Rejoice in Relief

Today was a one-photo day. A good sort of one-photo day. As I was walking from the station to work I heard a kerfuffling commotion, as some girls saw each other, and - presumably because not dead or homeless after yesterday's extreme fire danger in the Blue Mountains, where many people (us included) fled to lower and safer grounds - ran excitedly squeeing towards each other and hugged madly. You can also see others running up to join in the hug.

Manual lens, camera in manual mode, didn't meter, didn't focus, didn't aim, didn't stop walking, shot from the hip... Got it. :-D

Camera got put away after that; sometimes you feel sure you're not going to find another photograph that feels worthwhile.

And it's worthwhile going large for this.

After that first day of the fires, when I photographed great gobs of smoke on the way home, I'm aware that I've focused (albeit initially unconsciously) more on photographing a counterpoint to the fires: Missy's sprouting carrots, a bottle brush in front of the smoke, water on a leaf ... and now this. I may well, in days to come, photograph some of the devastated areas - but I think only where life is asserting itself. Maybe that makes me a mawkish sentimentalist, and insufficiently "gritty" and real - but it's me.

Also over the past days I've had three Flickr "Explore"s. My bleached railway station netted me my first; a couple of days later I uploaded a shot of the Milky Way, and that soon eclipsed the station shot; yesterday I uploaded a photo of miss 7, and then she went and got 'Explore'd. So that's a bit validating - whatever their algorithms might be. ;-)