Multi-tasking Friday…

I decided to kill two birds with one stone today and participate in Friday’s Fences and in A Rural Journal’s Random 5 Friday.  Damn, I’m good…

Taken last year in Charleston, South Carolina

My Random 5 

1. I found out earlier this week that Worcester, Massachusetts, which is the closest city to where we live, has received the dubious honor of winning The Golden Snow Globe Award for being the U.S city with the most snowfall this winter measured in inches.  At 108.9 inches, they beat out the runner up Syracuse, New York by about 12 inches.  Yes, it’s been one of those years…

2. When I’m on Facebook at four in the morning, I’m always amazed that I’m not the only one.  You people need to get some sleep!

3. I looked out the window this morning to see turkey tracks in the snow.  That made me smile.  You know, their feet are almost as big as my hands.

4. I miss my cats terribly.  But it is not time to replace them yet.  Well, special little beings that they were, they can never really be replaced, but you know what I mean.

5. I am currently involved in a discussion group about Voluntary Simplicity using the curriculum from the Northwest Earth Institute.  This week, one of the things we talked about was multi-tasking and how it is not necessarily such a good thing.  But apparently, old habits die hard.

I have a problem…

I don’t know about you, but when I need to reach into my photo archives like I did last week, I have a tendency to get lost.  The problem is that I take far too many photos.  And while I try to keep up with them by deleting the obviously bad ones and loads of mediocre ones right after I upload them,

 I always have a backlog.

When I had my knee replaced last October, I thought I would be able to sit around for a while and really weed out more photos but I had no idea that I would have no attention span post-op for about two months  and I surely didn’t realize that sitting for any length of time would get really uncomfortable.

  So I never got to all those photos.

Well, last week when I was searching around for my ten best shots for my Art Guild night, I got ensnared by the beautiful Charleston, South Carolina.  Greg and I visited there a year ago January and I was too busy around that time to really look at what I brought back digitally.  So the other day I just got stuck.  Here are a few photos pulled from my archives of some doors and windows from Charleston, South Carolina.

I have no idea why there was a red dot on this building.

Having to make hard choices…

Last night was my night to host the Massasoit Art Guild Photography Section.  I volunteered for this quite a while ago but as of the February meeting, I hadn’t come up with an idea for the meeting.  So it was suggested that I ask people to bring in their best ten photos for us to review.  That sounded good to me….at least until I had to pick out MY best ten photos.  Do you know how hard that is???  If you have a digital camera, I’m sure you do.  Of course, it doesn’t mean that I have thousands of really good photos to choose from but I do have thousands of photos to choose from and each of them has a pull on me.  Sort of like my kids…  Good thing I only have two of those.

Well, long story short, we had a very interesting night looking at photos.  There was everything from a photo taken with a Brownie camera in 1949 of a train yard near Boston that is the Riverside T-stop these days to an old doll found in an attic to abstract studies of gourd skins.  All of the photos were good because they spoke about the people who took them.  And when I really think about it, that’s what I love about photography.

Well, I thought I would post the ten faves (I hesitate to call them my best) that I picked (5 today and 5 tomorrow) and why I like them in particular.  Many of these have been on my blog before but I think a couple of them are new.

 

This is a photo of Walker Pond taken in the early fall.  This is located a short distance from our house.  I like this picture of it because of the mist coming off of the water caused by warm water and cooler air and because of the nice reflections.  I am a real sucker for reflection pics.  But, it tugs at me because I know how truly lucky I have been to have lived near this beautiful place for  so many years.  Season’s End…

This is a tobacco barn located in Hadley, Massachusetts.  I had admired this barn for a long time but this particular day when we drove by, the barn was full, the slats were open and the light was perfect.  The photography planets were aligned.  Don’t you love it when that happens?

And here is another tobacco barn located in another part of Hadley.  Even though it is really nothing like it, the photo reminds me of a painting of a Canadian barn by Georgia O’Keefe that I have long admired.   I love the horizontal lines of the barn in O’Keefe’s painting and I love the horizontal lines of this barn.

This is a scene from the Unitarian Universalist Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina.  If you are a cemetery wanderer and are ever in Charleston, this is a must see place.  It has a wild beauty about it that is just perfect in my book.

Here is a photo I call “Half Baked.”  It is a simple oak leaf that I came on while I was walking one day.  There is so much beauty in the world and much of it is so commonplace that we seldom even see it.  This reminds me to pay attention.

Until tomorrow…