The Story

Once upon a time.

I made an executive decision last night while I was searching for a particular picture. I didn’t find it, but I did find something called the PAD project.

PAD is the acronym for picture a day. I forced myself to make one picture everyday whether I had paying work or not.

I started this in 2006 while we were exiled to the high desert of New Mexico after Hurricane Katrina.

If you’ve never done it, you should. Not only do your photographs get better, but you learn a lot about yourself.

I liked it so much that I did it for another year, and another year and… until I did for five years when I decided to change it to picture a week. That really didn’t work so I stopped completely.

My decision to start publishing these pictures, many of which have never been seen by anyone, is two fold.

I was emailing with a friend and he said that his wife wanted to join a cloud. I suggested that if they subscribed to Amazon Prime that they use their cloud. It’s free. It’s solid. It offers unlimited storage for any size file.

One of the things that it does is scrape every similar file type into the collection. I decided to see what was in there. Woah! Almost every picture that I’ve made in the last 15 years was hiding in plain sight.

That got me thinking.

Since I’ve been poking around in my own history, hoping that my ghosts are friendly, I thought this would be a great time to revisit and publish those unseen pictures of that time. New Mexican pictures, all.

I enjoyed looking at them. I hope you do too.

Picture a day. That was the project.

I made a lot of decisions after I thought about showing these pictures to you.

The first was not to try to replicate the order in which they were photographed. It’s almost impossible because paying work was dropped in between the project images.

The second was to show you multiple pictures if that’s what the day’s results were. You’ll see a lot of that especially during the Albuquerque International Ballon Fiesta.

The third was not to touch these pictures in post except to sharpen them.

In case you are wondering, they were all made with a Canon G-9, a very good pocket camera.

This is a riastrad, a door or wall hanging made of red chili. It’s an icon of the southwest. They only last in very dry climate.

That’s the story. I’ll see you tomorrow.