For my Day 9 attempt at the Photo A Day project I took another trip around our yard. It’s harder than you think to take a photograph every day when you work full time. Luckily, today I got home with plenty of light in the day left to take my daughter outside for a little sidewalk chalk fun.

While we were outside I decided to give the macro setting on my point-and-shoot a little practice. (Macro is usually found in your settings under the flower symbol.) The great thing about macro is that you can use this setting on either the automatic or manual mode of your camera. So if you are feeling lazy (like me today, and basically most days, for that matter) you can still get very cool close-up shots with your camera on auto.

I decided to check out ordinary objects in the yard to see what kind of detail I could come up with my camera set to macro. I really liked the way this hose shot turned out. I was about 6-12 inches away from it and ended up with some great detail by simply focusing near the front of the hose.

I liked the way this lamp turned out, too, but I wasn’t close enough when I took the shot to get good detail so it didn’t make the cut for my “Macro Day” on Day 9. I liked it enough though to include it here.

I highly recommend leaving your camera on the Macro setting for a whole day and challenging yourself to get up close to objects you would normally just notice from afar. It really gives you a different (and interesting) perspective on everyday objects.