tongue and groove

gutters

i was reading Linda's latest post and saw that fabulous photo of leaves taken by her friend, Jane. it reminded me that i sometimes enjoy shooting gutters and the detritus found in them.  i need all of the inspiration reminders i can get right now because i've felt absolutely stumped by the mere thought of picking up the camera. (what to shoot?) so i went to my Flickr feed and searched for a "gutters" tag and found a few photos i'd uploaded. (i'm a lazy uploader; i often shoot, but don't post to Flickr.) as i looked at the photos, i noticed that this one came up in that tag search. i'd forgotten all about that journal page i'd created from gutter trash four years ago for Keri Smith's How to Wreck a Journal group. i'd not only forgotten about the journal page, i'd forgotten that Keri had commented on the photo of it.

Keri's blog was among the earliest blogs i found when i began blogging 7-1/2 years ago. i love her blog! ironically, i found the blog of the man who later became her husband shortly after i found hers. so it was cool to see that the writers of two of my earliest bookmarked blogs ended up married to each other. seeing that old journal page made me think of Keri and how much i enjoy her blog, but i realized i hadn't read a recent post from her. as i was thinking that, i clicked back to Google Reader and saw that, lo and behold, there was a post from Keri dated yesterday. she's back in California. for awhile, Keri and her husband lived in this town. i never met her when she was here, but she would write about sitting in a cafe a couple of blocks from our house. her husband did quite a bit of work at a place where i worked at the time. i never spoke to him either. it was so surreal to see him walk into my workplace after reading his blog for years that it sort of freaked me out.  :)

there's no point to this post other than this: synchronicity is always a delight and i'm continually amazed at how things always seem to come full circle.

The Revolutionary Yardscape

this morning i read this article about a new book by Matthew Levesque, The Revolutionary Yardscape.  i *love* the idea of repurposing materials in the yard or garden. Levesque has taken repurposed landscaping to a whole new level at his home. check out the photos! there are links at the end of the article to resources where you can find repurposed materials in your area.

i went to Flickr and searched for the tags "garden" and "repurpose." here's a slideshow of how some folks are repurposing materials in their yards. would be curious to hear if you're using repurposed materials in your yard and how you're using them.

arboretum terrace

it seemed kind of amazing that i had the place entirely to myself in the middle of a Saturday afternoon...

capture

i've been shooting photos since a family friend handed me a black & white film camera when i was eight years old and let me take pictures at the San Francisco zoo. then, because he was a high school photography teacher, he took me the school's film lab on a weekend and let me develop them myself in the darkroom. i've been in love with photography ever since...even though i don't know the first thing about it and use almost exclusively basic point-and-shoot cameras.

what i love is the action of photography. i love capturing an image. anyone who knows me well will tell you that i'm not someone who cares about owning things. i've given away my possessions time and time again as i've moved and moved into different chapters in my life. what i do love to collect are memories...and photographs help me to collect them.

i also like to play with photography...to be silly or absurd...to care less about making pretty pictures than about stepping outside of my comfort zone.

i might get down in the gutter and shoot the 'trash' there... 

or take a walk around the block, shooting random photos in all directions but never once holding the camera up to my face...it's interesting to shoot over your shoulder...to see what you've just left or passed...

or to suddenly realize that as somone who spends a lot of time browsing in libraries or through thrift store bookshelves you've never captured what the view looks like from down there... 

there's a lot of technique in photography as an art. you may use a little or a lot of it. i use, well, none. i shoot with intuition and whimsy...because i'm not shooting for anyone's pleasure except my own.

if you ever find yourself questioning your uniqueness, you have only to look at your photographs. they're hard evidence that no one sees the world exactly the way you do. i know lots of people who shoot beautiful photographs, but i don't try to emulate them nor do i aspire to achieve their pretty results. it's not that i don't admire their work...i do. it's just that i can only capture what *i* see...and that's enough for me.

happy 10.10.10!

