As both a reward and a challenge, I held myself to shooting with wild and reckless abandon for the entire duration of a recent family holiday.  This was a sharp deviation from my usual method and means of shooting (studio portraiture, controlled environment) and allowed/forced me to shoot what was there and rely on the instant assessments made by my eye and brain. In short, I had to abandon my usual ordered pattern of shooting and embrace the chaos.

What I realized -- as I shot, as I processed and scanned, and as I looked through this week's wonderful photo stream submissions -- is that no matter how ordered a shot is, there will always be an element of the unpredictable.  And, conversely, no matter how chaotic a scene may be, there will always be a tendency for pattern.  And the element of the unpredictable and the tendency for pattern both reside in the same place -- the eye of the viewer's mind.  

And so for this week's photo stream, I looked for the patterns that wound through the utterly unconnected photographs, the repeating beats in the wild that were echoed in the street, the random connections my brain would make between two unrelated ideas.  

The order in the chaos.