Dog Beach moment

There are plenty of opportunities to participate in crowd-sourced, theme-based photographic exercises. There's the Facebook Photo Shootout. Variations on the "a photo a day for 365 days" theme. People who shoot clouds all the time.

I don't usually participate in these but the NY Times' Lens blog had such an opportunity today, asking people everywhere to shoot photos at the same time. Their hope is that the assembled submissions will "create an international mosaic, an astonishingly varied gallery of images that are cemented together by the common element of time." The "Moment In Time" idea caught my interest and I don't know why. I just like the idea of waking up earlier on a Sunday than I normally would and going out to look for a photo, I guess.

The photos all had to be shot at 15:00 G.M.T., which translates to 8 a.m. San Diego time. I gave it a little thought yesterday. Where do I want to go? What do I want to shoot? I decided against having a plan (not always a good plan) and ended up at Ocean Beach. I left my coffee in my car and headed out to look around.

At 7:45 I saw surfers in the parking lot off Voltaire getting ready to hit the waves, people walking their dogs, a little old guy setting his folding chair out on the sand to read the paper. The tide was low - very low. I could actually walk on the sand around the jetty, so I headed closer to the mouth of the San Diego River, to Dog Beach. More dogs and their people. A guy waving a metal detector over the sand. I liked how the low tide left a large swath of beach covered with a thin glassy sheen of water, so I worked that.

I set out not knowing what I was looking for, but hoping for people. I think I ended up with a cliché. Oh well. This is what was in front of me at 7:58:56 this morning, what I submitted.

Did you participate in this worldwide moment-capturing? If so, send me a link to your photo (or the photo itself) and I'll post 'em here.