10.10.10 sunrise in Jacksonville, FL - photo by idea ablaze

this morning i was looking for something about the energy of this day...and found this. i liked this:

"It is important or useful to remember that the numeral is not the energy of the number but instead serves as a symbol of that energy — the power — contained within it."

and what she writes about the most powerful meditation actually being the simplest...to come back to the breath.

"Begin with the most fundamental part of you: your breath. Attend to your breath, noticing the rise and fall of your chest, the contraction of muscles, the inflow and outgo of the life force within you. Move next to your heartbeat, and feel within you the beating of seven billion hearts, all connected in some small way to the bird-flutter inside your own chest.

Breath and heart; heart and breath."

wishing you the interconnectedness of 7 billion heartbeats today. xo

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don't forget to share your "101010" photos at one of the Flickr pools.

who needs a trip to the farmers market?

happy Saturday!

a walk around the neighborhood this morning...

street photography

Joe Wigfall is a street photographer in NYC. he has a fantastic philosophy about his art and captures wonderful images. and check this:  he shoots without looking through the viewfinder, without raising the camera to his eye.  "i had to learn to see with my hands." take 3-1/2 minutes and watch. it's truly inspiring because it's not just about his technique...it's about his heart...and how he IS his art.

 

here's his FLickr stream. incredible images.

South Dakota

the entire Flickr set is here.

i arrived home late Friday afternoon after 15 days of travel with family. it included a 3-day road trip to my brother's home in eastern, rural South Dakota with my dad, stepmom and Ciara. we arrived on the 4th of July in time for a BBQ dinner and then my brother took C and i to Watertown to see the fireworks. my sister-in-law painted, furnished and decorated the loft space off Ciara's room into a beautiful guest room and that was my haven for about a week. we took side trips to Sioux Falls...to Marshall, MN to see my nephew Zak pitch in an American Legion game (in a beautiful American Legion park)...to Minneapolis for dinner downtown along the riverfront before Kayla's arrival at the airport...and a day of shopping at Mall of America (which made both nieces very happy). we drove home from Minnesota with tornado activity a few dozen miles north of us (exciting!) we road-tripped across South Dakota to the Black Hills for 3 nights in a cabin in the hills outside Lead...stopping along the way in the Badlands and Wall (for lunch and some tourist-y shopping). the cabin was beautiful...set among the aspens...3 floors...4 bedrooms, 2 baths, hot tub. i shared the loft bedroom with the girls. we spent one day seeing the sights in Deadwood and another day visiting the Crazy Horse monument and the quintessentially American Mt. Rushmore. Kayla and i flew home together from Rapid City.

it's hard to be on someone else's vacation, especially when you're used to leading a very independent life. my brother had wanted us to all be together this summer and my folks had never been to South Dakota, so this trip was really for all of them. when you're sleeping in lofts and sharing hotel rooms, it can be a challenge to spend 2 weeks w/o any privacy...or to feel your heart tug a bit as you whiz by yet another potentially gorgeous photo that won't be captured by your camera because others are deciding where to stop. that said, i'm enormously grateful that i could tag along since between my brother and dad, they picked up most of my expenses.

my brother took me fishing on two different lakes three different times...once with each niece and the last time with our Dad. i caught a walleye and two trout. i'd never been fishing before!  (shocking considering my brother's a former commercial fisherman.) as a girl i'd once begged my dad to take me and he did...but once i learned he was going to expect me to bait my own hook and touch the fish, my fishing career was over before it had started. but i didn't have to touch any worms (we used lures) and my brother unhooked each of my fish...a walleye and two trout. i was surprised to find it so relaxing and rather zen-like.

the sights were lovely and the weather was perfect. there was a major lightening storm one night that seemed to last for hours. being a native Californian, I'm used to the hills turning golden and brown in the summertime, so i was surprised at how green everything was both in eastern South Dakota and western Minnesota...miles and miles of green fields and crops. (i've never seen so many cornfields in my life!) 

