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Enormous Smallness: April’s Photo a Day Challenge

Photography reminds me to appreciate moments, to slow down and notice light and shadow, a fleeting smile, the graceful curve of a limb and the reflection in a mirrored wall. Another blogging photographer I admire, Joy of Joyfully Green, just today said, (photography) “…literally lets me stop time for a split second.”

There is something enormous about capturing the smallness of moments–making time stand still–so we can look more closely, study the details, and savor what is often unnoticed. Paul Strand (among others) did that with his photography. A friend of mine recently gifted me with some Paul Strand photo postcards from the recent exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art…and I am inspired by the simplicity and grandeur of the everyday moments he captured.

And I borrowed the title of this post from the title of a picture book I ordered today about the life of ee cummings–a poet who captured enormous smallness through his poetry. It seems fitting to celebrate the special qualities that photography and poetry share during April…typically a month that celebrates poetry (at least in schools).

Just this afternoon I was mesmerized by the buds on the orchid plant that nearly didn’t survive some time outdoors during our recent kitchen remodel…and the afternoon sunlight highlighted the enormous smallness of these emerging blossom.

And this tree that grows near my driveway often appears in photos when the sky catches my eye…like this sunrise a week or so ago.

Sometimes the enormous smallness is found in places where I share experiences–and food–with friends and family. And the people who accidentally appear in them serve to enhance that quality, like this photo of the Shake Shack in Washington DC…

or this from the inside looking out from Milk and Honey in Baltimore. (I like the way the words are reversed since I was photographing from the inside rather than the outside.)

Sometimes it’s in the grandeur of the mirrored high-rise that I notice the reflection of the neighborhood…

or the durability of historic architecture that reminds me that there is much to be learned by reading the world rather than solely depending on books.

Then there is the interplay of past, present, and future in our nation’s capitol–the place where government resides, but doesn’t live. Our laws and values are enacted in our neighborhoods and cities, but there is something about buildings like the capitol building that remind us that what is national is also local.

And in my local community where this historic movie theatre still hosts first run films, a place where people gather in the shadows of those who settled this area before the streets and infrastructure that we take for granted existed, we see that our lives interact with those who came before and will influence those who come after us.

So April’s photo-a-day challenge is to seek out enormous smallness, the beauty in the everyday, the complexity in simplicity, making meaning of seeming chaos. If you need them, here are some prompts to get your started:

1. April Fools

2. history

3. place

4. outdoors

5. new

6. family

7. work

8. poetry

9. laughter

10. inside

11. misery

12. in front of

13. behind

14. tears

15. life

16. tired

17. energetic

18. writing

19. fear

20. house

21. wheels

22. doors

23. nature

24. advocate

25. old

26. near

27. eyes

28. food

29. small

30. enormous

So for April, find the poetry in the everyday…be on the lookout for enormous smallness. 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 poem or the story of the photo, 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 as you seek out your own enormous smallness. Be sure to share and tag your photos with #sdawpphotovoices so we can find them!

Appreciate those moments…and be on the lookout for instances of enormous smallness in your life. I can’t wait to see what you capture through your lens!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Study

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Anyone who reads my blog with any regularity knows that I spend plenty of time on the beach. And with my camera in hand, I find that I often begin to study the things that I see through my lens. I’ve been drawn to seagulls lately…as evidenced in the photo gallery above (all images posted on my blog over the last few months).

And as I take photos of seagulls, I have also studied them. Noticing their habits, their preferences, their personalities…and more. As I walk along the shore, I am drawn to the crowd of seagulls. They seem to be social creatures, gathering together to hang out. They seem to have some favorite spots…and I walk through them on a regular basis.

I love the way they casually walk away from me as I come near. Seldom do they take flight as I approach, they just seem to shuffle over a bit as they keep a close eye on my movements.

I am always surprised by their adaptations. The runoff from the storm drains flows into the ocean near the lifeguard station at our local beach. I am assuming that this is fresh (ish) water (at least not salt water). I often see seagulls taking a drink from this runoff–in spite of the fact that we humans get regular warnings to stay away from this water–especially after the rain because of the risk of bacteria. I caught this guy in action, taking sip from the flowing runoff.

I love to watch seagulls in flight. They seem so carefree and graceful in the sky…when they are not squabbling with one another over a bit of food. This guy today was nice enough to fly right in front of my camera.

