Days 200-201/365: Bright Lights in the Big City

I can hardly believe that I have made it to day 200 already. There is a chance that I might actually complete this project. 

So I happened to be in London late yesterday (Day 200). I planned go shopping for some new clothes and thought that it might be a good idea to bring the camera along. I still had the Light theme in mind and wanted to catch some of the city lights with slow shutter speed. I had so many great ideas in my mind, but it was impossible to pull any of them off. The challenges were that I was short on time, I was tired and carrying lots of bags, I felt distracted by all of the people around me and worried about someone snatching my camera or bag and I couldn't find a good place to place the camera to get a good composition or to eliminate camera shake. Even resting the camera and pressing the shutter button with a two second delay didn't manage it. I got some pretty dodgy shots like these...

I guess you could argue that the top one has a certain water colour-like charm to it, but it doesn't work for me. 

Here was another one that didn't please me much, Piccadilly Circus at night. 

On a separate note, I really did enjoy walking around London last night. I didn't even get too frustrated by the bad pictures. I just felt able to accept that this is where I am in my photography journey right now, and it is much further along than were I was 200 days ago. I have so many memories from the years that I lived in London and I miss it a lot sometimes. Someone once told me that if you stood in Piccadilly Circus for your whole life, you would meet everyone that you will meet in your lifetime anyway. I don't know if that is true, but I would love to meet all of the earlier versions of me that passed through there. I first visited Piccadilly Circus when I was 9 years old. The next time I was 16. I moved to London when I was 17 and would have passed through pretty frequently until I was 22 or so. Since then my visits are much more sporadic. It would be so cool to get all of those versions of me together. Some of them would need a gentle hug and some reassuring words. The other thought that struck me was how much London has changed in recent years. Time really is passing and things move on. When I was younger I felt like things would stay the same forever, but they don't. 

Next up, Blurry Big Ben..

This one was the best of a bad bunch. It is not perfect by any means but I am going to go ahead and submit it to the Project 52. 

Today, day 201, was more straightforward. We were all tired after a difficult week of sleeping on the sofa bed, Bear waking up all over the place and a low lying illness (again). I had planned to grab some quick dolly shots and be done with it. Then Roo came downstairs and had some quiet time with Jasmine. I just had to capture the moment between these two. Unfortunately, his Kindle threw off a colour cast that I don't know how to fix. 

And a bit of dolly boudoir to end the day. 

I have been so impressed by the macro shots that I have seen in both my project 365 and project 52 groups. I couldn't help doing a little macro lens research. I had thought that a macro would only do close up work but it turns out that they are great for outdoor portraits. Sigh, so now the Canon 100mm f2.8 has been added to the ever growing lens wishlist.