Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

Eight years ago, my daughter Meg and I were in England in early November, and I took this picture of an elderly woman selling poppies in front of Bath Cathedral for Remembrance Day, what we call Veterans Day. We saw people selling these poppies everywhere, and we bought and wore them, too.

On Remembrance Day, November 11, we had just boarded a train in London when we heard the announcement that it was 11 AM, and that the country was now observing two minutes of silence. People on the train stopped what they were doing and remained still for two minutes…it was really quite a beautiful thing.

Photojojo has a great service for Flickr users — you sign up, authorize access to your Flickr account, and twice a month they send an e-mail message with a few of your photographs from a year earlier. The selection apparently uses Flickr’s interestingness formula, so you tend to get photographs that got a lot of views, comments, notes, etc.

Of course, this service doesn’t do anything you couldn’t do yourself — it’s certainly easy enough to search your archives by date or browse through your sets to find pictures from last Halloween, last Thanksgiving, or whatever. I probably spend more time going through my old photographs than most people, all 4,000+ of them. But there’s something quite nice about getting these messages and see a little gallery of favorites from the previous year. Sometimes it makes me happy, and sometimes sad. Sometimes it reminds me to get in touch with a friend or family member and say something like “I was just thinking about the day we went to the orchard and bought that big pumpkin last year, remember how much fun we had?” Often it makes me want to go out and take more pictures.
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Last Tuesday I participated in a professional meeting at Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston, Massachusetts. It’s a beautiful place, and I enjoyed walking around outside during the breaks to take a few pictures of flowers and statues.

But after the meeting, I headed off on a quest to get the picture I really wanted, a shot of Chet’s Diner in nearby Northborough. I have been wanting to get this one for my collection, but I seldom seem to be in that part of the state.
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Instant Karma — “Before Polaroid fades into history, let’s remember how influential — and cool — the art of the snapshot, and the cameras themselves, could be” [Mark Feeney, Boston Globe : March 16, 2008]

Polaroid announced last month that they would no longer produce instant film was just an inevitable step in the long, slow decline of Polaroid and the world of instant photography. Instant film photography, killed off by digital photography. In the world of cameraphones, Flickr, photoprinters, who needs instant film cameras?

But Polaroid really was once so cool. In Feeney’ words:

“…there are those who remember when it was the Apple of its day: feisty, ubiquitous, pioneering. The Polaroid Land Camera was like the Mac, with all other consumer cameras PCs. There was the same sense of engineering superiority and cultural cachet.”

When I was a child, my engineer father had a serious camera with a light meter and a lot of accessories. He took slides and wrote the technical data on the frames, and he carefully ordered and organized the slides in trays for the projector. My mother had an old Brownie box camera, later replaced by an Instamatic, totally point-and-shoot. She had some of her older photographs in albums and baby books, but most of her pictures were just tossed into shoeboxes, undated and unlabeled.
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I used to think I was an observant person, and a curious one. But since I joined Flickr, I realize how unobservant I have actually been all my life, how much I’ve missed. I look at things so much more closely and appreciatively when I’m taking pictures, or even when I am thinking about taking pictures. And I know a lot less than I thought I did, too. When I try to add appropriate titles, descriptions and tags for my pictures, I realize how little I know about the world around me. I don’t know the names of flowers, trees or birds, and I can’t describe architectural styles or features.
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When I first started reading about Project 365, for which people commit to taking one photograph a day, it sounded like fun and something that might be interesting, but I thought it would be pretty easy for me. I take a lot of photographs — I have over 3,000 on Flickr.

So in the fall of 2006, I decided that I’d try it, starting on January 1, 2007. I told all my friends, read a little more about it, looked at other people’s collections, and was all set to go. But on New Year’s Day, I went to my sister’s house over a hundred miles away, and somehow left my handbag behind, with my wallet, my phone and my camera. I probably could have figured out some way to take a picture, but by the time I got home, it was late, I was tired, and I just wanted to go to bed. I could have started a few days late when I got my camera back — there’s no magic about starting January 1 — I didn’t want to. I decided that 2007 was “ruined” for Project 365, and that I needed to wait for 2008.
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A few of my autumn photographs from Russell Orchards in Ipswich, Massachusetts, are featured this week on MasterCard’s Priceless.com website.

Russell Orchards is one of my favorite places in the world, especially in the fall, and I’m happy to recommend it and give them a little publicity — not that they need it.

Priceless Picks — “Delicious doughnuts, perfect pumpkins”

I love this photograph. I think it’s bright and cheerful, I love the detail of the center, and I love the colors. I especially love the delicate brushlike copper highlighting on the yellow petals.

It’s not the best picture I’ve ever taken. It’s not even the best picture of a sunflower that I’ve ever taken. But it’s the best one I took yesterday.
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Yesterday I finally took some pictures of the Miss Worcester Diner, something I’ve been meaning to do for years. I have vivid memories of visiting my grandparents in Worcester when I was a young child. We lived in the Boston suburbs, and the gritty urban landscape of South Worcester slightly fascinated me. The Miss Worcester Diner, with an old factory behind, and the rusty railroad overpass across the way, seemed to me to be the very symbol of the city.
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I first became interested in Yelp.com while looking at reviews of libraries, and I posted about this at my professional blog : Yelp and Other Local Information Sites. But then I joined Yelp, and got really interested in adding listings and reviews for local businesses, especially those small, independent businesses that are important to me, some of which are in my own neighborhood.
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