American in Spain

Obiter picta - A photoblog

November 5, 2009
Obiter picta - Nov 5, 2009

The brainchild of my blogrollmate, Lance, he and I and three other people he knows are participating in a photoblogging project that we call Obiter picta. From the About page (as a lawyer, he couldn't resist the Latin play on words):

Obiter dicta are incidental words, things said in passing. Obiter picta is a collaborative photo blog updated Tuesday through Friday. The participants\' contributions are not coordinated in advance. Any consonance or dissonance perceived in the themes, content or composition presented here is coincidental.

With year-long photoblog projects you can go really strict and demand that each photo is taken the day it's published and a photo is published every day of the year, etc. We considered doing that for at least a second before saying, "Nah, let's relax the rules as much as possible." That's why there are only new posts four days a week. I like to think of it as, "how you would arrange your homework in school if you could," with nothing due on Monday so you never have any homework over the weekend. Also you can submit any photo you took any time ever, so it's not like it's forcing us to be on the lookout for new photography subjects. I posted 488 photos to Flickr in September and October, so it's not like I'm strained for material.

I'm not sure what the point of it is yet, but I do like to let my brain puzzle over the daily juxtapositions of photos, searching for patterns. It's also kind of fun to get to know three people I don't know only via four photos each week.

Obiter picta - Nov 5, 2009

This is the homepage as it is today on November 5, 2009. I really like the simplicity and elegance of the design. Lance does all the work for designing and hosting and maintaining the site.

So anyway, head on over there and check it out. The most fun thing to do is to hit the Random 5 button and watch as it randomly selects a photo from each participant and places them in a random order. Sometimes you can get really cool juxtapositions.