As I ran out the door this morning I did the whole frenzied check for my keys, wallet, bus card, phone, coffee thermos and bike helmet and then happened upon this little well-worn heart stencil to see what I could do with it.

You fill in the blanks.

Just experimenting with the weird light from the rainy night. It was creepy — in fact a guy and I equally scared each other in an alley: I was fawning over beer bottles glistening in the street lights; he was running to his car — not to steal my bike, as I originally thought!

I know that being a photographer is more about seeing a shot than the act of snapping the photograph, but sometimes one has to wonder about naturally occuring (or unintentional) patterns and colors. Looking for photos makes one more attune to organic design.

We went to see Factotum last night. It was amusing — always do love Lili Taylor. But the best part was seeing what parts of the Twin Cities they would use as “LA.” I spotted downtown St. Paul, the west bank, the warehouse district, and, funnily enough, the day labor center a block from my house.

They also caught on film one of the last classic abandoned buildings in downtown, which I photographed last year experimenting with a Lomo. I love the richness of color the Lomo provides.

Right after I took this photo, I was approached by a Hank Chinaski-esque guy. He let me take his photo, but asked that I not use it anywhere. It’s a shame, because I actually liked it quite a bit — but photographing people still makes me uneasy.

Partially inspired by Heather Rogers’ book, Gone Tomorrow, I’ve been thinking a lot about trash and what happens once we shove it into dumpsters and alleys. Some of the most beautiful things I’ve seen are trash — perhaps because, if brightly colored, they stand out in contrast to their surroundings and coax us to wonder about their previous owners and lives. Two from today:

It’s that kind of day. Out of coffee.

I’m hoping that using a real live content management system will encourage me to take more photos and produce more cool projects. As an experiment, I chose Textpattern, in an attempt to broaden my horizons… but it felt very unsupported, not a lot of updates and communication, so I went back to WordPress, which feels very solid. So far so good!