best by me - my opinion

looking forward to spring - a polaroid image with impossible project film

"Guess What I Am" SSC

dahlia from my sister's garden

rest stop rust

my son turned 20 yesterday. i used to take a new year's portrait of him and his sister every year. here's one that i love. he was awesome then and is awesome now.

something from the past - for PAM

So I’ve tried to not look at everyone else’s photos before taking and choosing my photo for the day, but I couldn’t help but notice (while doing my administrative chores) that there is a wonderful range of types of photos. And now I’m tasked with choosing which type to share as a representation of my day. Photo #1: Errands for the day included driving downtown where I saw the gorgeous trees at our library which represents my town very well, a city full of trees and readers and history (my great grandfather was one of the founding members of that library). The photo I took there shows the brightness of the day and the welcoming shade and great patterns the tree makes. This is also perhaps a photo that will end up in my project ‘driving portland’. Photo #2: And then I got home and went to my backyard to decompress after driving and dealing with the logistics and craziness of the world. I sat and ate and read, and the photo taken (with panoramic setting) helps me remember to enjoy my yard as is and to not pick it apart because there is so much I would like different, and so much I need to do to it simply to keep it up as is. Photo #3: While sitting on those benches I noticed a light reflection in the area of my heart. It is diamond shaped, not heart shaped, but it made me smile and think about all the light and energy we all have inside us. That is something I would like to encourage everyone to remember, including myself *smile*. Photo #4: I am always drawn to the huge green leaf that the magnolia tree in my yard produces each year. It is a deciduous version of magnolia and the leaf is light and airy but very large. It reminds me that we can be kind and strong at the same time. That the winds of the world may blow us around but we can remain plain and simple, but beautiful. Photo #5: Heading down into the yard is something I like to do and there are two very small parts of the yard that I can see from the main part of my house that make me smile, a ceramic leaf that I fill with water, and some sunflowers that I bought in a large pot and placed by the fence were I should have planted sunflower seeds in the spring. This photo, up close on those two items, shows off to me the craziness yet the delight of the craziness of my day today. Beauty in the everyday, swirled and disarranged into something to appreciate, to see as a part of life that we can embrace. Photo #6: Of course, my nature photos most often lean towards the abstract, so with intent I photographed the sunflowers with an artful eye. This type photo is often part of my day, and certainly was today. I find I see things anew when I get in close and discover new worlds right in front of me. Photo #7: My backyard gets a lot of my attention because our interior has large windows facing that way. But my front yard is full of delights as well, and I wondered if I should share that part of my world. So out my front I immediately was struck by the angles and blue sky contrasting with the greens that have been surviving our very dry summer. (My outdoor plants have to manage on their own, I rarely water them with a few potted plants the exception.) Looking out from the front door one sees the lush green that is my saving grace. It nourishes me. And very observant people might notice the blue pot (appearing much smaller than it really is in this panoramic photo) that has shown up in a few of my photos on ipernity. One thought of a cloud remained from the morning overcast, disappearing when I next tried to get a close up of it. Photo #8: Then I thought that maybe a photo of my home from the front would be interesting – but ha! The building is almost invisible from the street, so instead I ended up with a very panoramic photo of my street. I do not live on the curve (which is truly there at the right in the photo), but the panorama being so wide it appears that way in the photo. On Thursday mornings, such as August 19th was, the garbage and recycling is picked up, and the orange plastic slide is from my kids’ childhoods (long gone, their childhoods, not the kids, the kids are still in town *smile*) – left for the new young children of the neighborhood to enjoy. We can see them from our kitchen window when they are on walks with their parents. Photo #9: Returning inside I am always surrounded by art and photography. These things are a huge part of my life (both visual art and written – my husband is a poet and musician and keeps me enthralled with language and music). One small showing of that is the mess of cards and photos that litter our kitchen counter. There you can see photos I’ve used for anniversary cards etc, art by my mother – ever present in our house, special objects (a red box camera can be found if you look close), even a photo of me as a baby (can you spot it?). This photo is another extreme panorama actually showing both sides of the raised counter this objects rest on. I find the crack in the middle, where the panoramic feature struggled to figure out what to do with my circling the counter, an interesting part of showing off such a crazy grouping of items. Photo #10: My inside photographic world is mainly found in my room (used to be the kids’ room) that I’ve only recently revamped to fit my needs better by adding a beautiful hardwood counter height work table. There you can find parts of my current projects laid out and not having to be put away every night when it’s dinner time (they used to be on the dining room table – yikes!). A lot of my photographic world is represented here if you know where to look in the photo (feel free to ask me about any piece of it). Photo #11: The part that isn’t represented in the other photos is where my love of photography came from. That is from my mother. On that new table in my room, there is a photo of myself, my mother and brother, in a beach house when I was about 6-8 years old. She was and is my inspiration, both in photography and how to be in the world. She married a man with a great eye for art and architecture, and had her own upbringing around photography (her dad was one of the vice-presidents of Kodak back in the day) and her love of photography and her ease at allowing me to play around with her cameras and the darkroom in our house, and her love of me, sparked my love of photography. This photo also shows part of one of her watercolors (what she has turned to in recent years – at 97 it’s hard for her to hold a camera steady, but she can still paint!), and part of one of my photographs – what I would call a classic ‘raingirl’ photo. And so I come to a decision – as with most of my decisions, it is not an ‘all in’ decision, but leaves me thinking I maybe should have chosen a different one. And so I fudge the rule a little bit – I include a link to my Album with the other photos here in my description – in case you want to check them out. www.ipernity.com/doc/raingirl/album/1304648 fyi - All these photos are straight from my camera, no post processing (today it was my phone camera – a phone chosen for its fairly good camera). That seemed appropriate to me for the day. ------------------------------------------------- I thought of all you as I went around looking for things to photograph today. You all are a large part of my photographic world these days also. So you can think of this group as my contribution to the day as well. Thank you so much for adding your photos. In the next few days I will start viewing and commenting on your photos. I also hope to engage in some conversations around your photography and your photographic world in the discussions.