Tag Archives: WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Elemental

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“Explore the classical elements of earth, air, water, and fire. How do you capture something invisible like air, or the movement of water? Or, more personally, is there a place you go to feel connected to the earth?”

Air, water and fire form a double rainbow touching Earth. 

Sitting on the ground beside a lake, the campfire behind him dancing in the air. 

Connected to the earth, from head to toe. 

Elemental

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Textures

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Nature loves to combine textures with remarkable contrast.  

Spine-prickly and petal-soft:

Cold, smooth, and rough: 

Fuzzy and rigid: 

 

Smooth, rough and bumpy:

Wet slippery, dry and grainy: 

 

Everywhere you look, Nature feels wonderful.  

Textures

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Satisfaction

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We collect estate sale items for our home business, Scholar and Poet Books. Most of these are books, but we  also specialize in recorded music, sheet music, and puzzles. We picked up a collection of about 300 jigsaw puzzles from a church rummage sale a few years ago. In order to resell them, we had to determine whether or not we had all the pieces. The only way to do that was to put them together. And so we began to assemble and photograph puzzles. That was about 2 1/2 years ago. We’ve become pretty adept at doing puzzles. We get great satisfaction in finding that all the pieces are included in these second-hand puzzle boxes .

However, sometimes a greater satisfaction is coming across a cool, vintage puzzle made from real wood, with ornate and elaborate “gazintas” – as in this “goes into” that. Steve gave me one that immediately reminded me of the Pastime Puzzles that my grandmother kept at her beach cottage. I lifted the lid and breathed in the aroma of old wood. I put it together while I was sick in bed with a cold. It was only a small puzzle, not like the ones my family would put together on the table in the living room. I realized there was one piece missing, but I wasn’t disappointed. It meant that it would be worth less in resale value, so I might as well keep it.

So “satisfaction” is not necessarily a complete puzzle. Satisfaction is enjoying the moment of discovery, the journey of working on a project, and the pleasure of keeping a memory alive.

 

Satisfaction

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Weekly Photo Challenge: What’s Wrong With This Picture?

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Do you see something….unusual…in this photo?  

Blue ‘Shroom, I saw you standing alone….
It’s a lactarius indigo edible mushroom. The latex or milk that oozes from it turns from blue or blue/gray to green when it is cut open. I’ve only seen this one. 

And what’s wrong with this picture? 

Boys in shorts, green grass and blooming flowers, and…snow on the ground? 
Okay, I’m kidding. That’s not snow. It’s flower petals from the tree overhead. 

 

What about these? Anything ODD about this place? 

Yeah. It’s all weird. I don’t get humans. I’m sticking to Nature Photography. 😉  

Unusual

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Collage

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Here is a gallery collage of photos from my recent series, An American Adventure. In a two-week road trip, I visited eight National Parks and Monuments in Colorado, Utah, and South Dakota. If you would like to see the entire collection of 17 blog posts, click on the banner headline An American Adventure. 

Canyonlands National Park, Utah
The Green River flows through Dinosaur National Monument

Collage

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Bridge

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“Only connect.” – my mother

“Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” – E. M. Forster Howard’s End

“True self is non-self, the awareness that the self is made only of non-self elements. There’s no separation between self and other, and everything is interconnected. Once you are aware of that, you are no long caught in the idea that you are a separate entity.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

 

Bridge

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Delta

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Δ Delta

“This week, share a photograph that signifies transitions and change to you… Explore the ways in which a single photograph can express time, while only showing us a small portion of any given moment.”

Time and change symbolized in a static, 2-dimensional image — not an easy trick. However, all around us there are clues to the way that Nature has changed things over time.  How about:
1) The resting place of the bleached pelvic bone of an elk who once wandered this tall grass prairie in South Dakota

2) The abstract art of calcite deposits left in a cave long after limestone has dissolved  

 3) The fossilized bones of dinosaurs that roamed the Earth some 150 million years ago, exhibited for present day tourists to see and touch

4) These stately forms of sandstone, layered and eroded over time 

5) The moment in time when light, air, water and Earth meet in a colorful conjunction, only to disappear in the next movement of the elements

Of these five examples, which one speaks to you of the joy in change and movement? 

Delta

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Transient

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The Wilderness Act of 1964 protects designated wilderness and defines it as “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain”. 

Hikers passing through in Canyonlands National Park, Utah, leave no trace…

Ancient desert communities left the pueblos centuries ago…

And my tent is pitched on this Earth for just a short while.

Transient

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Order and Chaos

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My photographic focus is on Nature. Here’s an interesting question: is Nature ordered or chaotic? I grew up hearing that God brought order out of chaos when He created the world. What might that mean? Do we see that evidenced in the world? There are certainly patterns in Nature, but aside from crystal structures, I have a hard time thinking of anything in Nature resembling a straight line. To me, Nature is one thing after another and never exactly the same. I see this in many examples, like my 4 children. 

And speaking of crystal structures, what about snowflakes? No two are alike, we’re told. Is symmetry the same as order?Pattern and repetition, if not exact, can be a kind of order, I guess…or it can be a kind of chaos. Are feathers orderly? Even when ruffled?

Nature is complex. I think that order is a human attempt to simplify Nature into something less overwhelming and easier to control. Sometimes this simplification has benefits. Evenly and consistently constructed stair steps are much easier to ascend than canyon rocks. 

Somehow, even though Order makes my life easier and tidier at times, I would not say that it’s better. I would not even say that it’s Divine. It’s just….orderly.  

Order