One month in

Well the great summertime Scavenger Hunt 2013 organised by Rinda is well underway! Today she has posted the first 'linky' for people to show their pictures.  Be sure to check it out on Rinda's blog.  And I have to say that at this moment in time I've been quite fortunate in finding a fair few of them.  However, we all know what that means in reality.  I've ticked off all the easily accessible ones and now am left with those that will either need a little bit of thinking outside the box or lucky finds.

I've put the ones I have found together as a set in Flickr.  You can find them here  and I've also made sure that when I have shown any of them in a blog post I have added a tag of  Scavenger Hunt 2013.

I think the one that made me smile the most at finding was my take on the Police car. 

 

One thing that I am enjoying this year and which is a sign of how times change in a short space of a year, is that people are adding photos via Instagram, the phone app that lets up upload pictures and link them with a hashtag.  It's a fun, instant way of seeing something and one of my favourite apps at the moment.  I also love the 'Beautiful Mess' app which lets you easily add text and graphics to pictures. 

This is such a fun project and I'm so pleased that it is becoming a popular annual event.  It must be hard for Rinda to know what to include.  Something that is 'easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy' in England may be as rare as hen's teeth in the US.  For example, one year the hunt included an outside washing line.  Something which almost every English household will have within 10 feet of their back door.  Yet apparently quite the rarity in the sunshine states of America.  Who knew?

 

But I think that the thing that has had us all in a quandary has been the picture in the clouds.  A brilliant, inspirational idea.  How we are all commenting on this one.  Either people have wall to wall blue sky (a la Arizona heat for Deb Turtle) {trying hard not to be too jealous of this dilemma} or we have wall to wall cloud cover with no blue bits in between to make a picture.  But when that cloud does break up, I reckon the streets of England are full of people walking around looking up at the sky and tripping over in the street trying to make out a shape in the clouds.  And how many of us have watched a shape forming, had an absolutely brilliant thought as to what it looks like and then by the time you scrabble around in your handbag, find your phone, put the phone into camera mode, point it at the sky and ... it's gone.  A sudden gust of wind has dispersed that beautifully formed picture of a horse/unicorn/teddy bear and it now just looks like - well, a cloud. 

 

One thing we must remember though is to always have your camera or phone to hand with batteries charged, you never know when a photo opportunity will present itself.  Take this morning, driving into town on the way to the supermarket.  Stuck in a queue of traffic, I saw three American wartime Jeeps parked outside the church.  With American servicemen in the driving seats and women dressed in authentic 1940s clothing and hairstyles.  Totally out of place - right?  A perfect scavenger photo - right? Let me tell you that shouting out, no don't move on, wait a minute I need to get a photo, where is my phone, why isn't it in the pocket I normally put it in, oh there it is, quick turn on the camera, does not work.  When the traffic lights turn green, the cars behind will not understand the whole 'need to get a scavenger hunt photo' concept.  And so another missed opportunity to chalk up to experience - but a lesson learnt.  Do not put phone in handbag while a passenger in a car.  You never know when you will need it!