old trees

The trees may or may not be old, but the pictures of them certainly are. I did not take one new picture this week. But... who doesn't have pictures of trees? So I went rooting around to find trees that I hadn't already posted! Seems I've posted any of the good ones and these are a few of what was left.


Kinda cheating as I didn't intend for this to be a picture of a tree (it's a picture of a mountain, maybe even a picture of rock walls, can't you tell?). I submit this standing on technicality: there is a tree in it.

This is a fairy tree, a hawthorn. To appease the fairies you make offerings of metal and you can see the many offerings here. I've offered coins to this tree so long ago the bark has grown around them... be a while before the tree grows over these iron offerings.

This is a seedling I rescued when I was weeding a small patch of garden this past spring. It's actually still alive, though not much bigger than as it is seen here. Potting it has turned it into a bonsai Mayday Tree.

shoes...again

You might not realize how inspired I was by such an ordinary thing as shoes, given that I've only come up with one more shot. Yet I have a feeling that I will be returning to this subject again, probably spontaneously. I find myself checking out everyone's shoes everywhere I go. I honestly didn't know I was a shoe person. My sisters-in-law go nutty over a pair of flats that match their purses...

These are my husband's shoes. He is a shoe person, he's just not a variety person.

shoes

This is terrible - I'm jumping in a week in advance! I took this picture back in May when I was in NY. I was at a festival working in the "alternative tent" as a tarot reader. There was a massage therapist, whose shoes are featured below, doing chair massages beside my table. I loved her sparkly shoes! This pic just doesn't do them justice (which is why I didn't post it back in May). But give the topic for this week I couldn't help myself. Warning: just because I posted this now does not mean I won't post some shoes again next Wed!

silhouettes

Do you detect a theme here? Again, this may not exactly be a silhouette, but I'm hoping it will be accepted as silhouette-ish. Do shadows count?

This Orb spider was hanging out in plain sight on the front of my house. I hadn't seen an Orb up here before and this was the only angle I could get! And, like photography teaches me all the time, I thought I could go back the next day at get a better angle only to discover I was wrong.

The next day the only thing left was a web full of juicy bugs. My Orb spider must have made a lovely meal for a local bird.

Zooming while shooting and Reflections

To be perfectly honest, I didn't take a single picture for our game the entire week. My excuse was I was in Florida with family so I was taking lots of family pics but not able to easily escape for more artistic pics. The reality is I thought about the topics all week but was simply too lazy/too involved to go in search of photo opportunities. So I am cheating a bit and using pics that I took in prior weeks. The reflection pics were taken last week in Boston, figures I was a week off. The zooming pic was taken in March, but it was one of my favorites so I decided to share (and it actually was the topic!)

reflections on a totem spirit

I didn't have the kind of lens necessary to do the other assignment. And I didn't have the mentality to do a "reflection" assignment. So I'm just submitting pics and pretending it matches what was asked of us.

Not too long ago a fellow volunteer at the Listening Post shared their fascination with Spider. There are many ways to receive Spider medicine, for him it has to do with communication and for me it has to do with being woven in relationships with others/life.

The last one is just a pic from my last night in Ireland. This lonely, abandoned outbuilding provokes dreams for me. There is a house, also abandoned, across the lane and I believe they belong together. I dream of renovating them, one as a home to share with guests and the other... my private art studio. This shot doesn't situate the shed, but to the West of it is an unimpeded view of the Mountains of Mourne and to the East, a clear view of the Irish Sea. 'Course, the same views are available from the house, so my guests will not be disappointed or deprived.

unusual viewpoints

I wish I had remembered the broken things option... I might play that this coming week. I tried for unusual viewpoints but honestly it was a struggle. The cow & stone wall would be hardly unusual if I was raised here, yet it caught me when I saw it. For this weeks assignment it's the best I could come up with.




This is just an ongoing contribution for the work with spider webs. It isn't actually the best web pic I snapped, but I thought it might partially count for an unusual view. I know, a stretch, eh?


And again, not unusual - just simply my favorite shot for this past week. And I really did take some color pictures... but you'll have to trust me on that.

Unusual Viewpoints

I started out with a plan of trying to catch Ryan mid-splash and discovered that it is much harder to accomplish than I originally anticipated. I caught tons of images of him either too early or too late but did finally manage to get a passable image (the first one below). Ironically with all the attempts I also managed to capture an even more compelling image by accident. I think the second pic really represents "unusual viewpoints" because it looks to me like he could be just as easily be coming out of the water as falling in. A happy accident! The third pic was taken in Boston as we were wandering the city waiting for Ryan to finish with his college orientation. I spent a huge amount of time taking pics of this reflecting pool which spanned about 5 city blocks. The images were so wonderful I had a hard time picking just one! (third pic) The last image was actually taken by Ryan, but I thought it was so neat that I had to include it. He was inspired by the "unusual viewpoints" topic and took this pic of the tattoo on my right ankle....

Things that are broken

I spent so much time playing with the "unusual viewpoints" subject this week that I ended up not devoting nearly enough time to this topic. While wandering the streets of Boston, I had the concept in the back of my mind but only managed to create this one image. Kind of hard to believe given all the stuff going on in the city, but there you go.... I get focused on one thing and see nothing else!