Silent Sunday: March 8, 2015
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Seeing Orange
In spite of the rain on Sunday and Monday, it seems that spring has sprung in San Diego. Today’s warm temperatures brought out the bathing suits, shorts, and lots of people heading to the beach. And there is plenty of orange around.
The vibrance of golden poppies, the amber of giant kelp, a hearty soup of fresh vegetables, pasta, and beans, hang gliders with sun shining through their colorful sails, beach umbrellas casting shadows as protection from the sun, a tangerine hanging from a tree, a tractor lumbering down the beach–used to protect expensive homes from eroding cliffs, and the sun dipping low on the horizon silhouetting the people sitting on the sand berm watching the waves roll. I’m feeling the shift from winter as the days lengthen…and we spring forward overnight.
What’s orange in your part of the world?
Weekly Photo Challenge: Overlooked
Some weeks I feel inspired and find lots to take photos of…I spend time outdoors, exploring the beauty of the natural world. And some weeks, like this one, I feel a bit overwhelmed with the responsibilities in my life and it seems like a stretch to find anything at all interesting to photograph.
But this week, in spite of only feeling like I have had mere minutes to devote to photography, I have been trying to take photos of things I might have otherwise overlooked. I’m sure my neighbors think I’m crazy as they watch me crawling around my front yard taking photos of dandelions!
I also noticed the way the light was playing with this crazy thorny tree near my driveway. The leaves have recently sprouted, bringing a bit of spring green with it.
With our kitchen remodel done and my hubby back to cooking, we are getting more interesting (and yummy) meals again. This week he experimented with a “South of the Border” pizza.
That’s enchilada sauce, red bell peppers, cilantro and avocado. Delicious! And today he was baking these vegan raspberry thumbprint cookies in his shiny new oven.
We had a much-needed rainy weekend that continued into Monday morning…and my morning playground duty (conveniently timed between rainy squalls) had me looking skyward, hoping students would have a little time for outdoor play before being cooped up inside most of the day. It was hard to overlook the rare dark clouds framing the playground.
Today I was at the university, thinking about how much time I spend driving around and around the parking lot looking for that elusive parking spot. I decided I should capture that struggle in a photo…which also had me noticing the light and shadows…and the many white cars!
I’ve been noticing the jacarandas in bloom this week as I turn from the major thoroughfare into my neighborhood. The pinkish purplish blossoms are stunning against the lengthening daylight as I head toward home from work. Today I took my big camera with me to work and reminded myself to stop, park my car, and take some photos on my way home. Here’s what I saw.
So, for this week, take a look around at what you may ordinarily overlook as you go about your busy life. What’s right under your nose? Out in your yard? Along the road on your way home from work?
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 #overlooked for this week and include @nwpianthology in your post.
So take a look around, what can you photograph that you may have overlooked in other circumstances? I can’t wait to see overlooked through your lens!
Silent Sunday: March 1, 2015
Connecting to Learn and Grow: March’s Photo-a-Day Challenge
I’ve been studying the concept of Connected Learning for a couple of years now, and have spent lots of time working to understand how the information in this infographic is relevant to me as a learner and how it might also impact my students.
And through my studies I have become a connected educator…and a connected learner, especially when it comes to photography. I learn so much from my fellow photographers and following their blogs. Joy and Margaret and Janis and Cee and Naveen and Connie and Lynn and so many more people inspire me, teach me, encourage me, and support me as I explore what it means to take photos every day, striving to improve my skills and challenge myself.
So for this month I thought it might be fun to highlight connections in our #sdawpphotovoices photo-a-day challenge. The connections might be environmental like those that Janis makes. Janis is passionate about keeping the beach clean and regularly posts gorgeous photos of trash she collects on the beach using the hashtag #litterati on Instagram. Here’s an interesting post called Yuck! she wrote about the trash she collects. Yesterday, maybe because of our stormy weather, the beach where I do most of my walking and photographing was much trashier than usual…and like Janis, my husband always walks with a trash bag to pick up the trash we find along the way. Here are a couple of pieces of trash we picked up (and disposed of) yesterday.
