A photo an hour

For the longest time now, I have come across bloggers trying the 'A photo an hour challenge'. The idea is to document every hour of your day with a photograph. It always intrigued me; even when bloggers spent the day working and documented it, the posts had a certain charm to them. So, yesterday I thought of trying it out myself. I had some activities planned for the day, and figured it was a good day to try it out. The only issue was the camera; the one I generally use is a little on the larger side and my point-and-shoot is always giving me trouble. I still opted for the latter and decided to edit them to give them a bit of an Instagram-ish look (which is another thing I love to see on blogs!). Talk about hitting two targets with one arrow, huh( I don't want to hit two birds, sorry). So here's my day:

8:00 am

Started the morning with a heavenly cup of freshly made coffee. Anything before sipping it is a complete blur. Right after, I sped off to html class. Knowing the design part of web design, I wanted to know more about the programming part, and luckily found a good short-term course nearby which wasn't too intrusive with my schedule. I contemplated sneakily taking a picture while attending it, but considering that the class consists of about 5 people, my stealth would probably have been futile.

10:00 am

Got home to a yummy breakfast of poha (which is called usli in konkani). It's made with beaten rice, coconut and a few other ingredients (it shames me that I don't know what they are).

11:00 am

Noted down some of the to-dos for the next couple of days, and promptly put them off to work with the new graphic tablet! I'm getting the hang of it (now that I've been obsessively sitting with it for almost two days). It's lovely, I don't know why I didn't get one earlier.

12:00 pm

Distracted myself while walking to meet a friend at the neighborhood market. Being noon, the Sun was in all it's glory and created some interesting tree shadow patterns on concrete. It also gave me yet another topic for some photo-experimentation! It was good to see the birds getting some respite from the heat; they made me want to join them (no, not really).

1:00 pm

The friend I met had mentioned a fun ice-skating place, and we decided to go check it out. Being quite far from our starting point, it did result in us getting stuck in some slow-moving traffic. It didn't mean photographs couldn't be taken of course. The one with the side-mirror reminds me of Jurassic Park (yes, I'm obsessed with that movie.) where the friendly neighborhood t-rex is chasing a bunch of puny humans in a jeep, and they show it in a side-mirror with a 'Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear' warning. Classic.

2:00 pm

Having worn the boots and watched the people in the earlier ice-skating session, we waited for our turn. The trick was to learn to balance on the ice, and slowly start skating. And the goal was to not fall down. Both were addressed pretty effectively, as by the end of the hour, I was able to skate (rather slowly) and fell only once when a gentleman who lost control rammed into me! The experience was amazing though, they even had a DJ and disco lights! The excitement of it all made me forget to take more pictures. Oops.

4:00 pm

Ice-skating sure leaves one with an appetite! This, and the aches of wearing the extremely tight skating boots took us to a restaurant famous for brewing it's own beer. It was a wonderfully rustic joint, with huge containers for the four kinds (lager, strong lager, smoked and wheat) of beer they made. We even got to sample all of them.

5:00 pm

Heading back meant some traffic along the way too. Nothing that couldn't be documented. Again.

6:00 pm

Well, more like 6:51 pm (as can be seen on the car clock). As I returned from ice-skating, another friend called. So off I went with her. Unfortunately, the time also coincided with rush hour, which gave me yet another opportunity to click photos in the car. The drivers of the adjacent cars looked extremely confused.

It got dark after this, and disliking photos taken with a flash, I called it a day as far as the camera was concerned. Now as I sit and basically journal the day that has past, I realize how I managed to fit in quite a lot. And the documentation definitely added to the enjoyment of it. It's definitely something I will try again.