300

Some of you know about my decision to take a photograph, every day, no matter what, EVERY DAY, even if it's not a good photograph or taken with my point and shoot or crappy D, even if I have the flu! Well, I started this 300 days ago and getting to the 300 point is a big accomplishment. The hardest part was from 200-300.

Now, a lot of them SUCK. But, there are many, many, many more that I love dearly and they would never exist at all if the rule didn't keep me going. I am definitely going to get to 365 and then I will have to decide if I want to relax the rules a little bit but right now, I felt like celebrating that I made it this far.

For the big occasion, I wanted to create something really special and different and this is it. I have been trying to teach myself compositing (using more than one photograph to make a piece of art). This photo contains more than 20 different layers - but again - the rules mandate that everything that went into this photo had to be shot on the same day. So, every layer in here - every word, every shadow, is from a photograph I shot TODAY.

This was inspired by a new favorite poem of mine by Billy Collins from "The Trouble with Poetry", called "The Flying Notebook":

With its spiraling metal body
and white pages for wings
my notebook flies over my bed while I sleep –

a bird full of quotations and tiny images
who loves the night’s dark rooms
glad now to be free of my scrutiny and my pen point.

Tomorrow, it will go with me
into the streets where I may stop to look
at my reflection in a store window,

and later I may break a piece of bread
at a corner table in a restaurant
then scribble something down.

But tonight it flies around me in circles
sailing through a column of moonlight,
then beating its paper wings even more,

once swooping so low
as to ripple the surface of a lake
in a dream in which I happen to be drowning.