Category: Uncategorized

This is the picture I decided on for the day. A lion hunting in the grass. I thought that today I would put a second picture in the post, just to illustrate the process that went into today.

I went through a lot of paper and lots of different animal ideas and quite a bit of food coloring. It has been a long day of trying some things out and seeking to get a picture that I wanted to use. Maybe I will use some of the stuff in the pile at a later date.

I considered using a more exposed picture to make the leopard white and the surroundings lighter too, but I liked the contrast of the dark and light better. We have to make choices and some people won’t like them. As long as we can live with them, that is the most important thing.

It is Wednesday and i’m just trying to stay afloat today. Sometimes you have too much to do and not enough time.

Bridges. Sometimes you have to cross them and sometimes you have to burn them. And sometimes you have to photograph them. This one looks pretty sturdy, although not all of them do. Bridges span gaps and bring things that seem dissimilar together. They have lots of uses both literally and figuratively.

Maybe we should spend more time building bridges to help us cross into new territory and burn the ones that allow the shadows of the past to follow us. Maybe we need to see where they go or stand on them and watch the river flow past below.

I wasn’t sure what I was going to do today. I did a picture similar to this two days ago but it was a lot less messy. But the piles of salt that were left after working on the picture yesterday reminded me of clouds and so I added some color let it run and photographed it.

This picture isn’t very polished and I thought about spending some time to clean up the edges and to try a few other things but in the end I decided that I would just leave it in its raw form. Sometimes imperfections are interesting to look at and they add elements that allow ones imagination to take over.

Today I was toying with the same idea as yesterday, but instead of just making the picture and photographing it I printed it on paper and photographed it. My floor looks like a multi-colored zoo at the moment, but I thought that it was interesting enough to put up this camel as the day’s post.

There are days when I am just messing around with an idea. Today it was shaping and coloring salt. Once I got the bear shape I had a bunch of salt that was piled around near the outline and when I started putting it all together I thought it started to look like a chunk of ice. So I put the bear on top of it and that is what you see above.

It was my intention to do something different with the bear but, as often happens when you are trying something new, it didn’t work out the way I was thinking it would. Sometimes that leads to some really disappointing results and other times it leads to something great. Many times it is something in between. The process can be a lot of fun though.

I have been posting pictures for a few months and coming up with new ideas every day can be stressful. Especially, with a limited set of materials to work with. On the other hand, it does force me to try new things and to think differently. That is a good thing. I think it is easy to fall into patterns that keep us in our comfort zones and don’t make us stretch. So forcing ourselves to do things that we normally wouldn’t can be beneficial.

I’m not sure why the soliloquy from Hamlet came into my mind today but for some reason I seem to have been channeling my high school self. I guess it must have been a really bad day…

Actually, it has been a decent day, but nevertheless I got some lines from the bard in my head. And when I thought about a sea of troubles it just seemed like a roiling sea of fire might be exactly the image I wanted. With a little paper folding and something flammable, we have the picture above. Unfortunately, the rest of the fleet didn’t survive the photoshoot and took a trip into the briny deep.

If you look closely, the model boat didn’t come out of this unscathed. But at least in the picture it hasn’t gone down yet and maybe it will come out of this whole thing in one piece. Here’s hoping.

Today I decided to pull out a picture I took of Matt’s bike a while ago. It’s just a piece of the top tube, but as simple as it is I liked the paint and the pattern of the carbon.

I haven’t taken a picture with fire in it for a while. But today was a good day to do so. I feel like I need to warn people not to play with matches or go take pictures of burning things (especially ones that you have caused to burn) without taking proper precautions. I think that flame can make for a striking picture, but it is better to not take a striking picture than it is to burn your house down.

Not all of my pictures directly (or indirectly for that matter) relate to cancer, but I was thinking about it today as I was working on an idea for my post and I’m so often struck by just how destructive it is. It’s kind of like fire. It can almost strike anywhere and at any time and it is so disruptive. It takes beautiful things and destroys them. You don’t have to be the one with cancer to get burned either, it harms everyone and everything that are near. And in the end you are often left with ashes.