insignificant detail I briefly mention in the post.]

In the last several weeks, I’ve been nibbling away at the fringes of the fast-food meal of what passes for my writing aspirations. In the meantime, a hungry little insect has been nibbling away at the me who’s been nibbling away at the fringes of etc. To wit: photography.

The specific trigger here, or rather now, is the daily Instagram series (black-and-white, with occasional splashes of color) I’ve been running since October 2017 — specifically, the approach of Day #1000 in the series.

My Instagram account is here; the hashtag I’ve used for the series is #everydaybandw… which, alas, is also in use by a other photographers. That’s “alas” because Instagram has never supplied a means to search/filter by both the account and a hashtag. So the only practical way of seeing #everydaybandw photos specifically by me is to view my account page, and tap on individual pictures in the grid. (Note: some of those in that series are tinted black-and-white — e.g. this one — or contain “color splash” effects, like this one.) You can also see a selection of my favorites from the series over at SmugMug, with the caveat that it’s updated only occasionally. (If you want to see all #everydaybandw photos, by anyone, try this. Most of those right now are mine, but not all of them.)

Now, there’s nothing inherently special about reaching Magic Number 1000 (or any other — even Magic Number 1). But I’m at a point now where I think I’ve got about all the satisfaction I can out of a series of “one black and white photo a day, of everyday scenes/objects/moments, which have been shot, post-processed, and posted with minimal effort.” At the time the series began, I desperately needed to spend some time “outside my head,” as it were:

• The Pooch had died just a few weeks before.
• I was still working a full week, every week, with no paid leave of any kind…
• …which was taking place — largely by my choice — in a small, enclosed, windowless office I shared with no one at all.

I also had pretty much ignored the whole digital-photography thing, and — although I’d loved photography in general since the 1960s — had not even picked up my film camera gear in probably 15 years.

So the daily photo mission forced me to do something — however glancingly “creative” — not on a specific schedule, but every, single, day.

…and then of course, recently, I’ve had all this opportunity, suddenly, to structure my time anew somehow. Over the last three months, I’ve started to run out of gas on the #everydaybandw journey for a couple of reasons.

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