My husband and I went to New York over the weekend, just for fun. We stayed at the SoHo 54 and walked miles for 3 days straight. I’ve had a hankering lately to get back into black and white photography, so I carried my real camera with me in a shoulderbag I bought for our summer trip to Europe. I don’t always want to carry a backpack everywhere.
Spongies Cafe in Chinatown, where we got 3 spongies — basically angel food cake muffins — and 2 teas for $6Sunday morning in Little Italy
City photography is hard. There’s so much going on, all the time, everywhere. Cars to dodge, signs and streetlights and wires obscuring some part of what you want to photograph, being at street level, which throws off all the lines and perspective if you’re shooting upward. So I mostly stuck to other subjects.
Teapot and timer at Little Hen in Greenwich VillageJefferson Market Library in Greenwich VillageVillage Vanguard
We made it to the Village Vanguard on this trip. We saw the Tyshawn Sorey Trio, who played without stopping, weaving one song into another, for over an hour. We, and all of the audience, were rapt. Witnessing creation, how the musicians interacted with one another, and listening as the music emerged felt like being inside an artist’s mind.
Flowers galore! Inside Little Hen teahouseUpstairs reading room at Jefferson Market Library in Greenwich VillageDictionary in basement reading room of Jefferson Market LibraryUpstairs reading room at libraryInterior Senza GlutenRainbow Liberty around the corner from our hotel
I want to take a brief break from my Europe journals to participate in a photo challenge my mom, Beth of wanderingdawgs.com, is hosting. She recently joined the Lens-Artist team of photographers who prompt bloggers with weekly challenges. This week is Mom’s first time hosting, and she has challenged us to share stormy images.
My mom has been blogging on her WordPress site since 2013, when she and my dad took their RV to Alaska. She started Wandering Dawgs to chronicle their adventures. In recent years, they’ve slowed down their RVing, but Mom still blogs regularly. She’s found community through her blog and frequently tells me about RV and photography friends she’s met online. For several years now she’s been active with the Lens-Artists and participating in the weekly Lens-Artists Challenges. I’m excited for her that she was recently asked to become part of the team of hosts. Congratulations, Mom!
On Tybee Island, where I grew up and where Mom and Dad still live, thunderstorms and hurricanes are as much a part of life as humidity, seafood, marshgrass, and Spanish moss. It seems only fitting that Mom selected storms as her theme.
I’ve got lots of images of storm clouds in my photo archives. The cloudscapes of Georgia and Florida were a favorite part of living there. Here in Virginia, I don’t have as clear a view of the sky to see unobstructed cloudscapes, but we do get pretty good ice and snow in winter, and some great cloudbursts in spring. When looking through my photographs for this challenge, I realized I have no good shots of stormy weather in autumn. I’ll have to remedy that.
Spring
Spring at the nursery during a cloudburst
Shopping for plants at the nursery, I got caught in a sudden downpour. I dashed into a greenhouse doorway to sit it out. It was over within minutes.
Summer
I love storm clouds in summer, so that’s what my favorite storm-related pictures are of.
Thunderheads over the Gulf of MexicoThunderheads at sunsetDouble red flag before Tropical Storm Isaias, Atlantic Beach, NC.After Isaias.
Fall
I have no images of leaves blowing, or wind in jewel-toned trees, or a good autumnal downpour. The best I have is a shot of a walk in the park after a storm in Munich.
After the rain in Munich
Winter
Most of my winter photos are of the aftermath of storms rather than the storms themselves. We do get spectacular ice storms here that make for pretty pictures.
Walking in a snowstormEvidence of an ice stormGust of wind after snow
Thanks for the fun challenge, Mom!
If you’re interested in following or joining the Lens-Artists challenges, John from the team has more information here.
I’ve been in denial for a while. Our daughter graduated high school four days ago. When our son graduated, I processed through writing and blogging. He was our first to leave. With our daughter, I’ve talked about it with people I love, and how wonderful and freaky it is for our children to not be children anymore, and how empty our house is going to feel when they’re both gone in August. Our son will start his third year at the University of Virginia; our daughter will start her first at the University of Florida.
I didn’t blog about it because writing about it would make me process my thoughts and feelings in a way I’m still not quite ready for. I think I’m still in a talk-about-it-with-loved-ones place. So for now, I’ll just write about how we’re celebrating our daughter’s graduation and her acceptance into her first choice for colleges. We’re on a family trip to the place of her choosing: Costa Rica. And on our first night here, we saw monkeys!
Can you find the monkeys?
We’re staying at an airbnb in Playa Potrero on the northern Pacific coast of Costa Rica, about 30 minutes from Tamarindo. We’d walked out to the beach to watch the sunset, and when we arrived back at the house, we heard rustling in the canopy above us. Seed pods thunked to the ground as the treetops shook, and we looked up to see monkeys climbing and jumping from branch to branch like squirrels do at home. We saw baby monkeys carried on mothers’ backs, and I watched a parade of monkeys march across a long limb in front of the near full moon. The kids’ trip was made in just the first day.
