Edit: This photo series has been named "Mint Condition" and is available for purchase as cards, prints and posters on Redbubble.

There is a truck in my neighborhood. It's an old truck. I don't know nearly enough about cars to be able to begin to tell you anything interesting about it (nor could I find anything that piqued my non-car-loving interest on the internet), but I do know it's a Chevrolet Apache 10. Oh, and the color of the truck is amazing.

I took some shots of the truck today, as I walked around the neighborhood. I frequently bring my camera with me as I walk, and I often find interesting things to shoot, but I don't always take the shot that I want.

Check out those rims! The color or this truck makes me want to eat ice cream.

I wonder about the owners of the things I want to photograph. If I looked out my window one day, and saw someone in my front yard taking pictures, it would be a little creepy. I definitely don't want to be that person. And yet, this truck is just sitting there, being all minty, begging to be my model.

So, then, what to do? Mostly, I just keep my camera to myself, or stick to shooting things that are definitely hanging over into the realm of the sidewalk. Or, I walk past the same thing over and over again before I get up the courage to take a picture. Like with the truck. It's been parked in front of the same house for at least 10 years. I finally took pictures of it today.

What have you always wanted to take a picture of?

This is the 6th entry in my Lazy 365 series. The shot I saw from inside, before I got dressed, that I wanted to be sure to get, was the snowy dust on the giant rosemary bush outside my window. The premise for my Lazy 365 is that I must see a shot, then get out the camera and get that shot. I'm not allowed to already have the camera in my hand.

The theme of my Lazy 365 challenge is this: See a shot, then get out the camera and get that shot.

As I was leaving the middle school one day, I noticed that the lacrosse team from the local high school was practicing on the field. I remembered that a good friend of mine was the coach of that team, so I decided to see if she was there that day.

Sure enough there she was, running drills with the goalie, looking like a badass... as usual.

The theme of my Lazy 365 challenge is this: See a shot, then get out the camera and get that shot.

H is for Highrise!

A slightly different view this time... I'm beginning to think I should just own the fact that I love these buildings that I drive past every day, and work my way toward a series of South Waterfront shots. Maybe something like Hokusai's Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji.

Each day, both directions, the buildings are a different color. Since they are all so reflective, the colors of the sky (which are affected by the time of day and the weather) and the colors of the river (also affected by the weather and by the sky) play a huge part in the colors of the buildings.

Of course, I also like to play with those colors a bit once I get those shots onto my computer, but I'm not adding colors that aren't already there. If you look closely at the SOOC shot below (left), you can see the pink, purple, blue, and yellow sky colors reflected in the shorter building.

This shot was taken from inside my car, through a rain-drenched passenger side window, from the driver's side. You can see a couple of blurry spots that must be droplets of water on the window. Can't fix those, but I can do other stuff. What I did to this shot in Photoshop Elements 3:

1. Used the distort function to correct the perspective on the buildings just a little bit.
2. Adjusted the temperature, saturation, brightness, and contrast as a whole.
3. Adjusted the Red, Green, and Blue levels separately.
4. Boosted the saturation of Red, Yellow, Green, Cyan, Blue, and Magenta separately.
5. Selected the sky and increased the blue in the midtones, and used smart blur on the sky.
6. Created a High Pass overlay to sharpen the outlines of the windows.
7. Darkened the brightest parts of the windows with the burn tool.
8. Very slight hue adjustments on individual colors in the saturation menu and with replace color.

The theme of my Lazy 365 challenge is this: See a shot, then get out the camera and get that shot. Exactly that shot.

So, there I was, stuck in traffic again. This time it took me 45 minutes to travel a distance that Google Maps says should take me 4 minutes. Normally that's true, but every once in a while the traffic gods want me to take some photographs, I guess.

And since this qualifies as not planning to take a photograph, but then seeing a shot I just couldn't pass up, I'll file it in my Lazy 365 category. If I had passed up this shot, it would have been ridiculous, since I was sitting there, inching forward, for forty five minutes!

My three favorites from my commute, leaning out my unrolled driver side window with my camera are below. I'm pretty sure I like the one above the best, but I'm open to critiques.

The theme of my Lazy 365 challenge is this: See a shot, then get out the camera and get that shot. Exactly that shot.

