Welcome to the Photo a Day Project blog, where you can read about my adventures in my quest to take a photo every day for the whole year!
Sharing the Sunset
Day 69
The weather today was crazy, and yes, that's the technical term, it was sunny one minute, then snowing so hard the next you couldn't see across the street, then sunny again, then windy, then snowing, sunny, cloudy, well you get the idea...crazy. So as I was heading home the sun was behind me and I could see in the rear view mirror it was about to go behind some clouds, I thought it might end up looking good and thought I would take a picture if I got to a place where I could stop. I found a spot and when I got a good look I was amazed, not only did the cloud look like it was glowing but the sky had turned every color it could, gray, blue, pink, orange, yellow I was shocked, because I thought back to just the other night and how completely different that sunset looked (day 66, Chasing the Sunset). By now you all know I am utterly fascinated by sunsets, and this one proves my point, this sunset was beautiful.
Usually I'm alone when I'm running around looking for photos, but lately at lunch or afterwork my brother is with me, we carpool to work so he's a captive in the car, I'm pretty sure he thinks I'm nuts because out of the blue I'll just stop the car and jump out. He always says "you're going to stop here?" or, "don't pull too far off the road, you'll get stuck!" My response to all this is always "nah, don't worry", and out I go. It's nice to have him there, he's always ready to hold the camera, or watch out for cars, or be ready to push the car out of the mud (which I haven't needed him to do yet) and it's also nice he's there to see what I'm seeing in person, then we look at the pictures on the camera together to see if anything came out, it makes it more fun when you can show someone else, even if it's your overprotective little brother.
" A good snapshot stops a moment from running away." -Eudora Welty
The Land of Oz
Dat 68
To me they look like a bunch of emeralds, not what it really is water drops on my car windshield. Water drops on the windshield mean it is raining, but emeralds must mean I am in the Land of Oz! Which would be way better than standing in the parking lot at work, getting wet trying to take a picture of the rain on my car. I have a confession, the movie Wizard of Oz scares the pants off me, not just when I was a kid, now, yes I mean now. The first time I remember seeing the movie we were at my grandparents house in Florida, I may have been 5 or 6 and my parents were going to let me and my brother stay up late and watch. It started to go downhill for me right from the start, when mean old Miss Gulch took Toto from Dorothy, I didn't like it one bit, then oh no, Dorothy got hurt! Then it switched to color, what the heck is with that? If you think about it there are so many things in that movie, the Wicked Witch, the Munchkins, those creepy flying monkeys, the guards at the palace even the Wizard, the Tin Man, Scarecrow and Cowardly Lion, are all pretty creepy. I watched it that night, I liked the music, and have watched it many many times since, I mean seriously, it's a classic. The thing I do remember as the most fun was sitting on the floor, wide eyed, in front of the tv, with my brother, both of us in our jammies, and acting as cool as a cucumber because I was the older sister and I couldn't be scared. I bet if you ask my brother, he would say he wasn't scared of those monkeys either.
"Someday I'll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me." -Dorothy
Capturing the Moment
Day 67
I'm beginning to see more birds around, actually I am hearing them in the morning, which is so nice. The geese must know something, they're heading north, and the deer and wild turkeys are out and about. They all must know, spring is going to spring soon, and it's not soon enough for me. I know, we've had a mild winter, which has been great, not a lot of snow, but as I've said a million times before, the lack of color is a drag. So, when given lemons you might as well make lemonade, I didn't think I could get a photo today if I worried that it wasn't colorful enough, I'd never find anything if I thought that way so I didn't worry about the color at all. Just for the heck of it I stopped and took a few photos of these birds in a tree, I didn't realize I got a shot of that one bird just as it took off, you see that's one of the biggest drawbacks to being a photographer, you don't see what happens until you look at the picture, which can be a nice surprise, but, at least for me, sometimes you feel like you've missed something. You don't have the memory of seeing something special, you have the memory of being there, but you see the moment in a picture just like everyone who wasn't there. It's an odd feeling, but at the same time a good one, it takes some practice to get that moment, it doesn't always work, sometimes my timing is off, but when it does work I'm not only surprised but really happy. I don't care that I didn't 'see' what happened, I'm glad that I was able to record it for all those who were not as fortunate I as was to be there in the first place.
"Every moment is an experience." -Jake Roberts
Chasing the Sunset
Day 66
As stated previously, I really like to photograph sunsets, I love the colors the sky turns, pale yellow, brilliant orange, even pink, if there are clouds hanging about they take on a life of their own. I was lucky as a kid, my grandparents had a house in Florida, we would go visit them every spring and one of the things I loved to do was go to the beach and watch the sunset. I'd be standing on the beach all pink and itchy from sunburn, and wonder, why did the sun seem to go down faster once the sun hit the horizon? As I got older and started to try to take pictures of how it looked, I would get fustrated because the photos didn't look like what I saw. I knew nothing about exposure, lenses and all that technical stuff, what I did know was my Instamatic camera wasn't doing the sunset justice, finally, I figured it all out and I started being able to get pics of that perfectly round firey ball I saw out there hanging over the ocean.
I take photos of sunsets now for my own enjoyment, some of them are kind of cool, but most are ordinary, I don't mean that as a knock on my own photos, I mean I haven't taken one yet that to me is extraordinary, and that is part of the enjoyment. Sunsets happen everyday, you can count on it, you might not be able to see it but the sun definitely goes down. The fun comes on the days you can see it, driving around trying to find a good spot before the sun dissapears, maybe somewhere with the lake in it, or maybe some trees, or a farm. The challenge is always there, and it's a challenge I will gladly take on every time the sun sets.
"Peace is seeing a sunset, and knowing who to thank."-Author Unknown
No Two Alike
Day 65
I'm fascinated by snowflakes, there really are no two alike, well there might be but I choose to believe there are no two alike. That's one of the first things I remember learning in school, that no two are alike, I used to think about that, there is A LOT of snow so how could there not be two alike? There had to be, but every one said, nope, each one is different, just like people they would say, but I had seen people who looked just like each other, twins, so my little brain figured there was way more snowflakes just in my front yard than there were people in the whole world, so at least two of them HAD to be alike. There's a problem with proving this, snow melts, you pick it up to look at it, it melts, you bring it inside, it melts faster, you lay in it to get a closer look it doesn't melt but you freeze. So my little five year old brain chose to believe the easy answer, no two are alike. Even now, my old semi adult brain still chooses the easy answer, I have even read a book about snowflakes, how they're formed, how certain weather conditions influence the shape, that there are probably snow flakes that look the same....blah, blah, blah. NOPE, no two are alike, so there, prove me wrong, but dress warm, I would hate for you to catch a cold.
"Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity, so that not a snowflake escapes it's fashioning hand."-Henry David Thoreau