Many of the photographers mentioned above highlight the beauty of the natural world in their photos…often capturing the uniqueness of the place where they live. Connecting with the local environment means paying attention to the details that others might overlook. I’ve been pretty obsessed with seagulls lately and have tried to capture in photos the variety of seagull behavior I observe. Quirky is often hard to snap…but if you look closely, you can see that this seagull is shouting out directions to the others around. What you can’t see is that there are lots of other seagulls nearby, seeming to respond to his directions!
I’ve also noticed the ways the gulls gather during low tides, milling around together in pretty large groups. They don’t seem to be eating, but do seem to enjoy hanging out together. I notice when I walk toward them, they start walking away from me. If I get too close, they often take to the air!
And there aren’t many lifeguards on duty in the winter, but the few who are there make regular runs in their trucks when the tide is low. I always love seeing the red lifeguard trucks on the beach! (No one else drives on our beaches…and during high tides, there isn’t much beach exposed!)
Other photographers I connect with highlight the urban experience in interesting and unusual ways. I find myself having to stretch to take interesting pictures in the suburbs where I live. (I’m much better when I visit interesting urban, metropolitan places.) But I did notice the balloons against the cloudy sky over the newly opened Petco.
And these rows of flags when I looked up. The flags remind me of swimming lane lines…and I purposely included the palm tree peeking into the frame!
Then there are the photographers that take gorgeous images of flowers. I love macro shots…but yesterday I only had my phone with me when I came across many native species seeming to thrive after the morning rain as I headed to my car after presenting at a science conference on a local community college campus. These California golden poppies caught my eye!
So March’s photo-a-day challenge is to connect…with another photographer, with nature, with the environment, with architecture, with your place, with the unique quirkiness of the subject… and more. Here is a list to help inspire you as you connect.
1. weather
2. plants
3. work
4. transportation
5. environment
6. animals
7. people
8. inspired by a photograph
9. nature
10. household
11. sky
12. architecture
13. interaction
14. explore
15. color
16. sound
17. celebration
18. green
19. ugly
20. ordinary
21. beauty
22. connecting to art
23. taste
24. local
25. exotic
26. pets
27. tree
28. signs
29. children
30. movement
31. still
Let’s spend March making connections…to each other, to our place, to ideas and passions. Let your interests drive your subjects…and your peers support your continued growth. Pick a single photo to post each day or create a gallery of your efforts. Post a photo or gallery each day with the hashtag #sdawpphotovoices to Twitter, Instagram, Flicker, Google+ and/or Facebook (the more the better!), so that we can all enjoy the posts. If you would like to expand your exploration, write the story that the photo tells, compose a blog post about a photo, a week’s worth of photos, write a photo essay, or make a video or slideshow. You are invited to create a pingback by linking to this url or post your blog address in the comment section. It’s fun for me to see what others are doing with the same prompts I am using!
You can post every day, once a week, or even sporadically throughout the month…whatever works in your life. You can post your pictures in the order of the prompts or post the one you find on the day you find it–or make up your own prompt for the day or the week! You get to make your own rules…and find your own connections. Be sure to share and tag your photos with #sdawpphotovoices so we can find them!
Let’s connect through our photos, our passions, our goals, and our interests. I can’t wait to see what connections you make through your lens!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Rule of Thirds
One of the things I love about photography is playing around with composition…either while I am shooting or in the editing process. The Daily Post this week focused their challenge on the rule of thirds…so I think I will piggyback this challenge with theirs.
You’ve probably seen more seagull photos from me than you ever wanted lately. And I’ve been playing around with different angles and compositional elements. Here’s an unedited one of a seagull standing on the rocks in the surf.
And this one is also unedited…on a gray day I captured this seagull in flight, in the upper lefthand third of the frame.
And it’s not always seagulls that capture my attention. This pelican pair flew overhead, cruising the shoreline…they are almost in the bottom third of the frame.
