I Spy with My Unblocked Eye ...

(Image Copyright 2007 Steve Brisendine)

Tea: Lapsang Souchong

Music: Waterboys, "The Whole of the Moon"

Time: Night.

Okay, let's see if this works.

I mentioned photography and a certain purple leaf a couple of days ago, but I didn't give the backstory on how I came to be out on photo walks in the first place.

Friend/co-writer/undefinable kindred spirit Seánan Forbes gave me a digital camera some time back. I confess, it was a long time before I unlimbered it in earnest. A snap here, a snap there. Nothing serious.

Part of it was that I used to have a fairly decent photographer's eye, back when I had to do a lot of shooting for work. (My hometown newspaper had one fulltime shutterbug, at best.) But I'd lost it over the years, for whatever reasons, and couldn't seem to get it back.

I took photos, but the composition was off. Or the image was just enough out of focus to be annoying but not enough to be "artistic." Everything that couldn't work ... didn't.

Still, I took the camera to New York when I visited last month. And something, pardon the expression, clicked.

And, knock on a whole forest, it's still clicking -- but the eye is seeing things it's never seen before.

Found patterns, curves, lines -- they're everywhere. And so while most sane people walk along the street looking at whole things, I'm the one looking for just the right angle and framing for a smear of easement paint or a rusty manhole cover (one on the other, if I'm really lucky).

I haven't lost sight of entireties entirely, but -- well, the Picture at the Top of This Post (sorry, it just makes me think of "The Monster At the End of This Book") is the sort of thing that's been finding its way onto my hard drive of late.

So I guess this is my first public showing, as it were. Hope you like it. And please don't run over me when I'm standing in the middle of the street (because sometimes, that's where the most interesting tar squiggles are).