Month: October 2018

So this is today’s picture. I feel like I should take some time to talk about the why of this project.  2016 was a pretty bad year. In January one of my friends, Marie, died from breast cancer, and while that sucked, it got worse when my brother, Matt, was diagnosed with kidney cancer two months later. Three weeks later, he was gone. Then in the summer my childhood friend Nate was diagnosed with kidney cancer. He died in March 2017.

I have been wanting do do a project to raise money for cancer research for a while now, but I have just kept putting it off. Some of my ideas seemed above my skill level, others seemed beyond my resources, but when I had the idea for the Quarter for Cancer project, I sort of ran out of excuses.

So for the next year I’m committed to seeing what I can do with this. I started this in memory of my brother and my friends who didn’t make it, but I’m also doing it for those I know who have been diagnosed with cancer and those who are currently dealing with it.

My hope is that I can play some small part in helping find a cure. Because cancer affects us all and the sooner we can get rid of it for good the better.

 

I went out for a walk today, looking for something to photograph. After it gets dark, the options for a photograph can be limited. So I wandered around in the dark for a while and then decided that I would do something I tried a while back. I just opened up the shutter for 10 seconds and walked up the street. You can see the red tail lights, the yellow headlights, and the green traffic lights.

Pictures like this can be a lot of fun to take. You never can be sure what you are going to get. The results can be striking, or they can be chaotic, or they can have distinct patterns. Some of them are blurry, some are not interesting, and sometimes you just aim wrong and miss where the lights are all together.

Abstract art is a funny thing. Someone can see something beautiful where others just see a mess. What I see in this picture is a car parked at the light when it turns green. Then it accelerates through the intersection toward me. Other cars pass by moving away, but they don’t stop, and they probably don’t know, nor do they care, that they are being photographed.

Aside from the picture, the project is now 1% of the way to the goal of $1000. That probably doesn’t seem like much, but, right now, few people even know that I’m doing this, so it is kind of a big deal to me. And I’m feeling pretty optimistic that over the course of the next year I’m going to be able to meed that goal.

Thanks.

When I started this project I knew that I wasn’t really going to follow a theme for the 300 pictures and it was going to be pretty eclectic. Today seemed like a good day for a little early Halloween.

I have been looking for something to photograph for the last couple of days, but between being busy and being down to $.07 (I printed a photo, probably the cheapest trip to Costco on record!) my options seemed limited. Passing some bushes up the street I thought the orange berry things looked like little pumpkins so I figured I would just draw some faces on them and make little jack o’lanterns out of them. Add one fall leaf and viola, um… pumpkins on a leaf. Tada!