And this egret was wading in the koi pond at Balboa Park…I especially love the colors and the way its mouth is open in this shot.
This was a favorite from the other day, taken with my iPhone…walking across the Target parking lot my eye was drawn to the gathering storm clouds in the sky…and the birds perched in this bare tree.
And just to prove that all my photos don’t include birds, here is a shot of a monarch caterpillar munching its way toward creating a chrysalis. This shrub was full of caterpillars…and people were delighting in pointing out the crawlers. We also saw a bright green chrysalis and a few butterflies too.
So, for this week, let’s play along with the Daily Post challenge and work on shots that follow the rule of thirds. (For more information about the rule of thirds, look here) You can frame your shots as you take them or play around with the composition in the editing process.
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 #ruleofthirds for this week and include @nwpianthology in your post.
So play around with composition this week and see how the rule of thirds impacts your photos.
Learning in the Intersections
You all probably remember them, those iconic experiences of heading out on a school day with your classmates and teacher to a local museum or art gallery to extend and enhance what was going on the in classroom…a field trip! And in the best of times, those field trips are memorable, often motivating learning beyond the school curriculum. Maybe one of those experiences even fueled your passion for a particular field of study.
But often, field trips are fraught with conflict. Are you heading out of the classroom to “do school” somewhere else? Is it a free day of fun with friends where the learning is incidental and accidental…if it happens at all? What role do teachers and museum personnel play in the field trip experience? What about chaperones? And what about students and their interests and passions?
Through Intersections—a project funded by the National Science Foundation through the National Writing Project and the Association of Science and Technology Centers—the San Diego Area Writing Project, in partnership with the San Diego Natural History Museum and the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center,has been exploring the conflicts and tensions surrounding field trips.
In our second year of investigating how to support student learning in the context of a field trip, we have learned a lot. Most significantly, we’ve learned the power of the interaction and co-learning of formal educators (those who work in school settings) and informal educators (those who work in out-of-school spaces like museums). We discovered that our goals for student learning are mostly the same, and through our interactions, we have reconsidered how we might achieve those goals. But first we had to let go of all that we have no control over–including exhibit layout and signage, field trip costs and transportation, and the uneven qualifications of chaperones, especially when it comes to facilitating student learning.
We’ve decided this year to focus on ways to support students as agents of their own learning, depending less on the adults who accompany them and trusting that a rich museum experience will result in meaningful learning–even when students do not complete worksheets that ensure they have learned specific facts or answered a series of questions delineated by grade level standards.
So we have asked teachers to prepare students for their trip by asking them to explore the exhibit, noting what interests them, and taking back interesting tidbits and lingering questions for further investigation through the creation of some kind of project back in the classroom following the trip. And to better understand how this works in action–with a variety of grade levels and school contexts–we are observing students in action through a series of field trip pilots.
Today we observed sixth graders in action. They came with a charge–to notice adaptations of plants and animals evident in the Coast to Cactus exhibit so they could create a project displaying their learning back at school next week.
We watched students looking closely, in conversation with each other as they observed live animals in the exhibit.
Students working alone, taking notes from the exhibit signage. And others in pairs and triads, some taking photos, others sketching, and some simply flipping buttons and spinning dials.
This student seems to be under surveillance by both the researcher and the stuffed deer as he takes notes from the informational placard.
Some students found cozy nooks to meet and write–like inside this Bambi airstream that is a part of the exhibit. While others took a bit of time away to see how many boys would fit inside the hollow tree trunk while a classmate looked on and snapped their photo!
And the questions linger. How much like school should a field trip be? Do students need to “on task” by completing forms, taking notes, answering questions… Or can they be talking to each other, turning dials, inventing their own competitions and games related to the exhibits, crawling through tunnels and squeezing into tree trunks…and still be learning? Do they need to “do” the museum, reading each sign, looking at each artifact from start to finish? Or is it okay to focus their time and attention on the areas that most pique their interests?
I’m interested in what these students will create when they head back to school. How will the visit to the museum influence their project? What will they remember most about this trip? Will they come back on their own, with their families? How would they use the museum if left to their own devices?