And there are times when it seems that the gulls take to the sky in a carefully choreographed dance, floating on the air waves, dipping and turning, swooping and gliding. I notice this most often in the late afternoons when I squeeze a walk in after I am done with work. There was a beautiful performance going on this afternoon as I headed back to my car for my drive home.

So…what are you studying through your lens? Nearby birds? The light in the afternoon? The way snow melts? The plants in your garden or the tree you pass on your way to work each day? If you haven’t yet studied…this is your week for a mini study!

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 #study for this week and include @nwpianthology in your post.

So take a look around…what are you noticing? What questions does it raise? Use your lens as a tool for closer study… I can’t wait to see what you are learning as you study through your lens!

Weekly Photo Challenge: Overlooked

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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?

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

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Connecting to Learn and Grow: March’s Photo-a-Day Challenge

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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

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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.

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.

Overcoming the Familiar: January 2015 Photo-a-Day Challenge

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The New Year arrives soon…and with it, often a list of things we plan to do to improve our health, appearance, productivity, attitude, and more. And, if you’re like me, you are still striving to improve your photography, paying attention the details that take ordinary photographs and make them something special. Sometimes I lament that I don’t travel to exotic places where I could try my hand at perfect snowflake photos or capture the colorful beauty of an outdoor market in Asia. And while travel remains on my to-do list, this month’s challenge is about seeing the familiar as though you were a stranger—seeing everything as new or at least with new eyes.

Anyone who follows my blog knows that I spend lots of time at the beach. And sometimes it starts to look so familiar that I can’t even imagine finding something new to focus my lens on. But just last week as I walked near the shore at high tide, I tried framing a shot of the empty lifeguard tower in some new ways. And as I was shooting, I noticed that I could see surfers in the shot. I tried some different ways of shooting and came up with this one with the surfer visible to the left of the tower.

I found this locked box on another day. And it took a few shots to figure out how to see the detail (notice the raised letters), but in my opinion, it is the seagull that I caught in the background that makes this shot interesting.

That same evening, we had stayed out for the sunset. And I took a number of shots with the silhouette of the lifeguard tower in the background, or a palm tree, or another tree. But this construction crane caught my attention and I loved the juxtaposition of it with the tree with the sunset in the background—the sunset not as exclusively nature’s beauty, but also a backdrop for construction equipment.

Sometimes my own front lawn turns from the ordinary grass into a fairy land. These little mushrooms almost look like a couple in love as they snuggle in the grass.

And if you keep your eyes open (or in this case, start searching for your missing cat), you might overcome the familiar. This shot was actually taken by my husband with his iPhone…and I love the image of our cat, Phil, nestled among the Christmas presents.

Sometimes a walk is just the inspiration I need to look with fresh eyes. I’m always trying to catch interesting photos of the train that runs through town…and I nearly always miss it. This time, as I was out walking, I caught not only the train, but also this runner going in the opposite direction.

As i walked through our local botanical garden, I noticed this fig tree…with no leaves, but with figs in abundance. I couldn’t resist this shot looking up into the blue sky.

And even the succulents that are so prevalent around here can look interesting depending on the photograph. For this one, I leaned in closely and played around with the rule of thirds. I love the color in this unedited shot.

So your #sdawpphotovoices challenge for January 2015 is to overcome the familiar in your life to find great photos wherever you happen to be. Here’s some prompt possibilities to help you vary your view:

1. inside

2. outside

3. home

4. neighborhood

5. work

6. pets

7. signs

8. transportation

9. light

10. people

11. plants

12. animals

13. place

14. buildings

15. kitchen

16. weather

17. night

18. day

19. hands

20. eyes

21. apparel

22. reflection

23. surprise

24. feet

25. fences

26. machine

27. technology

28. everyday

29. unexpected

30. interior

31. exterior

So start the new year by overcoming the familiar and challenge yourself to see your everyday life in new ways. Post a photo 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!

The new year doesn’t have to be about lofty goals, you can start the year out right by simply vowing to see the world around you anew! You can capture your view in a single photo or in a series. 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. You get to make your own rules…after all, this is your opportunity to overcome the familiar! Be sure to share and tag your photos with #sdawpphotovoices so we can find them!

So go out and start looking! How will you overcome the familiar in your photographs? I’m looking forward to seeing the world in new ways through your lens!