One of the best things about walking through your day with a camera close at hand, knowing that you have to publish a picture from that day, is that you look at the world a little closer than before. I find myself examining everything for its unique interest, beauty and artistic edge.

Puddles have become mirrors to a rippling upsidown world, every scrawl on the wall says something beyond the limit of its letters, and strangers aren’t as strange as they were when their faces faded into the blur of another days background.

It’s as if doing 366 Pictures has sharpened my senses. That comes as something of a surprise to me because I truly felt like my senses were pretty sharp and few things went unnoticed. But as I go through each day, I find myself actively engaging with my surroundings just a little more than I did before, taking just a couple more seconds to look at things, and really see them.

This all sounds a little hippy dippy I suppose, and maybe it is. But I’m enjoying this new level of exploration of the everyday. I’m not trying to take great pictures, or find fascinating stories. I’m not working hard to make this some kind of reportage akin to the colorful pages of National Geographic magazine. I’m just going about my day with my eyes open, allowing myself to look just that little bit closer at the things that were there all along, things that I might otherwise have paid no attention to.

So when my friend Aveen stopped to talk on his phone as we walked along Smith Street this evening, I started to look around. While he chatted away I noticed the row of Cellos lined up inside a shop selling orchestral stringed instruments.

Like most days, I had already taken several pictures. A random piece of street art near the University, an old building contrasted against a blue sky with drifting clouds, an ageing monk walking along the street in Fitzroy. All of them were good enough to be todays picture, but this snapshot, with it’s lines and repetition was the obvious one to share.

There’s no real story here, it’s just a random snapshot, but a picture of something I would have ordinarily walked passed without so much of a second thought. But now it’s locked into my story of 2012, noticed, seen, and shared. I love that.

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