2014-08-28 – I love my iPhone camera. I like being able to take pictures of family and friends, just like everyone else. I’m not so big on photographing food. Once in a while, I take a selfie, but not often.

My biggest use is taking random pix when I think something is beautiful or odd. Lots of my pictures are taken in the park across the street or when I’m commuting (when I used to commuter). If you’ve read this blog, you’ve seen some of my pictures.

(If you want to see the rare selfies, click on the following links. One has to do with my musings about heaven and hell. The other has to do with the hell of the Israel-Hamas war. The photos have a vague connection to what I wrote about in the blog, which is unusual. Usually the pictures and the blog are unrelated.)

I started out taking these pictures just to have something to put in the space at the top of this blog. The space is an odd shape: 500 pixels wide by 150 pixels tall. Many of the pictures I took in the early days did not work. They were tall and skinny, not short and wide. Needless to say, I began to look for opportunities to take short and wide pictures.

That changed the way I look at things. I began to sift the movie of my life for wide-angle scenes to shoot.

Then something else happened. I began to see beauty in the things around me. I don’t look for the wide-angle scenes so much anymore. I look for beauty or interesting pattern of light. I can always crop the picture to fit. I didn’t used to see this stuff. Now I do. It’s all around me.

The other day, my wife Kit and I were out to walk our dog Lefty. It had rained most of the day, but it was evening and the sun was out. We were walking east and Kit pointed to a half rainbow in the sky. I usually go looking for rainbows, if weather conditions are right. But the sky seemed too bright. Yet, here it was.

I was too slow to get my camera out and the rainbow faded. But the clouds in the sky were still magnificent and I spent the rest of our walk snapping pictures. The picture at the top of today’s blog doesn’t really convey the beauty. (Nor did the picture at the top of Tuesday’s blog.) You have to look up to see it.

A woman who was out for a walk with her children saw me taking pictures and commented on the sky. She pointed out that there were a lot of bats flying around. I am frequently in the park, but I don’t normally see that. I guess you just have to look.

(If you want to see a picture of a rainbow I did capture, click here.)