Category Archives: Photography

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Weekly Photo Challenge: That Marvelous Face

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First Face:

mom laughing

My Mother’s Face had to be the first face I learned to love. I am sure that I gazed at her for long stretches while nursing. I learned to get over my teen-aged embarrassment at her lazy walleye, her “long Celtic chin” (as she called it) and the fact that she never wore make-up. Her face is particular and characteristic. Her prominent eyes and small nose and mouth have been gradually swaddled by more wrinkles and folds as she ages. She is now 81; this photo was taken 3 years ago. What I love most about this picture is that she is in her natural state – enjoying life! 

Second Face:

scan0012

This is the face I see continually in my dreams, the face of my true love. He was 19 when I took this picture with the camera he bought me – a Canon AE-1.  We were married for 24 years and had 4 children. He died in 2008. This face has echoes in the living expressions of my kids, and I love that they inherited his warm eyes, his strong jaw, his brilliant smile.  

I have what might be called a photographic memory.  I close my eyes and see faces. Sometimes they are faces that I don’t recognize. I used to play with that ability to imagine crowds of strangers with particular faces and wonder if I had actually seen those faces in passing or if my brain was just making them up. I do know that I pay close attention to faces and always have. Perhaps I do carry those faces within me and always will. No matter how many I collect, I think these will always be #1 and #2. 

Face

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Happy Earth Mother May Day!

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What a perfect topic for a photo challenge!  Mother Earth is my favorite subject, and I’ve got LOTS of nature photos featured on this blog.  Check out my Wisconsin Outdoors and Wilderness pages in the header above for some of my favorites! 

Since this is the beautiful, lusty, bright month of May, I think I will highlight one of the woodland ephemeral wildflowers that emerge in my neck of the woods at this time: the Mayapple.  Yes, the tiny bud eventually becomes a little green fruit rather like a crab apple, but I hear it’s unwise to eat them in any quantity…because…well, you know…  Anyway, here’s one small citizen of Earth, from bud to maturity. 

Mayapple
Mayapple

Earth

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Admiration

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optimistic 2

“Guess what, Mama! I got another scholarship!”  

My middle daughter was battling major depression at the beginning of the year, experiencing crippling panic attacks and an ED that was out of control. What did she do? She quit her disastrous job, went back to school, and found a new job. She enrolled in Communications and Psychology and did a PowerPoint presentation on Depression. Her school essays have all earned A+ grades and have been used as examples for her classmates. I am incredibly proud of her and in awe of the personal reserves of strength she has had since she was a baby! There was never something too difficult for her to tackle, once she put her mind to it. 

Admiration

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Abstract Earth Day

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Today’s challenge is “Abstract”, and it’s Earth Day.  So many beautiful textures and forms in nature that may be completely unrecognizable close up although familiar at a distance. now 2One definition of “abstract” is to remove, as in remove it from its context. 

mono redwood

When you abstract something, you may consider it theoretically and separately from its surroundings. This is something that scientists do particularly.turkey feathers

And then the challenge is to put it back into context and look at it holistically, as a whole, interconnected thing.turkey

This is exactly the way we need to look at our Earth. Parts are interesting to study, but the whole, living thing is what we need to protect. 

the gorge wilderness

The complexities of our planet, the delicate balance and harmony of its interdependent eco-systems, are perhaps far beyond our capacity to understand. Therefore, it’s important to respect them and strive to preserve their integrity. And it’s equally important simply to revere them and enjoy the awe they inspire.

intricate 2

May you enjoy the Earth today, in abstract detail and in whole.   

 
Abstract

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Dinner’s Ready!

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What a fun challenge! Dinner, supper, the evening meal is an opportunity to establish a daily feast or celebration of sustenance, to gather your nuclear family together, share stories of the day, and unwind .

Yeah, right. I am amazed at how rushed and chaotic this time was for me when my four children were living at home and involved in extra-curricular activities!

However, they are living on their own, now. Their schedules are their own, and my schedule is that I work part-time 2 days a week and my partner works from home. I have re-claimed dinnertime for savoring food and conversation! I like to have a glass of wine or a gin cocktail or simply ginger ale with a lime wedge to wet my whistle while I prepare a meal for two in our tiny kitchen. Jazz by Chris Botti, Chet Baker, or any of the vocalists from the ’40s-’60s keeps me humming along in a great mood for evening pleasures.
My camera comes out for special dinner occasions, a new recipe or a holiday meal with family. I love the bustle of a potluck dinner with my children, and I fully acknowledge that they are better cooks than I. My mother’s dinners were elegant affairs where she was the clear Commander in Chief. (There’s one photo taken at her table – a distinct difference in style.) And I love dinner outdoors by the campfire or on the lawn of a music festival. Such a lot of delicious memories! 

photo by Steve
photo by Steve

Dinnertime

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Future

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future

Another morning of Spring snow, slowing changing to rain. The future comes to us haltingly, moment by moment. The human consciousness is capable of projecting thought far beyond this present moment. Other species don’t bother. The future is in the bud, the seed, the egg. They are content to let it belong there. 

may apple

I sometimes don’t know what to do with my human consciousness of the future. It can cause anxiety and expectation, which is often very unsettling. 

