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THERE’S MOOOORE

Back in June I decided that every month I’ll try to get pictures of something natural (plant, animal, landscape) of every colour (roygb, purple, white, black, brown). The idea is to further encourage myself to notice the world around me more, and to give me a reason to go outside and maybe to places I otherwise wouldn’t have gone.

The rules I’m playing by (feel free to play by your own rules) are mostly that 1. one subject can only count for one colour, 2. pink can substitute for either red or purple but not both, and 3. definitions of colours can be flexible (eg. grey might count for black, teal might count for blue or green, it’s vibes) because this isn’t supposed to be stressful.

As winter approaches, I expect finding every colour to get harder, and my work schedule is less conducive to going exploring than it was in June, so I’m gonna add that 4. if I’m really struggling to find time to get out, I may use pictures I took a year ago as a last resort, and 5. if I got a picture of something previously, and I see the same thing in the current month but can’t get a picture of it, I can use the picture I have. Again, while this is supposed to encourage me to get out, if I just can’t I don’t wanna self-impose feeling bad, so I’m gonna cut myself some slack.

June:

June ID’s

July:

July ID’s

August:

August ID’s

September:

September ID’s

October:

October ID’s

November:

I realised at some point that I’ve been following a few additional guidelines that factored into my decisions: 6. cultivated/non-wild plants(etc) do count if they’re outside and not heavily tended to, but not if its survival requires extensive human intervention (eg. climate-controlled indoors), but native or at least wild plants are better than cultivated (if equally cool/interesting); 7. (this is kindof number 5, but) a picture taken in the last handful of days of one month can be used for the next month if I don’t get anything better, because nature doesn’t change neatly at the start of every month; and 8. everything pictured was found around my local area for climate consistency (eg. if I lived in Arizona, travelling to Canada for a picture of snow wouldn’t count for this).

December:

December ID's

January:

January ID’s & bonus coyote vid

February:

February ID’s

March:

March ID’s

April:

April ID's

May:

May ID’s

If anyone else wants to do this project, or if I do it again in the future, I would really recommend starting around June (Dec in the southern hemisphere?), because starting in the warm season meant that colours were pretty easy to find while I was getting the hang of it, and then it got easier again toward the end when I (and my spouse lol) was lowkey getting a bit tired of it. January was definitely the hardest month to find every colour for, followed closely by February, partly because of the cold discouraging me from going out (but I’m happy that doing this motivated me to go out anyway). Blue was usually the hardest colour to find, followed by purple when there weren’t flowers (apparently, there are a lot of purple flowers, but not a whole lot is purple that isn't a flower). One big thing I learned was that I need a better camera; my phone camera can’t see anywhere near as well as my eyes can, so there were a lot of subjects I just couldn’t capture and a bunch more I wish I could’ve gotten more clearly.

I love modern aus because they find new and infinite reasons to be weird about each other, always ending up tangled with the same honesty

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