Goal: 1 Photo

 I pulled into the parking lot by the South Park trailhead and had 20 minutes to wait for an appointment.  I started thinking about Ansel Adams and the early days of film photography.  Adams would sometimes spend days in preparation for a single photograph.  I wondered what it would be like to wander around with my camera in the vicinity of my truck and wait for the opportune situation to take just one photo and base the day's blog post around that one photo.  With the advent of digital photography I have this nagging feeling that people, including myself, take too darn many pictures without giving much forethought to any one photo.  We might come home with hundreds, download on a computer, then delete most of them.  Choose a few good ones (lucky ones?) and feel we've created high art.  I wanted to slow down and get just one photo.  Couldn't do it!!!
After wandering for around 15 minutes in a very dry, brown, and combustable field, a shrub-like flowering plant (above) stood out as the pink blossoms were like little lights in an otherwise drab background.  Then I dropped my lens cap, and as I bent down to pick it up, I noticed that my new pants were covered with sticky seeds.  That called for a photo.

 I was running out of time and wondered whether the pink flowers would be worthy of my goal.  So, I paused briefly by the big sign with a map of the trail system.  Below it was a brown metal box containing free trail maps.  Printed sideways, as you can see below, the word MAPS jumped out at me and stirred a feeling I often got when I lived in Ukiah.  I never stopped getting a quick thrill when I saw the word "Haiku" on the "entering Ukiah" signs in my rear-view mirror.

 With about a minute to go, I passed a large Thistle that stood out above the surrounding dried-up vegetation.  Even though most of its flowers had gone to seed, the plant was obviously still alive and I found it photo-worthy.  So, there you have it - 20 minutes of wandering and thinking and producing a few photos and ideas that I'll undoubtedly revisit from time to time and see where they lead me.