We are paying attention to the intersections of formal and informal learning, of writing and science…and of student interest driven inquiry and teacher/adult directed learning. And with each pilot field trip, I have more questions about supporting student learning as we work to help students initiate and shape their own learning using field trips as a tool.
How do you view the iconic field trip? How do you prepare your students/your own children for out-of-school learning experiences? What outcomes do you hope for when you think field trip? We’d love to hear about your thoughts and experiences!
Shades of Gray
It’s not what you think…this isn’t about the book or the movie. Instead, this is about winter and all the grays I’ve been seeing lately.
I’ve noticed icy grays…not here at home, but while I was in Chicago and the temperatures hovered between negative numbers and teens I noticed icicles hanging from the bumpers of cars in the parking lot while I was taking a brisk stroll around the hotel where I stayed.
And after some adventures in the airport, I found myself in a window seat in the last row of the plane. On the positive side, I was able to take photos throughout the flight, including this one as we began to taxi to take off for the flight to San Francisco.
So much of the country we traversed from high in the sky was covered with snow. At one point when I looked out I noticed this snowy map, with roads and rivers etched into the landscape below.
I came back home to much more reasonable temperatures and headed off to Los Angeles to spend the day with my son. (You saw some pictures on this post) The historic Bradbury building offered a glimpse of some different gray…with lots of ornate metalwork including this amazing working elevator.
As we headed out of the downtown area, we traveled through this tunnel. And because I wasn’t driving, I got to take a photo and capture the gray textures illuminated by the row of lights.
From up on Mulholland Drive, the entire city skyline including the Hollywood sign were on display. Unfortunately, the day was gray and hazy, making the skyline a shadow in the distance.
And back at home, I made my way back to the beach. It wasn’t cold…sweatshirt and bare feet weather…but it was gray. I’ve been a bit obsessed with seagulls lately, and found myself taking shot after shot. This one captures the shades of gray visible on the beach this week.
So, for this week, as we head toward the end of February, look for shades of gray. Will you find them outside or inside? The result of weather, the color of metal, or on the feathers of a local bird?
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 #gray for this week and include @nwpianthology in your post.
So go out in search of gray…all the shades you can find! Let’s reclaim those shades of gray and capture images that reflect the range of grays that we see. I’m looking forward to seeing all the shades of gray in your life…through your lens!
Exploring Symmetry…LA Style
I know that symmetry is a mathematical concept…one of precision, perfectly matched halves. But mostly, in the world, symmetry is not so perfect. But there are echoes of symmetry all around us. My eyes were hearing the echoes of symmetry the other day as I explored downtown Los Angeles with my son.
There is something so special about spending the day with my son and our cameras. We walk and talk and take photos, noticing details, trying new shots, seeing the world through each other’s eyes. And there’s a certain symmetry in that too.
My eyes were drawn to this old building visible from the parking garage. The symmetry has been spoiled by graffiti, age and disrepair. But there is still something beautiful about it.
In contrast, this old historic building has been preserved, both inside and out. Inside, the exquisite marble floors and intricate wrought iron frame the antique mechanical elevators. And outside, I had to angle my shot to exclude the modern Subway sandwich sign and stoplights to capture the beauty of this elegant old building.
We also ended up climbing flight upon flight of stairs as we explore the is old rail system called Angel’s Flight. Built in 1901 it traveled up and down a block…and after scaling the stairs…I see why they wanted a railway!
Grand Central Market was an explosion of colors and smells…and quite a tasty place for lunch! I was drawn to these cactus pads…there is a certain symmetry in these bins of produce and the jumble of price signs rising out of them.
I’m not sure that any of my photos fit the mathematical definition of symmetry…but for me they communicate the idea of symmetry, the creation of purposeful balance and arrangement. Just like my day with Nick…the perfect balance and arrangement of time, exploration, and connection. And the cherry on top…dinner with my daughter-in-law! Symmetry!
Thinking Through My Lens 