Wow, it’s been a year since I wrote a post here. It’s not actually surprising when I think about it…2025 was pretty terrible in terms of my personal life. I won’t go into any of it here but suffice it to say multiple very hard things happened. Some of them still happening. Sigh.
So that’s enough of 2025, and good riddance.
For 2026, I decided to join the long-running daily photos group on Flickr. I’ve tried this before. I have daily photos albums on Flickr for 2019 (19 photos) and 2020-2021 (47 photos, but that’s over 2 years), showing the wreckage of my earlier attempts. Who knows if I’ll stick with it this time.
But here, so far, in all its glory, is my Almost Daily 2026 Flickr album. The first photo is from Dec. 31, which I included here to make up for the fact that I didn’t decide to start this project again until Jan. 2, missing Jan. 1. Other than that, so far I’m on track with a photo a day (okay, so it’s only the third week of Jan so not that impressive).
One thing I’ve noticed in the couple of weeks I’ve been doing this is that I’m much more attentive when I’m out and about, or even in the house, to looking for interesting things that I might have just glossed over otherwise. For example, for this picture of a closeup of grass with dewdrops (click on image to go to Flickr where it is):
I was out walking and saw that the grass was sparkling. Normally I would have just walked past, and on a good day I would have thought: “Oh, the grass is sparkling. That’s nice.” This time I thought: “Let me get closer!” And I was surprised at how well my iPhone camera did in picking up the droplets of dew.
There is a weird artifact in the middle about ⅓ from the bottom, where my camera did something odd with the sunlight on the blurry blade of grass, but I didn’t notice this until much later so I couldn’t try again to get a new picture. And I haven’t seen the same level of dew since!
For this closeup picture of the side of a glass honey jar with crystallized honey on it:
I would usually (and have every day since) just use the honey and put it back away and not even really notice. But this time I thought, huh, that pattern looks kind of interesting. Again the phone did an okay (not great) job wit the closeup. I’m sure others could do much better with a better camera!
For this picture of a seagull standing on a pole at a beach, with its beak open:
Again, I see gulls sitting on poles all the time. But this time I wanted to go see if I could get an okay photo. I took a few, and this one with its beak open calling was the best! I could have played around with adjustments on my phone or my mac to change colours, contrast, brightness, etc…but I decided to leave it as is, warts and all.
Sometimes I realize I haven’t taken a photo yet and it’s the end of the day and I try to cobble something together quickly. Like this photo of three soap bars on a bathroom counter. Not terribly interesting except the top one has a maple leaf.
But hey, I took my daily photo!
I’ve noticed that lots of my photos tend to be closeups. I’m not sure why. I do sometimes wonder what the phone camera can do with those, and so far it’s not too bad, so I guess I’m just experimenting. But today’s was a landscape shot of fog over the water:
Looking forward to more daily photo adventures!