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The boy who wore that shoe turned 29 years old this week. I’ve thought of his future for that much time, and more. Perhaps that awareness has been helpful. Josh gradBut sometimes, I wonder if it’s not as helpful as my awareness of the moment. 

My son & his girlfriend

The flicker of the present, the warmth, the light. This is where we are most alive. 

Future

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Landscapes of my Life

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I am pleased that Joshua Tree National Park and Jeff Sinon were both mentioned in this challenge. I happen to be fans of both! And of Wilderness, of course. (There’s a page dedicated to Wilderness above – please take a look!)

Landscape has been an inspiration for me from a very young age. My father used to take me for walks in the Morton Arboretum in the far western Chicago suburbs. I was overjoyed to be set free running across open expanses of rolling lawn dotted with dandelions and trees. Suburban landscapes are quite domestic, though. I longed for something wilder. 

suburban landscape

I would stare out my second floor bedroom window towards the west, imagining that the frontier started just beyond the GAR Memorial Forest Preserve and the Des Plaines river. I finally learned that there were just more suburbs on the other side. Then, when I was 10, we went to Colorado to visit my cousins, and I saw a mountain for the first time. It was like all the magic of a fairy tale come true, more majesty than I could take in with my arms spread wide and my feet clambering tirelessly upward!

Yellowstone

When I was 14, we moved to California, and I discovered a diversity of landscapes to love – the shore, the deserts, the redwood forests, the foothills and the Sierras. 

By my 30th birthday, I had moved back to the Midwest to raise my four children in a less dramatic but safer environment. I fell in love again with the prairie. 

prairie kame

But Wilderness calls me to the North Woods and the West whenever I can travel, and these landscapes are the ones I want to photograph with more care and passion (and better equipment!) in the future. 


Landscape

 

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Swans at Half Light

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hero

warmth

When I was a little girl, my father read to me from E.B. White’s story “The Trumpet of the Swan”. I was 8 years old when that book was published, and I can imagine my father buying it to read to me and my 3 older sisters with his own great curiosity about that remarkable writer neatly disguised as paternal generosity. I had a fascination with the part where the young swan stays at the Ritz Carlton in Boston and eats watercress sandwiches provided by room service, probably in part because I was born in Massachusetts. We had moved to the Midwest when I was 4 years old. When I was 14, we moved to California. When I was 29 and had 4 kids of my own, I moved back to Illinois. Five years ago, I moved up to Wisconsin. In the north woods, and the edge of designated Wilderness, I saw my first wild swans in the half light of evening as I was setting up camp with Steve. I thought of Louis the swan and of finding your true wild voice. I heard the deep silence of that Place and felt the tender understanding of my father, who loved the outdoors. I stood on the soft, summer pine forest floor and took these pictures. To me, the world is poetry – in moment and memory. 

Half-Light

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Dance

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“I am the joy in change and movement.” – Steve’s statement of identity from a Transformations School of Spiritual Psychology exercise. 

I have always loved dancing, although I don’t always love change and movement in other areas of my life. My problem as a dancer has always been that I’m too cerebral and not as intuitive and fluid as I’d like to be, especially when learning someone else’s choreography.  When I “freestyle”, I think I do better. It has to do with allowing yourself to open up and be unconcerned whether you’re “doing it right”, to just go with the flow of feeling and response. It feels fabulous to let myself move to music! I get a great sense of my biology and my emotions – and it gives my brain a much needed rest!

So what images come to mind when thinking of movement and freedom?

Water, clouds, wind, birds and bodies.

 

May you move joyfully through your day today, and thanks for your visit!

Dance

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The Color Green

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I’ve never been to Ireland, but I love the color green. I carry a bit of it with me at all times, in my eyes.

I do have a great-grandmother who I think was born there. My grandmother’s name was Marion Keefe McFarland. My husband’s grandmother’s name was Mabelle Claire Mahanna Sargent. Today I think of them, for I knew them both, a little. But mostly, I think of green.

For all of you celebrating Irish, I wish you the best of St. Patrick’s Days!