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.

Textures are us....

I decided to jump on the texture bandwagon today and join Texture Tuesday at the Kim Klassen cafe.  It's fun playing with texture.  

And while I'm at it, why not hook up to Tuesday Muse at A Rural Journal?

Scavenger Hunt Sunday is here again…

I found this week’s prompts for Ashley Sisk’sScavenger Hunt Sunday particularly challenging this week.  Well, cookies were easy and it gave me an opportunity to do something I haven’t done in months, which is bake.  Other than that the prompts were:  #5, Word of the Day, Sharing, Wiggle and, of course, Cookies.  Here’s what I came up with…

#5:  I wracked my brain to think of something around here that had the #5 on it with no success.  So I gathered up five books that I like and took a photo of them.  I also put five stones on top of the five books.  Why...I don't know.

Word of the Day:  I took this word from Dictionary.com.  I like checking the Word of the Day on there when I remember.  Usually it's a word that I would never use because I can't remember it five minutes after looking at it, but I enjoy the practice anyhow.    Of course it's up to you to decide whether or not I interpreted bibelot properly.

Sharing:  I made cookies for this Hunt and there were plenty to share.

Wiggle:  I had nothing for this until Greg got a plate of spaghetti for lunch the other day.  Spaghetti wiggles, doesn't it?

Cookies:  An excuse to make my very favorite kind of cookie - the plain, old fashioned oatmeal cookie with lots of nuts.  They may not be much to look at, but they sure tasted good.  I wish I could have shared them with you.

By the way, this is what it looked like outside while I was baking those cookies.

We ended up with close to 20 inches of snow when they had predicted 8 inches.  I can tell you that there is a BIG difference between 20 and 8 when it comes to snow.  But that was Friday.  After two gorgeous days, the snow pack is less than half of what it was.  Spring is on its way.

Having to make hard choices, part 2…

You can see that I don't take many pictures of people.  But here's one I really like.  This picture of friends Sean and Ellen was taken last October on our trip to Italy.  We stayed in a beautiful villa along the Amalfi Coast.   And though it was a little cool for me, Sean braved the infinity pool, which is where he is standing in this photo.  I like the mood of this because it reminds me of how beautiful, calm and relaxing the villa was.  I also like that Sean has his hat on.

This photo was taken along the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia.  What a wonderful drive!  We were there in the winter so there wasn’t much traffic, which allowed us to stop when we saw something that I wanted to take a picture of.  I like this photo a lot and spent some time on it getting it aligned properly.

Here’s another one from our travels.  This photo was taken in 2010 on a trip we made to Scotland.  These boats are on the Isle of Mull.  I think they leave them there for photographers like me to ooh and aah over.  I love Scotland.

Sunflowers are probably my favorite flower and I love them in all their phases.  To me, this one looks like it is just waking up from a long nap.

And finally, here’s a photo I took at Three Sisters Sanctuary in Goshen, Massachusetts, on one of the field trips Carrie and I took.  This is a great place to wander around with a camera.  I highly recommend it if you are in the area.  In this photo, I love the juxtaposition of the wild vines and other natural growth against the relative fineness of the stained glass window.  The Unexpected…

Are these my ten “best” photos?  Probably not.  Well, maybe…  Photography is very personal and very subjective.  I suspect that to me, these are the best because they all invoke wonderful things and good times in my mind.  But maybe I will change my mind tomorrow when new things happen in my life.

By the way, we are still waiting for the snow to start in earnest.  We are supposed to get 8 plus inches.  Here’s hoping that they misread this storm and it will all blow out to sea.

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…

Hunting for color…

“There are so many colors in the rainbow,

 so many colors in the morning sun,

 so many colors in the flower

 and I can see every one.”

~ Harry Chapin

The prompts for this week’s Scavenger Hunt seemed easy to me when I wrote them down last Sunday.  After all, what could be easier than Red, Orange, Yellow, Green and Blue.  Then I started to think.  It has been so gloomy  and cloudy around here that going on a color search outside didn’t seem to be the answer.   And, of course, there are no flowers to be had this time of year  in the great Northeast, unless buying out the grocery store or florist is the answer.  But, I actually thought about the grocery again to find my colors.  "Why not buy vegetables and fruits for the project?" I thought.  But, in the end, I simply went around the house and gathered up stuff.  Since I love color, that wasn't so hard.

LINKING TO ASHLEY SISK'S 

SCAVENGER HUNT SUNDAY.

Leaving Western Mass at last…

Here are a few more of the batch of photos I took on my little jaunt with my daughter Carrie last week.

 

I managed to find one for Friday’s Fences.

Here’s a shot of the Congregational Church in Goshen, Massachusetts.  This church dates from the 1780s.  I think it is an interesting and beautiful building but there is no way that I could figure out, short of standing in the middle of the street, how to take this photo without wires all over the place.  Sure, I could have sat here for hours cloning them out, but at some point, we just have to accept the fact that wires are part of our lives.  Heck, I am surrounded by wires right now and I bet you are, too.

Carrie and I took the long way out to North Adams so we could drive by the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace.  Susan B. Anthony has long been a hero of mine and it meant a lot to me to stop and spend a little time here even though the museum associated with it was closed the day we passed through.  This building is located in Adams, Massachusetts.

It was cold when we were out there as you can tell by the ice hanging off of the Windsor, Massachusetts Town Hall.

Happy March, you all!

Linking to Friday's Fences.