A few months ago -- after a group of us had shared a few drinks -- my friend, Lou, confessed he sometimes hates it when I spend an evening snapping weird pictures of all sorts of things, myself and my friends with my low-quality Sprint Katana camera phone. But, he noted, maybe if I did something clever with all of those pictures I take, he might not mind as much.
"What about a coffee table book," he suggested, quite earnestly.
I thought for a moment.
"Hmmm...," I replied, pensively. "Something like, "A Year in the Life of a Camera Phone?"
"Exactly," Lou said.
Well, I couldn't fathom actually taking cool-enough, low-res camera phone pics to capture the interest of a literary agent, who then would sell my creativity to some major publishing house and make my tome an internationall bestseller on coffee tables across the globe, but it did put a seed of an idea in my head. I write for a living. I also like to take pictures. Why not combine the two and do something with it.
Thus began the idea for my blog. I know I'm not the first camera phone blogger out there. I'm one of those who tends to jump a little late on the bandwagon, but what the heck...this site is free...my head is always full of things to say and the world offers so many different pictures to take each day.
So, welcome to my humble little blog. I hope you'll check back regularly to see what kind of weirdness or banality I capture on a whim with my Katana camera. I will try to post daily, although I'm not going to make it a hard-and-fast rule. The only rules I am setting for myself is that the pictures have to be taken on my camera phone, by me and also have to be posted on the day I take them. Hence the "A Day in the Life..." approach.
I had originally planned to start this project tomorrow, Jan. 1, 2008, but today I came across a photo opp that I felt needed to be shared. It's December 31, 2007, here in Cleveland, Ohio, but you wouldn't know it by this picture, taken around 10:30 a.m. outside the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, situated on the shores of Lake Erie in downtown Cleveland.
It's sunny. It's blue. There is no snow on the ground. And the temperature was above freezing. The only thing giving away the fact it's winter here in Cleveland (other than the chilly wind coming off the lake) is the bare tree in the corner of the frame.
Blue sky and a pale sun on New Year's Eve here in C-town -- I'll take it! And I'm sharing it with the rest of you as my inaugural venture into blogdom.