i stumbled upon M. J. Andersen's memoir, Portable Prairie, on a sale table at Wall Drug and picked it up for $4.99. sacrilege! it's fabulous and i encourage you to read it even if you have no interest in South Dakota. it's about our quest for home and what that word even means to us. she's also very witty.

i also read Pete Dexter's brilliant Western, Deadwood. me, reading a Western...i know!  it's a great book and it was really fun to go to Deadwood as i was nearing the end of it. 

and in the gift shop at Crazy Horse i picked up The Journey of Crazy Horse which i'm about halfway through. it's a lovely book, though it's hard not to feel some white guilt and shame while reading it. it's beautiful to read about the Lakota way.

i took a sabbatical from Twitter and Facebook while i was traveling and though i've been home a couple of days, i can't seem to get myself to jump all the way back into them. i suspect my social media engagement is going to be a little quieter for the remainder of the summer as i work through what my next steps will be.

hope you're having a wonderful July.

ROSI

spend enough time online among social media types and bloggers and you're bound to hear the term ROI...return on investment.  i've been thinking a lot lately about my social media ROI. not in an outward way, as in how to generate ROI for my online presence...but inwardly, in a quest to streamline the platforms i use and how i use them. ROSI, if you will...return on self-investment.

finding myself with lots of free time these days (being unemployed in a traditional day job), one might think i'd want to spend more time online. my last job blocked all social media at my workplace, so in my personal time i often felt a bit frantic to stay connected with my virtual world to try to keep up. now that i have control over how i spend my time, i find myself wanting to spend less time online. i've been gravitating more toward real-world experiences...reading...going to movies in theaters...going for walks or bike rides...sometimes just daydreaming and taking naps. notice what's missing there? actual creating. i'll get to that in a minute...

i've been thinking about the various social media platforms i use and looking at the ROSI i'm getting from each of them. i've decided that i'd really like to winnow things down and focus primarily on just a couple of them. for me, those would be Twitter and Flickr.

i hear some people say they couldn't possibly use Twitter because it's too much of a time-suck. if that's the case, you might want to re-think how you use it. by utilizing Twitter lists, you can really personalize your experience of it. i just hit the 3-year mark at Twitter. when i first started tweeting there were 5,000 tweets per day worldwide...now there are 50 million!  if you follow a fair number of people that can feel like trying to fill a thimble from a firehose!  that's why lists can be so valuable. fill your Twitter stream with those who give you the best ROI, and shift the rest you're following over to a list. i continually tweak my Twitter stream and lists, and i encourage you to do the same. creating your lists takes a chunk of time initially, but tweaking and maintaining your lists and stream pays off big efficiency dividends down the road. and with 50 million tweets a day, efficiency is paramount. why bother tweeting at all? in my opinion and experience, there's nothing else like it. Conan O'Brien recently made an appearance at Google HQ. about 18 minutes in on that video, he says he didn't spend one penny on advertising for his tour. instead he sent one tweet linking to a site where people could buy tickets and the shows sold out in a couple of hours. still think Twitter's not valuable? 

the other platform that gives me enormous creative inspiration and helps me find my mojo is Flickr. i've been a Flickr member for a long time (6 years?) but have gone through long spells where i haven't used it much. thinking about my ROSI, i had to admit that Flickr gives me enormous creative returns, even if they're not immediately tangible. i think it's one of the most extraordinary social networks we have. by putting this in black and white i'm hoping it will inspire me to get my Flickr groove going again.

i'm finding Facebook to be a big time-waster because it's too redundant. i don't need to follow the same people (and their blogs) at Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader. what's fallen by the wayside in an effort to have some online/offline balance is reading my friends' blogs, yet that's an activity that's given me some of the best ROSI over the years. the inspiration and joy i get from reading your blogs inspires me to want to engage on my own. needless to say, the other thing that's fallen by the wayside as my social media efforts have splattered all over the place is writing here...that's where the 'actual creating' part comes in.  ;)