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As the day was coming to a close, I was getting nervous about what I should do for a picture today, but as I was driving home, this sunset presented itself. Sometimes we worry about things and the answer just presents itself. Sometimes we have to scramble to make things work out. Today I think I got lucky, even though I didn’t have my camera and had to use my phone.

I think that in general things work out, but not always exactly as we expect them to.

After yesterday’s penguin and duck photo, I was still in the mood to do a little sculpting. The nice thing about clay that never hardens is that it never hardens; you can work with it at a slow slow pace and it doesn’t become a solid mess that you can’t manipulate. The downside is that it never hardens; worse yet, it gets softer as you work it so fingerprints show up and it doesn’t hold its shape. It can be kind of a nightmare. Especially if you are working with small stuff anyway.

I started out, still on an animal them and made a small herd of sheep. I even made one with a black body, but I made the head and feet white. So, it wasn’t so much a black sheep as it was a negative sheep, which was fine with me since I am a photographer, but I couldn’t come up with any sort of positive message or even a reason to post the picture. So I herded the sheep and penguins and duck away and started over.

That led to trying to make a hand. I’m still not 100% sure what I was going to do with said hand, but it turned out to be less awesome than I had hoped. After I wrapped it around a lump of clay I thought it looked like it was trying to pull itself onto the thing and thought I should do a picture with little climbing people. So I started to make some little climbing folks. Then my rule about what I was allowed to use and what I wasn’t came back to bite me. What was I going to have them climb? I have some bricks and things lying around, but that would have been using stuff I owned that wasn’t photography equipment so I didn’t feel like I could use it. I was going to use a lens, but I decided that a tripod would be a better idea. Thank goodness for loopholes.

 

Clueless didn’t have anything to do with the penguins or the duck for that matter. If you haven’t picked up on it yet, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I started doing this project before I felt like I had all of the pieces put together and so I’m kind of muddling my way through and figuring things out as I go. Maybe I’m the duck in the picture.

As it happens, I feel like I may have been a bit ambitious when I decided that this project was going to include 300 photographs. On the positive side, it means I have to be consistent with my photography, but it turns out that with some of the constraints I put on the project and the fact that I need to post a photo almost every day, it isn’t always easy to come up with a good idea for a picture. That leads to pictures like this one. I’m not really a sculptor, as you can plainly see, but today I felt like I needed to do something with my hands. So I started to play with some clay that I picked up at the local art store. I had 4 cubes of the stuff and the snow in the mountains and the limited color palette gave me the idea of penguins. That and the fact that I work with computers all day and kind of like linux. The duck was an afterthought, since I couldn’t figure out what to do with a quartet of penguins. I did consider a penguin Abbey Road type picture, but ultimately decided against it.

I just have to accept that some days my picture is going to be something like this. And I’m sure that I’m going to run into a creative block on at least one day and I will just have to post the best idea I can come up with even if I’m not too happy about it at the time. I hope that there will be many that you find interesting or fun or maybe even brilliant, but I have about 289 left, so we shall see.

My last 3 posts of the ribboned flowers have been for three people who meant a lot to me. Today I thought I’d do something a little different. Today a friend is racing his bike in orange socks. Orange is the kidney cancer awareness color. But He rides for someone who died of a different cancer. So this pink ribbon is to say thanks.

I have been running and riding my bike with the Huntsman Heroes for 7 years now and in that time I have met some pretty remarkable people and made a number of really great friends. All of them have their own stories of loss, hope, heartbreak or miracles; sometimes a combination of all four. And they aren’t the only ones who have been affected by cancer. The truth is that is touches us all in some way or another. Friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances; someone around us is affected. I could put the names of dozens of people on the picture and it would be appropriate. I hope that I don’t offend anyone because I didn’t choose their loved one’s name for my post today.

