So I came up with two ideas: get pictures of all the pants of the people who pass by my office window in an hour...or... get pictures of all the pants I can in an hour. I set up my camera to point at a specific spot that would get pretty much just the pants of passersby. I rigged it up to try a sharp angle on the frame, to capture as much as possible just the pants part of people coming through the space on view. I snapped a couple, then had the extra idea to switch on the camera's intervalometer and set it to 1 shot/min for 60 minutes. During that time, including the shots I made intentionally, I got 13 people's pants or partial images of pants. I also got 49 shots of...nothing really. I included a couple of them here for reference.

I did have some interesting personal experiences while I did this. The game of trying to catch some pants through a narrow field of vision at 12x was interesting at one level. But I also had a chance to explore my own head. I found it kind of became an exercise in patience...almost meditation, almost torture. I saw a lot of people walk by. Dozens. In my peripheral vision I caught sight of people walking into range. I felt a powerful pull to reach out, change the settings, snap the photos intentionally. I would hear the mechanism click and whirr and watch someone walk right into the frame a second later. Or I'd see someone coming halfway up the bridge and pray they'd slow down, or speed up. I wanted to capture more pants! But I couldn't, the die was cast and I was going to get what I was going to get, which was a relatively small number of pants. I got very anxious, really hoping I'd get everyone, to the point that I might have done better if I'd just taken an hour off work and sat on a parkbench somewhere counting pants and documenting.

Well that's not true, I mean I actually got a bunch of work done. But I did feel on edge and jittery for the whole hour. I guess it's just hard to follow your own rules and be disciplined sometimes.