i am hope :: white

i am hope :: white

i am hope :: tiny things

 . . . in a big way . . . 

or big things . . . in a tiny way . . .

i am hope :: photos

There is a great Photo Friday series over on "i am hope" -- thoroughly enjoyable.

A little quiet for the week.

visual obsessions: more roadtripping

I am amazed at how the same drive can look so different; every time we trek from Colorado through Wyoming and into Utah, I come away with a few hundred too many pictures.

So many wide open spaces, so many tight little vistas.

reunited, and it feels so good

My camera came home yesterday, and hasn't been out of my hands much since. Funny how much of a difference a little hunk of metal and mirrors can make in one's life, in the way one sees life. I swear there are more birds out today, and that I actually could smell the musty dirt of early spring driving home this morning. Even with the windows up.

So happy to have you back.

lights

With the holidays long over and the rooms stripped of all their festivity, I've been thinking a lot about lights lately. The past few weeks have been the darkest of the winter -- long and cloudy and low. Or maybe they have just seemed darkest, without that extra umph of bright lights scattered over the walls and trees around the house.

I have been skimming through my archives and thinking about how small wads of lights completely transform pictures.

I have been thinking about light while my camera is in the shop and the babies crawl around on the wood floor in the early morning sunshine. The light hits the floor just so, and they chase the stripes and try to grab the shapes.

And since I can't chase them through a lens, I just watch. Or I climb down on the floor with them and put my hand in the light too.

There is something about stepping out from behind the lens, from behind the book and cthe omputer and the phone and the window pane. Life is so much different three steps removed. There is something about getting into the light and air and sounds and smells, about experiencing it all first hand.

I'll be grateful to have my camera back eventually (please, please, please) but in the meantime, there is something to be said for being without.

visual obsessions: sepia

Way back in 2003, we received our first digital camera. Our photo library from that year is pretty sparse (ever the slow-to-change girl, I was wary of filmless photography) and our computer space even sparser. I only have a few dozen pictures archived from 2003, and of those, fully half seem to be saved in sepia. I don't know if it was the novelty of photo-adjustment software (ahhh, no more red eyes), or if I was feeling extra nostalgic for the faded prints of my childhood, but I seem to have gone a little overboard. Eventually my husband, who had actually learned the non-sepia aspects of the software, suggested I duplicate the photos before playing with them -- ingeniously simple, if slightly more space consuming.

But in those early years my originals are the experimentals.

Looking back through them today, I find the sepia effect thoroughly appropriate. Those first years were my long ago and old fashioned, my novice experimentation, those simpler days with just three little kids and no lessons, no school, no long-term-financial-plan, no real sense of the passing of time.

And yet. I say all that fully aware that "back then" nothing seemed simple, that three little kids was a completely overwhelming dynamic, that I was tired, anxious, and uncertain just as often as I can be today.

But the sepia soothes the print, takes out the glaring colors and off-tune composition, and leaves for me a sense of the joy and confusion and wonder those years contained as well, of our continual forays into new beauty -- within nature and home and all of the people I so intensively loved.

Those pictures ignite a sensation that once upon a time things were somehow more open and clear, and that someday maybe they will be again.

roadtripping window shots: small doses

More roadtripping through the vast expanse that is Wyoming these past few weeks. We somehow timed our traverse between storms, and traveled on clear roads in saturated light. With the kids quiet in the back and good music wafting, the stage was set for hours of merry window shooting.

Then the camera battery died.

We bought a new battery on holiday (merry christmas to me), but only managed enough charge at the shop to last through morning festivities on the 25th. So for twelve hours on I-80 and a big old empty photo card, I have only half a dozen shots to show.

But the light was definitely good. Sometimes a little can go a long long way.

visual obsessions: silhouettes

A couple of years ago I mentioned to my mother-in-law that I had managed to put together Christmas cards (an every-other-year achievement at best these days), and had even included a picture.

"That's fantastic," she said. "And can we actually see your faces in the picture?"

Oh.

Until that point I was well aware of my personal aversion to family photos of a forward-facing and stationary fashion. Maybe because we don't stage all that well, given our current head count and energy levels, and maybe because I'm just plain impatient, but I gave up on trying to get everyone looking (and heaven forbid, looking pleasantly) in the same direction a long time ago. And truth be told, I really love the effect. The pictures feel alive to me, as if a taste of the daily motion of our lives is captured right along with the people.

But I was not entirely aware that I have a tendency to skip faces altogether. I don't really have a good explanation for this one. I certainly like the faces of the people I photograph -- in fact I am almighty prejudiced when it comes to the exceptional beauty of my girls and the rugged handsomeness of my boys. But flipping through the photo logs, there is no doubt that I tend to go after motion that avoids direct eye contact.

One result of this tendency has been a slew of silhouette pictures. There is just so much going on where there seems to be so little going on; what these pictures leave unseen is even more potent to me than what they show. And maybe in the end that is the draw of the silhouettes, of the away turned faces, the mystery and possibility of all that is left unseen.

visual obsessions: upward

Our kids are incurable climbers, a tendency which has drawn its share of applause and, well, disapproval through the years. But I love that they are always looking upward, stretching toward, taking risks. While I follow them around with a camera (and a ready hand), I'll admit that it's sometimes hard to let them work themselves in and out of situations, to give them the space to explore their limits.

There are boundaries and rules, of course, but in general those are pretty broad. They have a lot of room to maneuver, and sometimes they get stuck and scraped and nervous. Sometimes they're not sure they can get down. So I stand below and offer some advice -- "left foot now, just a little lower. Hold on tight with your right hand and reach for the branch with your left." I am there, but I'm usually hands off.

There is something to be said for doubting and conquering, for trying and failing and failing again, and trying and maybe not failing. For learning to trust instincts and footing. For reaching the top and stretching one's arms to the horizon and daring it to claim it's unreachable.