A morning at the beach, quietly contemplating the water and a grey overcast sky, only the phone in hand, when it all started to change so fast…
Weekly Photo Challenges here
Fleeting – Sky
The Sign Says
First day back at work today after a couple of months off and meandering.
Leaving the garden behind this morning, my feet muddy from the wet soil, heading out along College on the streetcar for the first time in weeks, after a few blocks the driver leaned deep into his horn and the brakes but too late, too fast, nothing could stop him and he rear-ended a taxi, totally crumpling the back half of the car.
All of us passengers fled the scene, the streetcar driver slumped depressed over his steering wheel, the taxi driver strangely indifferent.
Ahhh, the city…
Now walking to work, I run into an old friend, a friend I haven’t seen for maybe 5 years and we kiss each other and hug again and again – it has been so long, too long… I am suddenly grateful for the streetcar driver’s misfortune.
Now rushing to work, the day is beautiful and the city vibrant, so wonderful to be in it, feeling the heart of it, not thinking about the absurd, if entertaining dramatic spectacle that has gripped city governance for the past weeks.
Opportunities for photos abound, and indeed there are signs everywhere, too many signs, the city is rife with signs.
Some are intriguing, cryptic in a playful way –
Others are strange in that futuristic sci-fi dystopia movie kind of way…
…especially as there is NO blue door in sight.
Others are attractively bilingually cryptic in a way that is repeated again and again in different languages all over the city –
And others just seem to have been very badly located –
But now very very late for work on my first day back, I run up the stairs and face the door with the sign leading to the floor that will be my daytime abode for the next couple of months…
The WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge can be found here.
Water drops – on imitating
Over the weekend I was messing around with the camera out in the country, experimenting and trying different things.
As I was framing and snapping and adjusting, I realized I was imitating Karen – realized there were photos of hers I had seen and been intrigued by, and as I looked through the viewfinder, I was semi-consciously trying to figure out how she did that…
And while failing utterly to get the same results, still I found I was teaching myself something via this imitation of a master.
Other moments it occurred to me I was trying to create an image like Sandra Bartocha’s images…
And again, failing completely. Yet in the process, little things were learned out about the angle, the blur, the light, the settings on the camera.
It has been almost 1 year now I’ve had this camera, my first digital camera. We are still getting to know each other.
Mucking around like this in the rain, trying to capture something of the water and reflections and the glistening of water drops, working from an impulse of exploratory curiosity, fun as it was, I found the pictures I was taking bored me in and of themselves…
But the process of passing through these mediocre efforts was part of pushing towards something that might still be fresh and different and unique, that might interest me at least, even if no one else.
So then, back home, staring at the endlessly fascinating fish pond, I tried something a bit different –
Training the hose onto the surface of the water, a process began of exploring the bursts of action and colour, of water as it met water…
And wondering about the possible extremes of abstraction, I became curious and interested again…
follow your nose 