Travelin' About

Anna still loves participating in art classes. She showed me some of her paintings. So I'm intrigued with beautiful older people. They represent wisdom, experience, survival, knowledge...and I, for one, would like to learn more about them.  I was doing a portrait of my neighbor last week and remembered that she has a beautiful mother who is 95 and full of vim and vigor. So I asked if we could go visit Mom and photographer her. Dorothy loved the idea, because she knows what a treasure her mother is, so we headed over to Anna Scrugg's home where I was greeted warmly and shown some of her lovely treasures. She has the most amazing kitchen - large enough to cook for many and she told me about some of the large parties she hosted from that kitchen. She's been living in her current house for 40 years - at one time you could see Austin's Capitol from her porch - hard to believe with all of the development that has occurred over the years. She was a teacher ...

So, I'm not sure exactly why, but I see so much beauty in elderly faces. Perhaps it is because I have entered the Senior Years myself, but I look around me and am just struck by the wisdom, joy and life-stories that I want to hear and preserve from the cool old dudes around me.  I was blessed to do portraits at a Senior Center in 2015.  That was meant to give me lighting practice and provide the Seniors with an 8x10 image - something that they or their families could treasure.  I got so much more from those beautiful people than I gave. One woman dressed to the nines for the event, bringing along matching high heeled shoes despite the fact that she was 89.  Another woman was turning 104 the very next day. It was a diverse group - one couple from Japan, an elderly German gentleman and a Vietnamese soldier who had helped the US during the Viet Nam War and he brought his medals to show me. One guy wore a gold suit that was huge on him but he was s...

"The people in Cuba have an innocence because they haven’t been exposed to the “real world.”   You see the physical manifestations of that with the old cars, the 50’s architecture – it’s been frozen in the late 50’s."   "Every one is interesting."                                  - David Allen Harvey My cousin told me she's loving seeing my recent Cuba photos because they "exude such joy."  That's how I felt while I was there - filled with joy.  The people may be monetarily impoverished but they are not inside wasting their lives watching TV or complaining on Facebook, they are out on the streets, living life, participating, sharing, dancing, making music, creating art, making the most of their lives. I went on a Strobist X-Peditions Workshop earlier this month to Havana, Cuba. I've been following the Strobist blog since 2006 and have learned...

As the year winds down, I can't help but look back and note that it was a very good one. I had my photographs shown in several exhibits, I got to practice my creativity a lot and I got a great deal of travel to new and fun places.  The year began with a fun macro workshop with Doug Box and Randy Kerr where they had several stations set up to challenge our macro endeavors. The rose on the top row, middle photo was taken there as well as several others that I treasure.  That one was in a fish tank and Doug was splashing the water to make the ripples.   The one on top left was taken in January after coming home from NYC where I attended my grandson's 5th birthday. The sky welcomed me home here in Texas with a brilliant array of colors and my husband encouraged me to hike closer to that old barn.  There are a few from a jaunt with friends in March to Brenham, Tx. in search of a great background for the fabulous Bluebonnet crop we had this year....

I've been going through the images I took this past year, trying to come up with a "Best of 2018" and finding it really difficult.  I was fortunate enough to have had trips to Charleston, cross country to NY, Colorado and Wyoming, not to mention the adventures I engage in with local photography friends. I got a lot of good pictures this year.  And, I have been actively practicing things to make me more creative, so, I am STILL trying to cull my selection down to a more manageable "Best of".  Meanwhile, I did have fun putting aside some of my favorites (more emotional choices than compositionally and technically accurate ones). OK, so many of the top favorites are family - I am blessed to have a family that allows me to photograph them more than they'd like. They let me practice new techniques and oftentimes they will play along, allowing me to get something unusual. Then there was the time they actually enjoyed the process - when I used my u...