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I got some broken phone parts from the local Fix It shop down the road. As I looked at the sad pile of electronics, never again to be electrified, one screen stood out to me.

It was closer to a whole screen when I began, but it was darker than I wanted due to the LCD material on the back. A material which, might I add is incredibly difficult to remove. In trying to remove the material glued to the back of the glass, I damaged the broken screen more than when I originally got it. But in so doing I had this idea for a picture. If you have ever gotten really close to a screen or monitor you may have noticed that each pixel is made up of a red green and blue pixel. With the higher resolution screens of today they may not look like an open carton of Neapolitan ice cream, but if you had an old CRT TV that you got really close to, you know what I’m talking about. And thinking about that array of red, green and blue, I thought if you break a bottle whatever is inside comes leaking out, so if you break a screen, then all the red, green, and blue should leak out the bottom.

I set to work suspending the screen in the air and then proceeded to pour paint on the back and photograph it as is dripped off the bottom. This is one of the shots that I think was more successful at showing what I was after. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

It seems that 2021 has started off the way 2020 ended. After a two week isolation after a covid exposure, the project has fallen two weeks behind. Fortunately, it’s early in the year and I have some time to make it up.

The picture needs a little touch up, but it seemed more important to get this posted and start working on the next picture, so here it is, in need of just a little touch up in the future.

It started with a trip to the office supply store, which just happens to be next to Zurchers. After picking up some ink for the printer, I went to the manager of the party store with an odd request. Sometimes it is difficult to come up with a creative idea for a photograph. It is always hard to ask someone if you can have their garbage. But she was kind enough to give me a bunch of mylar balloons that I could work with.

I made some fish and a mylar aquarium, I stuck butterflies to the apricot tree and finally decided on the picture above — a row of butterflies on a painted stick.

It’s only three weeks into the year and I’m already behind. I’m going to blame covid and take a mulligan on this one however. As the year started I had an exposure incident that had me voluntarily quarantined at home for two weeks. During this time I worked on this photo, which I took using some bike parts donated from my sister-in-law’s garage. But there is something about cabin fever that makes it awfully hard to get anything done if you aren’t forced to do it.

Despite my best efforts, I just couldn’t get myself to post, knowing it would mean having to do some edits and updates to other webpages. I know there are people out there who love making webpages and it turns out I am just not one of them. Needless to say, the updates were not made and no new picture was posted. Now that the quarantine has ended, I have no excuse to procrastinate any longer.

One of the most frightening things in the world is a blank page. It has the potential to be anything, but until something is placed on it all the potential for success is latent; but so is the potential for failure. Leaving the page blank seems like the only way to avoid failure, but isn’t not even trying a failure in itself?

I have been examining a blank page for the last two months. Procrastination is easy if you can think of any reason to entertain it and I have been telling myself that I wasn’t ready to start this project for the last eight weeks. I could tell myself I’m almost ready for another eight, but on the last day of the first week of the new year, ready doesn’t seem to be the answer. But starting today, one picture a week for a year just seems so reasonable that, whether I’m ready or not, today is the day.

I got the materials for this picture from the cutting floor of Brown Floral. I had several pictures that I created from things that were just going to be thrown away. I may post some of them in Instagram. In the end this was my favorite and the choice to start my project, One Man’s Trash.

Today is the second to last picture for this project. I thought I would just take a picture of all the stuff I gathered as I worked on it over the last year. If you have been following the project you may recognize some of the stuff used in different pictures.

I folded this thing and I just wasn’t happy with the design of either side. So, I cut it in half and got this. I thought it was more interesting than either side alone. Isn’t that how life sometimes is? We fill it with routines or friends who are just like us and it isn’t until we do something different or meet someone new that we get out of our rut and see things in new and exciting ways?

I didn’t pay attention to some of the details, like some debris on my background and maybe a little something on the lens. I considered cleaning things up and retaking the picture, but then I thought how everything has imperfections. Except for people’s carefully composed social media feeds that resemble real life about as much as a hippopotamus resembles an apple pie. And I just decided to leave them in there today.

Just added a bit of that winter feel to the pine tree.

It’s late and I’m tired. Some days make you question whether to be grateful or whether to be annoyed. I could probably go either way today, but I think I’m going to choose to be grateful.

I knew going into it that today was going to be less than ideal. I had a car breakdown on Sunday that I had to deal with today. I suspected it would take a couple of hours, but it turned into a much larger production that ate up a bigger part of the day than I had anticipated.

But I had help from family and friends to get me where I needed to be and where I couldn’t get to because I was carless and fancy free. I hate having to call on people and inconvenience them when things happen, but it’s really nice to know that you have people like that in your life, especially when you haven’t got a car in the world.

And at the end of the day I got a nice little shot of some crocuses.

I decided to make another little wire tree. Enjoy!

This would probably be a better Halloween picture, but by then this project will be over.

But if Bob Ross ate this much candy before the show just imagine how entertaining that show would be.