I started running to support a good cause, but some things changed March 5th 2016. I had asked to dedicate the training run that morning to Matt, who had just been diagnosed with cancer. The day before, March 4th, he died. It was hard to stand up in front of a group of people that morning who were running in support of my brother and let them know that he didn’t make it. And running was so much worse. Over the next 15 miles there were a lot of people who had kind words, or just ran part of the distance with me in silence while I ran and I cried and I walked. At the 15 mile mark I just wanted to stop, to never run again. And without the support of those people, I probably wouldn’t have made it.

The thing I learned that day is that we all need support. We all need people who get it. Sometimes we need to be the people who show support for others that are going through hard times. While I started this project because of people close to me, but it goes far beyond that. This is also for everyone else that has a story. I can only tell mine, and hope that it helps. I hope that I can use the project to help those who are working to find a way to stop us from having these stories.

Thanks to everyone who has supported me and my family and my friends and their families. And for those of you who are in need of support, well, my thoughts and prayers go out to you too.

 

 

Finding myself with extra flowers and nothing to do with them, I thought I might be able to write something inspirational with the petals. So I looked long and hard through quote books and read a poem or two (but Breaking the Ice just didn’t seem inspirational enough) and came up with nothing. Then I started thinking about things my brother would say. He often said, “Swearwords,” when something went wrong.

Swearwords didn’t seem like a message that you would get from a flower. Most of the flowers I know don’t say much at all, except for the ones in Alice in Wonderland and the things they might say were more cultured, except for that saucy pussywillow.

Now, a flower losing its petals might be inclined to use some stronger language. Especially if the petals it was losing were on the top. And there you go, today’s picture!

So this is today’s picture. I feel like I should take some time to talk about the why of this project.  2016 was a pretty bad year. In January one of my friends, Marie, died from breast cancer, and while that sucked, it got worse when my brother, Matt, was diagnosed with kidney cancer two months later. Three weeks later, he was gone. Then in the summer my childhood friend Nate was diagnosed with kidney cancer. He died in March 2017.

I have been wanting do do a project to raise money for cancer research for a while now, but I have just kept putting it off. Some of my ideas seemed above my skill level, others seemed beyond my resources, but when I had the idea for the Quarter for Cancer project, I sort of ran out of excuses.

So for the next year I’m committed to seeing what I can do with this. I started this in memory of my brother and my friends who didn’t make it, but I’m also doing it for those I know who have been diagnosed with cancer and those who are currently dealing with it.

My hope is that I can play some small part in helping find a cure. Because cancer affects us all and the sooner we can get rid of it for good the better.

 

I went out for a walk today, looking for something to photograph. After it gets dark, the options for a photograph can be limited. So I wandered around in the dark for a while and then decided that I would do something I tried a while back. I just opened up the shutter for 10 seconds and walked up the street. You can see the red tail lights, the yellow headlights, and the green traffic lights.

Pictures like this can be a lot of fun to take. You never can be sure what you are going to get. The results can be striking, or they can be chaotic, or they can have distinct patterns. Some of them are blurry, some are not interesting, and sometimes you just aim wrong and miss where the lights are all together.

Abstract art is a funny thing. Someone can see something beautiful where others just see a mess. What I see in this picture is a car parked at the light when it turns green. Then it accelerates through the intersection toward me. Other cars pass by moving away, but they don’t stop, and they probably don’t know, nor do they care, that they are being photographed.

Aside from the picture, the project is now 1% of the way to the goal of $1000. That probably doesn’t seem like much, but, right now, few people even know that I’m doing this, so it is kind of a big deal to me. And I’m feeling pretty optimistic that over the course of the next year I’m going to be able to meed that goal.

Thanks.

When I started this project I knew that I wasn’t really going to follow a theme for the 300 pictures and it was going to be pretty eclectic. Today seemed like a good day for a little early Halloween.

I have been looking for something to photograph for the last couple of days, but between being busy and being down to $.07 (I printed a photo, probably the cheapest trip to Costco on record!) my options seemed limited. Passing some bushes up the street I thought the orange berry things looked like little pumpkins so I figured I would just draw some faces on them and make little jack o’lanterns out of them. Add one fall leaf and viola, um… pumpkins on a leaf. Tada!