Month: December 2018

Many people might be sad that 2018 is over. I am not one of them. If I was an awesome sculptor I would have made a little Leprechaun to dance on the grave. But I’m not so you can imagine it if you hated 2018 or pretend that there are some flowers on it if you thought it was a good year.

In either case, here’s hoping you have a great 2019.

I don’t know what to say about this. It was a cold and gray morning with gray and white houses and gray and white trees. But despite its lack of color I thought it was rather beautiful. Sometimes simple things are.

It’s near the end of the year when people think about New Year’s resolutions and reflect on the last year. I decided that I liked the reflections in this water. Take it as you will and come to your own conclusions, etc.

I was out walking near the dog park, maybe that should be a dog-friendly park. In any case, I was standing on top of the hill looking around and I saw this woman in a red coat walking her dogs (there were actually three of them). The dog was black and all of the trees were covered with snow so it was nearly a black and white scene. I have seen a lot of pictures where the photo has had all of the color removed except for some select element which is in some other color. 

When this woman came around the corner, she added a splash of color to the scene, so I took this picture. Maybe I should have named this picture The Lady With the Dog, like the Chekov story, but then people might make assumptions about the woman in the picture and that just seems judgmental.

On that thought, what story does this picture tell? Is the woman alone with only her dog? Is the park empty? One of the beautiful things about photography, in my opinion, is that it captures a single moment in time. That can be misleading though because life isn’t just single moments, it is a continuous stream of moments stacked end to end in an ever changing line. If you saw the picture from seconds earlier or later when there are multiple dogs tearing through the scene, you might think that something completely different was going on. 

But if we can capture a particularly moving moment, it is possible to extrapolate a beautiful (or for that matter horrifying) story to go with it. My story might not be the same as yours and that is an amazing thing. I love how everyone can see their own version of the story told by the same picture.

New snow and Christmas is over. Today seemed like it was full of possibilities. After shoveling the driveway, I decided to go for a walk and see what possibilities I might run across. I didn’t see a lot of birds in the dog park, but I did see this one hiding in the bushes.

Normally, I don’t go for birds. You have to get close or have a long lens to get them to fill the frame. As you can see, the bird is pretty small, but when my thoughts were on possibility, I thought a bluebird might be the right subject of the day. I don’t know where the idea of the bluebird of happiness came from. Maybe it was the most optimistic of the saddest type of bird but since the phrase has somehow stuck, I decided to use this picture. 

Hopefully, the day does turn out to be full of pleasant opportunities and worthwhile adventures. With all the possibilities, who knows what might be in store?

Best movie ever!  Watched Better Off Dead this morning. Those two grinches are on the feet of my footy pajamas that come out once a year to prepare me for the day. 

Merry Christmas to anyone reading this. Hopefully, your day was awesome and you also got to watch Better Off Dead. 

This morning began at four. I know most people don’t believe that 4 AM exists and I think if you ignore the senior citizens, more people have seen the earth from space than the morning at 4; at least on the getting up side. So if you are going to be a denier of 4 AM or a flat earther, I think the morning story is more credible.

I was out the door before the sun chose to show its face this morning I was out looking for something to photograph. I drove around for a while, watching the sleeping city looking for my picture for the day. As often happens when I get stuck, I ended up at the cemetery.

I hate Christmas on a good day, and today wasn’t a good day. There are people that you have for certain conversations and when you need to have one of those conversations and the person you want to talk to is dead that sucks. Turns out that if you go to the cemetery early enough to beat the sun and every sane person who is still at home in bed, you don’t seem like an idiot talking to a cold stone slab and not getting any answers. I don’t actually think that there is anyone to talk to in a cemetery anyway. If there are, the afterlife is a pretty bleak thought. I’m sure Matt has better things to do than lie around in a box six feet below the ground, but I tried talking to him anyway.

As I wandered around the cemetery I got to looking around. The clouds were hanging over the mountain like a gray cold wet blanket. The kind that if you put it around your shoulders it would just make you sad, cold and wet. If more snow had been falling I might have been just that. But the mountains pretty much said what I was feeling, so I took a picture of it. Not a great picture, it was a little too dark and I didn’t have a tripod so I didn’t get a nice clear panorama like I wanted to. But I did get a gloomy looking mountain.

Despite my general aversion to Christmas I felt like this was ok for the picture today. Maybe I should have just bah humbugged my way through the day because putting this together was like playing the worst game of pool ever. Just when I had part all together one grain of salt would carom off another and mess up the letter. 

I guess it was a good thing I was watching Groundhog Day, because it felt like doing the same thing over and over again and making no progress. But eventually I got this arrangement and decided it was good enough.

As promised yesterday, here is what I was working on with the salt and needle.

I am not a big Christmas fan and I have been tired of it this year since before Halloween. As a result, I felt that a little encouragement was due to all those who like me are a bit grinch this time of year, and also to those who love this time of year but are getting tired of all the things that you have to do around the holidays. So, take a load off for a few minutes, take a few deep breaths and remember it’s ok.

Today I thought that I would put a picture of me working on the picture I’m going to post tomorrow. I think that with the ubiquity of Photoshop and camera-phones it can be easy to dismiss photography or at least under value it as an art form. Drawing and painting are seen as higher forms because they require special talent and since everyone has a camera these days people don’t often think what goes into a good photograph. 

It can take a lot of time and effort to set things up for a picture, and you can’t always decide where the clouds will be or where the light comes from in a photograph. You can do that in a painting. With a photograph you may have to wait a long time or move things around in the studio to make it right. I know that with photo editing tools you can do a lot of cheating like replacing backgrounds and doing composites, but I consider that photo-art and not photography. I’m sure lots of people would disagree with me and we could have a lively conversation on the matter, but I prefer to use what I get out of the camera with a few minor tweaks to color or contrast. Call me a purist, or crazy, or what you will.

Anyway, this is me moving salt crystals with a needle point. It can get tricky because if you get the point in the wrong spot, sometimes the crystal jumps. Tune in tomorrow and I will show you what I created.