Water

March 9, 2016March 12, 20162 Comments

Today’s Photo 101 prompt involves water. I have lots of pictures of water – trying to choose just one was not easy!

But there was an added challenge for this post, and it involved orientation. Vertical or horizontal – which one’s better?

In this case, I like the vertical one best:

: Water still as glass…

: …made for great fishing. 🙂

These are some old pictures; Bubbles was only three when these were taken. This was his first-ever fishing trip, and it spoiled him a little bit because he caught a fish just about every time he dropped his line in the water. They bit quickly, too – none of that waiting business that so often goes along with fishing.

If only every fishing trip could be like this one… 🙂

Street

March 8, 2016March 7, 2016Leave a comment

When I saw this prompt, I knew exactly which picture to share:

wlcsp

It may not be new, but it’s one of my absolute favorite pictures. I shot this on our family vacation last summer. It took us fourteen hours to get to the Black Hills, and there were plenty of streets and roads along the way. Roads crammed with cars eager to leave the city behind, streets full of pedestrians out enjoying the summer sun.

But this one?

This one captured my imagination from the moment I laid eyes on it. I love images like this, where man’s influence is minimal at best. Where the only evidence another person has ever trekked across these hills is a lonely road and a dream. Places like this seem to be growing fewer and farther between.

Sure, this photo isn’t perfect. It’s a little pixellated because I had to zoom in from across the road to get the image I wanted. It was the middle of the afternoon when I took this picture, and we were all exhausted after driving all day the day before. It was quiet in the car; the kids were too busy pressing their noses to the windows to bicker. But that only lasted while we were in motion – once we stopped, all bets were off. If I’d had more time, I could have crossed the road, but that wasn’t an option. This photograph is like us – imperfect, but beautiful. Despite its – our – flaws.

Because of them, even.

Every time I look at this picture, I feel peaceful. The storm has not yet broken, and the road calls to me, its twists and turns promising adventure just beyond that hill. All I have to do is put one foot in front of the other. As in pictures, so it is in life.

Sometimes all you have to do is just keep swimming/walking/writing/photographing.

Home

March 7, 2016March 7, 20166 Comments

That’s me on the bottom right. Thank goodness high-water pants haven’t made a comeback.

Home is where your story begins.

My story began in a modest red house on a quiet corner in a small town. But nothing stays the same for long, and when my little sister arrived a couple years later, that quiet corner became considerably less quiet.

And so it goes.

Many years (and even more plot twists) later, I left that modest red house with its white garage and its yard full of trees behind me as I ventured out into the world. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to go back to that little red house on the corner, but it was too late. I was too grown up.

Maybe you can’t go home again, but you can always take it with you.

You can’t go home again.

So I made my own home. Several times over, in fact. And while I think it’s true that you can’t go home again, that’s only because I believe that home is something we carry with us wherever we go. Home is in our memories. Home is in the way we look at the world. Home is the way we treat others.

Home is a state of mind, a way of being, a feeling that can’t be taken away.

When I think of home, I think of the warmth of my grandma’s kitchen. I think of the hustle and bustle that went into family get-togethers. I remember the after-dinner tea and cookies, and how all of those things came together the morning after my second wedding as we all congregated in the kitchen of my new home.

Home is family. Home is friends.

Tadpole and Bubbles like to get up to all sorts of shenanigans.

Home is where your heart is.

It may be a sappy cliché, but that’s only because it’s true. Home is where your heart is because, without heart, there can be no home.

Photo 365 #113: Triumph

November 28, 2014Leave a comment

I had a great picture in mind for this challenge. It’s a picture of Bubbles when he was little, having made it through the tube on the playground. He emerged from it feeling victorious, and reached to the sky in joy.

Or at least that’s how I remembered the picture.

I dug it out of my external hard drive this morning and discovered that his expression was a little less triumphant than I remembered. Okay, a lot less triumphant – it looked like he was about to cry.

Well, so much for feeling victorious.

“Come here you…stubborn…apple!”

“Mmm, apples!”

But then I ran across these pictures. When he was little, we used to go apple picking at a local orchard every fall. Most of the trees were too tall for him to reach, but there was this one that had some particularly low-hanging fruit. He was determined to help us pick apples, so he went over and immediately began tugging on a beautiful red apple.

