Images

I have a lot of different thoughts when I work on a project. With some projects I go into them with a theme involved and that guides the things I choose to photograph. That can make the project cohesive and the pictures seem related. The longer projects seem to be a lot different. Especially when I have periodic deadlines. When I have the freedom of time I can create and then think and then create again when I have what I think is a good idea.

What I come up with when I have short or set deadlines makes a project like this difficult. While the purpose of this is ultimately to raise money for cancer, and I think a lot about people I know who have had cancer, the disease itself and what I have that I might be able to express with a picture, what I can come up with varies greatly from day to day. Some days I lack time to do something that I want to, some days I lack ideas. My thoughts during the day make a big difference too. There are days I just don’t want to think about cancer, and some days I just want to do something fun.

Today I was thinking about how cancer really messes with our lives. It strikes everywhere and it doesn’t just affect the person with a positive diagnosis. It spreads out in random directions and touches people near and far. It wreaks havoc on people financially, physically, emotionally and in pretty much every way imaginably. So as I dropped food coloring in some water and watched as it did its thing. It took on a life of its own, starting from a single drop and then oozing out in all directions.

It summed up my thoughts fairly well.

When a kid sees a tiger and yells, “Cute!” it is hard not to say, “That there is 400 pounds of pure made to kill you.” The same goes with many other wild animals. It is tempting to call a baby leopard cute until you remember that it will grow up to be an adult leopard which would rather eat you than be cute.

Today I just though I’d post this because today people need a break from all the serious stuff for at least long enough to stop and say, “Awww.”

Oh, c’mon. I said probably.

But elephants don’t get cancer. This elephant in particular is helping with cancer research. HCI uses blood from this elephant in its research into why elephants don’t get cancer and how that can be used to help treat humans.

 

Today started out as a pretty good day. Ran with the Huntsman Heros and saw a lot of familiar faces and some new ones. At the end of the run, another runner in the park came over and wanted to say, “Thanks,” because she was going to HCI for a chemo treatment in an hour. It’s always nice to see that the fundraising you are doing is helping someone.

But the day turned grim later, when I found out that another friend got a cancer diagnosis.

Every time you hear the news it’s like a punch to the stomach and even if the prognosis is good it never gets easier to hear. So I spent the day thinking about what I could take a picture of that would adequately express or show what I have really been pondering today. I know that words are inadequate, so I fell short on the goal today. But the fact remains that there are a lot of people who feel this way and are committed to keep doing what they can until a cure is found.

Cancer sucks.

Watching the weather turn and the season change has just had me looking at the leaves. Maybe I should have just taken some panoramas or landscapes the last few days, but I have been ok with just getting some close shots of the leaves, even if they were fake that one day.

Today I thought I would do something similar to yesterday, but with paper leaves instead of real ones. I probably should have switched the two since this would have been a better Halloween costume for a tree,  but hindsight is 20/20.

With everyone dressing up today, it looks like the trees wanted to get in on the act. So I gathered up the leaves and made a picture.

It’s a strange thing, this project. The point of it is to raise money for cancer research. So some days I feel a lot of pressure to create a photograph that someone might want to hang on the wall. That is hard to do on any given day, but I’m not sure that it is possible to do every day. Some days the brain is empty and the best idea is one that you know no one will want. I went into this having accepted that some days the picture would be crap and I just have to cringe and keep moving forward.

Today isn’t one of those days. I’ll come back to that in a minute.

March 5, 2016 brought me to this exact spot, only on that day I was sobbing and broken. Junior high can do that to people, I guess, but I wasn’t in junior high. I was several miles into an 18 mile run. Running can also make you cry, but it wasn’t just the run that day. Fortunately, I had a lot of support or I wouldn’t have finished the run that day. That was a pretty bad day.

But if you rewinded time about 25 years the same spot was a much different place. Instead of cones imagine a silver Saab 900 pulling up to the curb blasting Strength by The Alarm (who will be playing on Friday here in Salt Lake) with a cool twenty-something in his aviator sunglasses at the wheel and his sub-90 pound blonde haired brother riding shotgun. A couple of his friends were in the back seat also getting a ride to school.

When I reminded Matt about those days, when he tried to make me much cooler than I was (unsuccessfully I’m afraid) his description of those days was, “When we were young and the world was ours.”

So, this picture reminded me of some really good times and one incredibly bad one. I realize that there are possibly three people on the face of the planet who might want a copy of this picture and two of them likely would only want it to be supportive of this project. So, the picture for the day probably won’t help me reach my goal of raising $1000 for cancer research, and that’s ok. Some pictures are going to be like that, some pictures may attract the attention of people because they find them irresistible, some are just going to get a trophy for participation, and there will hopefully be some that speak to the heart.

Until tomorrow, thanks for reading.

 

The end of another week is here. While I was thinking of what I could take a picture of today, I saw that while the leaves are falling there was still a rose growing. The rest of them were fading but this one just hadn’t yet. Some roses stay long on the bush and some bloom and die quickly.

Kind of like people sometimes.