I often fall into the trap of thinking I must travel to inject novelty into my life. Sometimes I remember, though, that I can inject novelty by looking at my own surroundings with a tourist’s eye.
Yesterday was a gorgeous spring-summer day, and I had the whole day to play. We live near a college campus, and lucky for me, there is a horticulture garden there. I wanted to soak up sunshine, like a plant, so I slung my camera over my shoulder, and walked the two miles to the six acres of tended beds. When I travel, I like to walk instead of driving. On foot, I can see things slowly and up close, hear all the bird songs that go with the place, smell the flowers that are in bloom, or the lunches cooking in restaurants I walk by.
When I do this at home, I get a chance to appreciate where I live, and am reminded how ridiculously beautiful it is.
Feverfew in my garden.Sunlight and lichens on rocks.Silvery fern.Big green leaves.White phlox and textured leaves.Berry cascades.Silvery fern.Sunlight on garden chairs.
I’ve felt very fragile since we dropped our son off at college. I’ve had trouble sleeping, and I feel jittery and strung out. Work has been hectic, which has been hard. My team lead encouraged me to be gentle with myself in the coming weeks because she knew this would be an emotional time for our family, but sometimes work and the world don’t really allow for going easy. There’s too much to do. I’m too far behind. I got Covid two weeks before our son left, and I could not afford to lose that time at work, and I’m still trying to catch up.
I did finish something at work on Friday that had been weighing on me for weeks, and that kept getting shoved to the bottom of my ever-growing list, so I was at least able to sleep this weekend having finally gotten a draft out for review. I feel better after sleeping past 4am on Saturday and then again on Sunday.
My chest still feels thick sometimes despite feeling otherwise recovered from Covid. I mowed the lawn on Friday and it wore me out. Sunday I wanted to get out of the house and out of my head, and I wanted to do that in the woods, on a hike, with my camera. I didn’t feel up for anything strenuous, and it was hot out, so my husband picked a short, flattish hike a little higher up in the mountains where it would be cooler: the War Spur trail near Mountain Lake Lodge, where Dirty Dancing was filmed.
The trail was shaded and green, and the air smelled fresh, especially when we dipped down into a stream-bed where clear water trickled over mossy stones. The hike is known for having lots of mushrooms, and we probably saw two dozen different kinds. They’re delicate little things, fragile but grounded. Those earthy mushrooms, the fat acorns, and a smattering of red leaves in green ferns were what I needed to feel some peace.
Mushrooms and moss, I love the combination (and the little mushroom hiding in the lower right)Gills and dirt.Puffball in the understory.Eight different yellow, brown, copper, and toast-colored mushroomsI love the gills and cup shape, and the moss and green leavesFall is coming, and I’m happy about that.
We’re visiting family in Florida. Yesterday, I woke early to walk on the beach before it got boiling hot. I took my camera with me, and it turns out I didn’t end up walking very much. I wanted to play with some of the basics I’m learning in my photography class — motion, leading lines, contrast — so I ended up stopping every few feet to snap photos. I also wanted to mix it up a little with my photographs; I’ve got a thousand shots of the Gulf of Mexico being the Gulf of Mexico in it’s beautiful blues and greens. I switched to black and white, and I had fun capturing the beach in a totally different way.
I started a new photography blog to help me curate some of my favorite photos and also track the camera settings on them so I can learn. It’s at photo.andreabadgley.blog if you’re interested.
Sometimes decay can be beautiful. I walked the garden one day looking for dried and cracked textures, for discarded parts, for nature in a state of decomposition. For something different than I usually look for. There is so much to see when when you look beyond the fresh bloom at the beginning of life. This was a a wonderful reminder to observe more than the obvious: flowers and butterflies are beautiful in all their colorful glory, and so are brown branches and brittle dry flower petals.
Remains of cut flowers in the compost pileHydrangea in the compostA rose bloom in its death throesHydrangea in the leaf litter
Of course, all of these dead and dying things are fodder for other life: ants, fruit flies, centipedes, and worms all feed on them. Rain and wind, friction and feet, biting mouths and digestive tracts break them down until they are dirt again.
And sometimes, before that happens, a creature will gather these shed strands, forgotten fragments, and castoff clumps into soft shelters for new life to be born.
A recent work trip to France and then a family trip to Iceland have rekindled my interest in photography. I had gotten bored photographing our garden over and over again — same flowers, same mulch, same butterflies and caterpillars — and I’d gotten in a rut. When we were in Iceland, everything was new (and gorgeous), and I took my camera with me everywhere while we we there.
