Just to let you know, this is actually being written at the beginning of November, because that’s when I cemented the idea. Not all posts have that much lead time – far from it – but occasionally, I have a concept that works better (for me anyway) to postpone a bit. Mostly because this image above was taken exactly seven years ago on this date, and featured then.
But there’s slightly more to it than that. My photos are sorted into categories, and this one was in the Sunrise/Sunset folder, which was very sparsely populated at the time: a mere 52 images resided therein, the first being from Florida back in 2004. In eight years of digital images and opportunities, I only had four dozen pics from sunrise or sunset, which was disturbing to me at least, especially since when I get the right conditions, I’ll fire off a selection of frames over a period of several minutes as the colors change. And while I had a pretty good collection of photos on slide film sitting in the cabinet, the digital folders were notably barren.
Things change. Since then, we moved to a new location, with a pond nearby. And we took several beach trips, where I often made the effort to be out at sunrise. So to illustrate, I tell you that at present, the folder contains 2507 images [I have left myself a popup reminder to ensure that this number is correct right before it posts, thinking that I may have added to it – as of this writing in early November, the number was 2,474.] [Edit early AM 12/27: On top of that, I snagged more than a handful from a student outing yesterday evening, and had to sort through those to get the count correct this morning ;-)] That’s a bit more like it, especially since in there now lives my green flash photos, and some of the prints that were featured in my gallery show.
Anyway, I had to take advantage of the idea that the last Storytime post of the year would fall on the anniversary of first posting the image above – that’s the kind of elaborate planning that you’ve come to expect from me. Annnddd this is also the 11th anniversary of the first blog post, too. Well, my first blog post – there are ugly rumors that others began ‘web logging’ before me, but no one so far has documented such to my satisfaction.
[Also of note, at least to someone I suppose: That first blog post was also the only, so far, use of the word “bonhomie” within these pages. It’s not like I looked it up to sound erudite for the first, or that I stopped using the word since then for ethical reasons; there just wasn’t any particular opportunity where it seemed to fit at any later time. I mean, it’s not like it’s a common word anyway…]