We’re staying at the beach the first three days of the trip before we’ll go to the interior for another three days. The monkeys were fun, and I also love listening to the birds, which sound much different from ours at home: the bird calls here are deep-throated and emerge from the depths of broad-leafed, lush vegetation. The beaches are pretty gorgeous too. They curve in wide inlets protected on each end by rocky protrusions dripping with green.
And I love the coconuts. I can’t get enough of them. The kids loved monkeys on the first day. I loved that the cocktail I ordered — a Coco Bolo, with coconut water, lime juice, thyme, honey, and rum — was served in a coconut.
I’ve long wanted to visit Zion National Park in Utah. When I visited my friend last week, I didn’t realize how close she lived to Zion, and I was super excited when she said we’d go there one day during our stay. The sky was overcast when we arrived, and the colors of the land were all muted and dull. Still we gasped in awe at the majesty of the cliffs that rose high into the sky. Then the sun came out, and I thought I would die from the beauty.
Before the sun broke throughLook at that red rock!This took my breath awayDesert rockWe didn’t have waders to walk in the water into the Narrows slot canyon, so we just hiked down to its entranceBlue sky and red rocks
I’m on my annual weekend with my girlfriends, one of whom moved to Utah from the southeastern United States last May. The air, plants, and landscape are so different here from our humid, soft forests and mountains in Virginia. I love the wide open skies, arid plants, colorful rocks, and jagged peaks. These photos are from a little park a few miles away in St. George. Tomorrow we’re hoping to go to Zion, which I’m super excited about.
My husband and I woke without an alarm yesterday morning, ate a quick breakfast, and got in the car to drive the two hours to Grayson Highlands where we would hike Mt. Rogers. As I packed my daypack, he told me it would be in the 40s and really windy. I grabbed a couple of extra long sleeved shirts to choose from, along with ear warmers and gloves. But mostly I was excited to bring my camera; I remembered this hike being stunning.
We arrived at 10am to blue skies and fierce wind — wind so strong that flags stood straight out and snapped and cracked in it, that trees whipped sideways, and that it ripped the door out of my hand when I opened it to get out of the car. I could hardly close the door against the wind. I had underestimated the weather and did not bring my wind breaker even though my husband told me it would be cold and windy. I feared I would be miserable the whole time.
I put on every layer I brought, and we got moving to keep warm. As soon as we started hiking, I was warm enough despite the cutting wind. It helped that the day was glorious. On our way to the state park, we drove through rolling hills planted with Christmas tree farms, and wound our way through mountain s-curves as gold leaves fluttered to the ground.
We hiked through a tunnel of Rhododendron and I could see my breath. I brushed up against a fir and smelled Christmas trees. The trail was lively with backpackers coming off the mountain after camping the night, bundled warm against the biting chill.
The vistas were spectacular, just like they were last time we hiked this trail ten years ago. Last time we hiked was in June, when fresh spring greens and pinks were emerging. This time, we saw yellows and oranges and brilliant reds mixed in with the evergreen of the firs. The brilliant reds were so intense, they were almost florescent in their redness. It turns out they were not leaves, but clusters of shining berries.
We passed over exposed meadows broken up by giant boulders, then down into glens filled with firs and rhododendrons and ferns and moss. We passed through a rocky notch that opened into a golden glade where the the forest floor was covered in fallen yellow leaves and the October light slanted through the trees.
The light all day was glorious. At one point I thought I had my amber-lensed sunglasses on, but I did not. I hadn’t even brought them. I just wore my regular glasses. Everything had a golden glow.
When we were out on exposed balds, the wind was so sharp and cold it made my eyes water. We hiked fast, though, and that kept me warm. We passed backpacking campsites that smelled of damp forest morning, nylon tents, and campfire. Smoke twirled up from the ground. We heard the zip of tents opening and the murmur of morning voices.
When we got into the fir forest near the top of Mt. Rogers, the crowd was absent. We’d been following the white blazes of the Appalachian Trail all day, but the trail to the top of the mountain was a spur trail, and we only saw a couple of other people on it. Unlike most summit hikes around here, the culmination of this trail wasn’t a view; it was a boulder, the highest point in Virginia, in an evergreen forest that felt primeval. The forest looked ancient with its moss covered stumps, moss covered tree falls, mossy trail and stones and tree trunks. The ground was wet and everything dripped; the mountaintop was often in the clouds, and not much light seeped through the dense fir needles to dry it out after being drenched in mist.
When we emerged from the forest, the light was warm and bathed the mountains in its amber glow, but I struggled all day to capture it. For once I hardly cared because the hike itself made me fall ecstatically in love with the world at least three times because I was so overwhelmed by the beauty. This is hands down my favorite trail I’ve ever hiked. I want to hike it again and again. I didn’t need photos to capture the light, I just enjoyed it.
But then, near the end, when I figured I just wasn’t going to get any shots I was excited about, I saw a pile of brown leaves on a stone in the dappled forest light. One textured leaf was spotlighted by the October sun. And I got it.
Butterfly Mind 