Since we returned, I want to keep going. Photography helps me see the world with fresh eyes. It helps me find interest in the mundane, in the stuff that’s so much a part of life that I don’t see it as potential for art. This is a theme I’ve found in writing, too. We rarely stop to acknowledge the beauty in the routine things we take for granted, or we minimize their curiosity because they’re so normal and everyday to us.
Mrs. Tubbles, for photo class exposure assignment
To help me notice the world around me, and to help me improve my photography, I wanted guidance. I wanted assignments. I wanted direction from someone who is not me. I found an online course that seems to go on sale pretty much every day — Photography Masterclass: A Complete Guide to Photography — and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.
Garden flowers, for contrast challenge from course instructors’ Photography and Friends website
Each day, I discover new settings on my camera, like the bracketing and exposure compensation features, or different film simulations, including black and white. And each day I play more in my editing software (darktable) to see if I can tweak this lighting or that contrast or deepen that color.
Daisies and fence; just playing around in editing software to convert to black and white
I’ve started carrying my camera with me more frequently on outings, and I’m learning a ton about my camera and about photo editing.
I’ve got a long way to go.
There are a few things that no amount of editing can fix, and the biggest ones I’ve found so far are exposure and focus. I take photos now at lots of different settings for exposure, but I still have a lot to learn about light to get it right. Also, my eyes aren’t great, and it’s hard for me to see whether an image is actually in focus until I get it on my computer; I’m often disappointed that what looks great on my camera’s tiny display screen actually isn’t that great on a screen where I can actually see it. Most of that comes down to trying to shoot in low light without a tripod though, meaning I end up with super shallow depth of field, like in the first guitar image below where the grain of the guitar body and part of the bridge are in focus, but the bridge pins and the strings — only about 1cm closer to the camera — are not. These discrepancies are teaching me what I need to improve in order to capture what I’d hoped to capture, though. I’ll keep practicing. I should have a few years left in me to keep learning.
Composition assignment: negative spaceI just like the shiny metalI love all the beautiful woods of acoustic guitarsComposition assignment: rule of thirdsComposition assignment: symmetryI occupied myself at the guitar store by working on a composition assignment
We tried several excursions in Iceland that didn’t quite work out: a hike we couldn’t get across a river for, puffin watching that was obscured by fog, wind, and rain, another hike that was only accessible by a road that turned from paved, to gravel, to rutted gravel, to grass, to grass and mud, to rutted grass and mud on a steep grade in the middle of nowhere. We decided to back out of before we got stuck on a mountainside in Iceland with nobody around for miles.
After that last attempt, the one where we almost got our rental Suburu stuck in mud high up on a mountainside, we decided to take a safe, well-travelled, known hiking trail at Skógafoss, one of the nearby waterfalls we hadn’t been to yet.
Skógafoss going over the dropSkógafossSkógafoss spray from upper viewing platform
The hike starts with a tremendous staircase next to the first fall of the trail, Skógafoss. The metal stairway climbs a vertical height of about 200 feet in a little more than 500 steps. At the top is a grated platform with nothing but air beneath your feet and a view of the fall from above. I battled vertigo to take a look and watch birds fly below us.
Most visitors climb to the top to see Skógafoss from above, then turn around and go back down, but there’s also a trail – Skógá trail or Waterfall Way — that follows the river for 15 miles, between volcanos, to the river’s glacial origin. Along the trail are so many waterfalls I lost count. We saw six or seven dramatic ones, plus some smaller ones, and we only hiked two miles of the trail. I’ve seen estimates that there are more than 20 falls along the entire path.
We had a cloudy day after a rain, so the grasses and mosses were bright green, almost neon at times, especially against the grey sky.
Fall 2 (after Skógafoss): HestavaðsfossFall 3Fall 3Fall 4: SteinbogafossThe third and fourth waterfalls we saw on the Skóga trailI love all the mosses and little pink flowersMore pink flowersFall 5Mosses, flowers, waterfallsOh yeah, in addition to the waterfalls, this hike is full of mountains, rock falls, and rock formationsMy son and I liked the tiny waterfall on the left; I guess these are falls 6 and 7Moss campion, my favorite little flowerWaterfall #8 in fewer than two milesAnd back down at #7 again — I think this one is called High Peaks
Every step along this trail was breathtaking. The trail is well marked and is obviously well trafficked, but it was not crowded; we often had periods where we were the only people in sight, and we sat and watched the waterfalls in solitude. It was kind of overwhelming how wondrous it was.
Butterfly Mind 