WARNING: Totally off-tangent rambling. I’m just way too exhausted right now to write a longer, more riveting post. Right.

Well, I just thought I’d share with you this self-portrait which I did a few days ago as part of a photography challenge (via a group called Utata) and as my day’s submission for the 365 Days project.

For the challenge, the idea was to create an image based on 3 elements:

1) There must be an umbrella in the shot.
2) The photo must be indoors.
3) The final image must be in cinematic ratio.

The picture you see here became one of my submissions. Turned out that it made it to Flickr Explore’s Front Page. At one stage, it had the rank of #12 in the “interestingness” archives.

When I was submitting and thinking of a title, I just thought of the obvious - “Umbrella”. Then, Rihanna’s song popped in to my head -

Ever since, the lyrics of the song just got stuck in my head (don’t you hate it when that happens?!) -

"When the sun shines
We’ll shine together
Told you I’ll be here forever
Said I’ll always be your friend
Took an oath
I’mma stick it out ’till the end
Now that it’s raining more than ever
Know that we still have each other
You can stand under my Umbrella
You can stand under my Umbrella…"
(Lyrics from Rihanna, "Umbrella")

Anyway, a few days later, I found out that Mandy Moore also did a cover of the song. So, this didn’t help either -

And, of course, there’s this version by Australian Idol, Natalie Gauci (which I also enjoyed when I first heard it) -

Hmmm… what do you think? Which one do you like better? Or, don’t you like the song at all?

In any case, now that I’ve blogged about this, I’m hoping that I’ll finally get this song out of my system. But, if you have any other tips on how to cure the ‘Stuck Song Syndrome’ - I’ll be more than happy to read all about them.

Oh, and yeah, I’ve received some questions about how I created the “Umbrella” image. If you’re interested to read more about some background info on the photograph, please read on…