Musings on Thanksgiving Weekend


I started this blog a very long time ago.  My intent was to share photography tips and travel information.  Through the years I did write about both local places to visit while living in Austin, Texas and some great big trips I got to enjoy - France, Cuba, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, America's National Parks and more. The archives are here if anyone at all is interested. If nothing else, it has served as a journal for me.  I certainly don't believe anyone else is reading this.

This year has been bizarre with Covid 19 taking over our everyday lives.  No travel...not even to local places that would be so cool to explore.  We moved to Columbia, Maryland this year and I still haven't ventured to see Washington, DC. I believe my last post was about exploring Annapolis which is 35 min. away and my daughter and I just stayed 90 minutes and had to get back to our safe zone (where there were bathrooms we could use).  I would never have believed you if you had predicted this would happen just two years ago.  And yet, here we are - still in the midst of a global, horrific pandemic.


My grandkids love playing in Photoshop. I believe this started as a flower scene.

But my purpose here is to make lemonade of lemons.  I have gotten to "play" with my photography more than ever before.  There has been so many "free" seminars and conferences that I've enjoyed. Sunsets are spectacular here in Columbia and even though our view is blocked by suburbia and trees, I have found new ways of capturing the magnificent colors. 

The peaks are a new Senior Center that is being built about a quarter of a mile away. We are not happy about the traffic that is going to expand when it opens but again, trying to make lemonade.

I've played with water refracting patterns.  And multiple exposures.     



And I've spent endless hours with macrophotography - bugs, flowers, spiderwebs, the kids miniature toys...  






I taught my grandkids Photoshop (and then cry cause they won't let me back at my computer)   And I've discovered BIRDS!!!  I've become obsessed with BIRDS!!!!



Most of all, I realize that I am grateful for the gift of Photography. For the ability to capture beauty and look at it over and over again. To be able to share it and see the joy that others find in it. To be creative and productive and feel alive despite so much doom and gloom in the news.  To see the magnificence of the Creator who crafted so many amazing flowers, birds, trees, skies.....

I was all alone in a big nature center last week and I just stood in awe of the place and felt so thankful to be in that place at that time. 

So, even if I have no readers, it's good for me to pause and realize that I am fortunate that I've discovered photography and make a point of getting out to practice my craft, challenge myself and just play .... even though I am now "elderly" and have to be more careful than ever not to get hurt or sick.  It's still fun to find new photographic challenges. I think I'll go find some oil, food coloring and water and see what I can stir up.

Keep Shooting, Friends! And Have a Safe and Happy Holiday Season!!!


Comments

  1. CindiDecember 1, 2020 at 10:36 AM

    What a special post Chris! Your photos —especially the birds—are always marvelous and these are no exception! I love the different experiments with refraction and that the grandkids love photoshop. I look forward—even if it’s just me—to checking out your next blog!! This pandemic will surely be over sometime and you can go back to what you love which are definitely not “senior” things!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Day Trip with my Daughter

Image
Between Covid 19 and moving from Texas to Maryland, I really haven't seen much of the world this year and that is hard on this travel-loving girl.  Here I am living an hour away from Baltimore and Washington, DC and we are stuck in an unending state of quarantine.  I needed to break out so I asked my daughter if she'd take an early morning trip to Annapolis with me. "How early?" she wanted to know. She is not normally a photographer and, with two young children, unaccustomed to our "pre-dawn" starts.  "As early as you can," I tried and she and the kids showed up slightly after 7 am.  Popsie stayed with the kids who grumbled that they just wanted to go back to sleep, but Nova was game for a new adventure and we happily drove 35 minute southeast to the beautiful city of Annapolis.  Court house showed some signs of life. Mask covered guards stood at the door. Maryland's capital city, located on the Chesapeake Bay is a lovely, his...
Read more

Visiting Switzerland - Zurich

Image
My husband and I recently had the opportunity to join a group of photographers, led by Joe Brady and his wife, Diane Bollen , to visit five different cities in Switzerland - Zurich, St. Moritz, Zermatt, Grindelwald and Lucern.  Despite never hearing of these places before now, we had such an enjoyable trip that I want to share this experience with you. I plan to write 5 blogs, one for each city, to show some of the beauty we encountered and remember this wonderful trip. We arrived in Zurich very early on a Saturday morning in June. We chose to go straight to sleep in an airport hotel, to ward off jet lag. When we woke in early afternoon, we were right near the trains which were in a giant "mall" building with all kinds of shops. We asked which stop we needed to get off, and proceeded to navigate the train system to see some of Zurich's sites.  The streets were festive with vendors and people shopping.  After walking around and trying to figure out where we needed to meet...
Read more

Doing my best to capture Austin's weirdness

Image
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home. I discovered an awesome PhotoWalk yesterday thanks to Photographers Adventure Group and Trover . The concept of Trover was brand new to me - it's a phone app that helps you share life's hidden gems, through photography, with others, and it is evidently very popular in other places in the world and is becoming a hit around here. So, the walk encouraged me to use my iphone as a camera way more than I would normally use it. That didn't stop me from taking close to 300 images with my camera - but it did open my eyes to the social networking capabilities of iphone photography and one of my fellow walkers also showed me some outrageous editing capabilites it has as well. We were instructed to upload our photos as we took them, giving a bit of a description and posting them to the Trover site. This was a technological challenge for me, but I love a good challenge and, at the end of the day I actually won a pretty cool p...
Read more