June | 2014 | Thinking Through My Lens

Do you speak in images? Enjoy taking photos to document your experiences or just to express what you notice in the world? Love to share them with others? Welcome to the weekly photo challenge! I post a new challenge each week…check in regularly and join the fun!

As I think about possible photo prompts, I try to think about the variety of images that might be possible with the particular prompt. I like to think about “out of the box” interpretations as well as those that might be expected. So this week as I considered pictures I might include along with the prompt, I was thinking about the relationship between a photo of a hang glider, a bee, some geese, and a balloon rocket…and they all seemed to suggest something along the line of in flight.

The most literal is the hang glider I couldn’t resist following with my camera while walking on the beach on Sunday. We were down at La Jolla Shores, not far from the glider port, and could see gliders in the distance. One came over the bluffs and got quite close…and here is a shot.

And I was recently in Ohio where I saw many things that are different from the things I see in San Diego. One example is this family of geese walking across the parking lot. They are clearly not in flight…but seeing them creates images in my head of that magnificent “V” of geese in flight, most often seen by me in movies and picture books.

And school is still in session in my district. This week we were out in the garden, enjoying the abundance growing in our Scrumptious Schoolyard. There were birds, butterflies and bees diving in and out of the blossoms taking care of the business of pollination.

For the last few weeks our students have been busy with balloon rockets in the science lab. They developed hypotheses, created launch procedures and data tables, and then tested their theories as they flew their rockets across the room. It wasn’t easy catching these rockets in action. Here’s one in flight.

I couldn’t resist this final photo of one of my favorite photo subjects: dandelions. I love this version of a dandelion with most of its seeds blown away. For me it suggests that the fluffy, wisps of seed pods are in flight…heading toward a place where they will take root and proliferate, maybe even in a sidewalk crack. I love the tenacity and strength of the dandelion!

So this week’s challenge is to find subjects that are in flight. Those flights might be the literal leaving of the ground of an airplane or bird or the fanciful flights of imagination and whimsy. Maybe your photo is grounded…but suggests flight (like my geese). As always, you are the one who gets to decide what counts as in flight…so have fun, and take to the air!

You can post your photo alone or along with some words: commentary, a story, a poem…maybe even a song! I love to study the photographs that others’ take and think about how I can use a technique, an angle, or their inspiration to try something new in my own photography. (I love a great mentor text…or mentor photo, in this case!)

I share my photography and writing on social media. You can find me on Instagram and Twitter using @kd0602. If you share your photos and writing on social media too, please let me know so I can follow and see what you are doing. To help our Weekly Photo community find each other, use the hashtag #inflight for this week and include @nwpianthology in your post.

So let your imagination and your camera lens take flight! I can’t wait to see what you find.

This is the time of the school year when schedules become unscheduled, students start to feel like summer has arrived (and act accordingly), and it’s also the time when the most amazing displays of learning happen.

We’re lucky to have a school garden…and even luckier to have a gardening teacher who takes our students out to the garden to plant, learn, and harvest each week. And yet unexpectedly this week our gardening teacher resigned. So we (my teaching partner and I) decided this would be an excellent time to have our students get their iPads and head out to the garden to take some photos.

It was just a week ago that I had taken the first and second graders out around the school grounds to take photos while the third graders were otherwise occupied. And as we walked the campus they framed shots of whatever caught their eyes…and many of the photos are stunning! (When they get them posted on their blogs, I’ll link you to a few!)

So with iPads in hand, our students were eager to explore the garden. They photographed strawberries and cucumbers, sunflowers and squash, bees and caterpillars. They delighted over each new find and worked to capture their discoveries in photographs. (And I couldn’t resist a few either!)

But taking pictures just wasn’t enough. So after recess (and putting the iPads safely away), we headed back to the garden with our writer’s notebooks. And that is when the true magic happened. Our students settled with their notebooks to capture their images of the garden in words…words of their choice, format of their choice, style of their choice. They sat on the ground, on the stumps, on the benches, and even on the edges of the garden beds. Some sat alone, others gathered in small clusters. And all wrote. A magical hush settled on the garden. We could hear the shush and whoosh of cars passing by and the songs of the birds that would swoop into the beds for a nibble here and there. Butterflies flitted from blossom to blossom and bees went about the business of pollinating too.

After some time writing, I got up to peek at the students writing and captured a few images of the writers in action.

After a time, we gathered back together to share a few lines from their writing and experienced the richness and variety of what it means to write under the influence of the garden. I can’t wait to see how they transform this writing into blog posts that also include their photos.

So, I’m reminded that the unscheduling of schedules can result in wonderful serendipity…and the most incredible writing! Gardens are amazing places…and our school garden is truly spectacular, filled with life and science and learning and offering students so many opportunities to interact with the natural world and get close to the foods they eat. There is really nothing like a bit of garden magic.