photo of the week: life is like...

Sure, "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get." That's true, but life isn't that simple.

But life is like a box of chocolates in a lot of ways:

• if you have more money, you can afford a bigger, nicer box of chocolates
• if you have very little money, you wish could afford a chocolate
• if prices go up, you may not be able to afford the box of chocolates you used to
• all the chocolates look a little different, different colors, some more perfectly shaped, some with nuts or fruits, but they're all chocolates
• people will form preconceptions about a chocolate based on what it looks like on the outside, regardless of what's inside
• if the box of chocolates drops, odds are that if you're in a nice box of chocolates you'll get picked up first

There's another aspect of life to be learned from the life of Forrest Gump. There's no accounting for dumb luck. Photography instructors and others will tell you "good photographers make their own luck", which is shorthand for saying "put yourself in the right places at the right times, and you'll have better luck", but in the bigger picture (no pun intended), that doesn't account for people who can't put themselves in the right places at the right times for a variety of reasons.

All of which are thoughts that passed through my head when I spotted this scene as I cycled home from the grocery store. Having my camera with me was "making my own luck", and I had to adjust things for the exposure, but this was 95% "dumb luck".