Found this while running some errands today. I have passed this sign before, and always liked the contrast of the red and white letters against the russet building and blue sky. Today, since I actually had to get out of my car and stand in the road to fulfill my challenge, I figured I should check out the deli, too; I've been looking for a good sandwich place.

Around the front of the building, there's a lovely awning with statues on either side of the doorway. I liked it right away. How had I never noticed the statues before? But then the sketchiness began... It was closed. Turns out, according to their hours, they're only open on Fridays and Saturdays, and for just a few hours each of those days. I tried looking in the window. It was unclear whether it was ever open.

I don't know if I even want to go back to see if it perks up when it's in operation mode. Maybe operation mode isn't sandwiches at all...

See a shot, then get out the camera and get that shot. Exactly that shot.

There are lots of 365 day photo challenges out there. Most of them focus on taking a photograph every day for one year. The motives include recording one's life, learning to use one's camera better, learning to take one's camera everywhere, and finding subjects even when it seems there are no subjects to be found. These challenges are hard, and they're meant to be hard.

Such a challenge would be extra hard for me for one particular reason: I do not lead a regular life. No, I'm not a secret agent or anything like that. I mean regular as in routine, with a schedule that matches most other people.

About one-third of my days are regular days. I wake up, I go do some stuff, I come home, I spend a little time on the internet, I go to bed. There is plenty of time and flexibility in such a schedule for me to reasonably challenge myself to take a photograph, do some brief editing, and formulate a short blog post about it. I could even do them in batches and post once a week - not easy, but not really an obstacle.

Another one-third of my days are non-stop work from the moment I wake up in the morning (6:30) until the moment I go to sleep at night (sometimes as late as 1:30). This is not an exaggeration. When I work there, I barely have enough time to pee when I want to, let alone have enough energy left at the end of a day to spend any time at all on a computer. Also, the internet access is patchy and questionable at best, and frequently nonexistent. If I want to bring my camera somewhere during the day, I either have to carry it around all day (that's a long day, and my camera gets heavy after the 15th or 16th hour), or I have to figure out some extra free moments before and after the time I want to have it with me, so I can pick it up and drop it off. I make this effort as often as I can anyway, because the nature shots are so worth it.

The last third of my days are spent recovering from the second third. If I don't have to be anywhere, I make a point of not being anywhere. I don't even exit my pajamas. I have been known to not leave the house for days at a time. This would also make a photo challenge difficult. I know there are many interesting things in my house I could find of which to take a photograph, but I think I would get bored with hunting down new subjects within my four walls.

What do I really want out of this? I don't want a record of my daily life (like I said, some days are really just not worth recording), I would like to learn to use my camera better and take it more places with me, but not if it becomes a chore.

What I really want is to get better at not passing up a shot.

This is my challenge. If I see something interesting that I want to photograph, and I didn't already have my camera out, I need to learn to stop, get out the camera, and take the time to get the shot I want. This will probably lead to carrying my camera around more.

This is not a take-a-photo-every-day challenge. This is a take-a-photo-when-a-photo-presents-itself challenge. I will not find one every day. Some days I will find more than one. Some days I'll be too tired to notice that there's even a world out there to be photographed. Some days the view (from my couch) will never change. This will be a 365 challenge not because it will happen every day, but because I'll keep doing it until I have successfully done it 365 times.

"It" being: See a shot, then get out the camera and get that shot. Exactly the shot that I saw.

The photo above is the first in my 365 challenge. Well, OK, the zeroth. It doesn't count because I took the photo before officially embarking on this journey. It fits the theme, though. At a friend's beach house, where games and puzzles and relaxation abound, I had been sleeping on the couch. As I awoke and sat up one morning, I peered over the back of the couch, across the card table with a puzzle-in-progress, and toward the sliding patio doors that lead to the porch, the beach, and the ocean beyond.

The puzzle was bright and colorful, but from the angle I was sitting, and with the morning light coming in through the glass, the puzzle pieces looked silvery and metallic. Sure, I dropped the saturation down on the photo later, but not by much. The scene was basically black and white already. I knew I had to get the shot, so before I did anything else that morning, I went straight for my camera. I think it worked out pretty well. Only 365 more to go.