It put up quite a fight, but he was victorious in the end. Triumph never tasted so sweet. 🙂

Photo 365 #112: Double

November 27, 2014November 26, 20148 Comments

Don’t let these sleepy expressions fool you:

sleepy

These guys are double trouble. What one doesn’t think of, the other one does.

Photo 365 #111: Edge

November 26, 2014Leave a comment

If the following picture seems familiar, it’s because you’ve likely seen it before in sepia:

edge

I took this picture back in 2007. I was doing someone’s senior pictures, and I couldn’t help taking a few shots of this bridge for myself. It’s an old railroad bridge spanning the Iowa River, but it hasn’t been used for trains in I don’t know how long. I have a deep and abiding love for the relics of my state’s history, a bit of which you can read about here.

How about you – what are some of your old loves?

Photo 365 #110: Glass

November 25, 20146 Comments

Seymour has given me some lovely gifts in the time that we’ve known each other. This is a detail photo of one of those gifts:

bowldetail

For our second anniversary, he bought me a beautiful glass bowl from a local shop, and its beauty never fails to impress me. The glass contains ash from the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens, which appeals to my love of history. It’s just a beautiful bowl, and one of the prettiest pieces of glass I’ve seen outside of a church.

I spent probably a good half hour taking pictures of this bowl back in May as we were packing up to move. I played with angles, lighting, zooming in and out…In short, I spent way too much time photographing this bowl when I should have been packing. Let’s face it – no one likes packing, and taking pretty pictures is much more fun. I love the texture and color of this photograph almost as much as I love the bowl itself, and the thought that Seymour puts into gift-giving (regardless of who the recipient is).

It’s a perfect reminder of the things I treasure in life. Do you have something like that, a reminder of things you hold precious? Tell me all about it in the comments!

Photo 365 #109: Treasure

November 24, 201410 Comments

What do I treasure? Well, I treasure many things, but of all the things I treasure, my family is most important:

family

This is from our annual summer gathering on my mother-in-law’s side of the family. While this isn’t everyone, it is the picture in which my children were at least all looking in the direction of the camera, even if they weren’t all smiling. I love my family, and am blessed to have married into such a wonderful one.

What do you treasure?

Photo 365 #106: Landscape

November 21, 201415 Comments

I love landscapes. I think the majority of pictures I take are either of my kids or landscapes (49% landscapes, 49% kids, 2% other). Iowa is such a beautiful place that I can’t help whipping out my camera (either of them) and capturing the glories of nature.

quixotic

As previously mentioned, I also love sunsets. The arrival of snow is seriously hindering my ability to capture them through the break in the trees that form the western borderline of our property.

I may or may not have mentioned, however, that I’m not fond of the wind farms that are springing up all over the area (seriously, I can’t remember if I’ve talked about it or not). There’s one that stretches for a good ten miles south of where I live, and the blinking red line on the night horizon is one I find quite annoying. Now there’s another one that mars the northern horizon on my way to work. If this keeps up, I’ll be living in the middle of a wind farm inside of ten years.

Still, I do like the silhouettes these particular turbines made against the darkening night sky. And I love the hint of blurriness evident near the horizon and the edges of the turbine blades; it makes the whole scene feel a bit dreamy and surreal. When I took this picture, I was reminded of Don Quixote tilting at windmills, and I love it when nature makes me think of books.

What do your favorite landscape photos depict?

Photo 365 #105: Swarm

November 20, 2014November 21, 201414 Comments

The first time I met Seymour’s extended family was at his annual family reunion. He has a big family. I know people always think they have a big family (I sure thought so, even though I was including my grandma’s brother’s family in my head count), but Seymour really does – his dad was one of 13 kids. Reunions always used to be held at a nearby state park due to the number of people who’d come and, while it seems like fewer people have come the last couple of years, there’s still quite a crowd.

So we pull into this park and start looking around. There are people everywhere, but he can’t see anyone he recognizes, and the only people there that I know aside from him and our kids are his parents. Finally, he turns to me and says, “Are we in the right place?”

I looked at him like, Really? You’re asking me?