When I looked out the plane window and saw the mountains of Utah, I saw saw-blade ridges that are wholly unlike the rounded green mounds of the Appalachians I’m used to. I couldn’t wait to get out into them, and after a nearly a week at our hotel, I finally took a gondola ride up the mountain and went for a hike with some of my coworkers.
I can’t wait to take our kids to new places to see how different the world can be.
I generally photograph nature: hikes in the Appalachians, camping in Shenandoah, clouds in Florida, marshes in Georgia. This week, though, I am among talented creatives who organized a morning photo walk not on a hiking trail, but down Main Street in Park City, Utah.
At 7:30 in the morning, before the sun crested the peaks of the mountains east of town, twenty Automatticians with cameras dangling from their necks poured from vans onto the streets. I was one of them, and I photographed things I don’t normally photograph.
The shopping district was empty, and we criss-crossed vacant streets as we snapped shots of roof lines, window displays, and street sculpture.
A maintenance crew puttered from lamp post to lamp post, and water dripped from hanging flower baskets in their wake. Our shutters clicked like beetle wings, and the sun rose quietly over roof tops.
I plan to take my camera up the mountain while I’m here so that I can get some nature shots, but looking at these photos, I am refreshed that I tried something new. I need to shoot like this more often.
I’m in Park City, Utah for the annual Automattic Grand Meetup, and I had originally signed up to run the WordPress 5K this morning. After all the wine I drank last night, though, I decided to go for a solo mini-hike instead.
I took these photos on the trail behind our hotel as the sun rose over the mountains.
The word fray no longer makes me think of threadbare jeans or ratty-edged towels. It makes me think of the swim start in a triathlon, when your heart has hummingbird wings that beat inside your throat. When, after waiting for hours for your heat to begin, you finally line up shoulder to shoulder with your comptetitors, and you finally run into the water, and when it’s knee deep, you finally dive in and and you slither over another swimmer and you get kicked in the face and elbowed in the ribs, and you suddenly feel a knee in your back as a swimmer slithers over you and you go under and swallow lake water, and then you pop up again and get elbowed in the ear and you try to cough out the water and hope your goggles don’t get kicked off. That’s what fray is to me. Being in the fray at the start of an open water swim.
*Photo from the TriAmerica triathlon in 2002, in our pre-children life. I’m not sure whether my husband or my mom took the picture, or even if I’m in it. This is my entry for The Daily Post Photo Challenge: Fray.
I am a fan of contrast: of rough against smooth, of blur against sharp, of dark against light. When I saw that this week’s Daily Post photo challenge is to share a shot that captures a contrast, I knew I would want to participate, and I knew I would want to share photos from our trip to my childhood home in Georgia.
When I started looking through my photographs from the marshes, though, I realized the contrasts I was trying to tease out in the photos I selected – land against sea, wet against dry – were forced. Those things are not the true contrast I feel here. The contrast I feel here on the marshes is the wide expanse of flatness that is so different from our mountain home.
In our Appalachian home water is surrounded by land, is fresh, and falls from the sky. In my Georgia home land is surrounded by water, the water is salty, and it rises from the sea.
In our Appalachian home the horizon undulates. The sky shrinks and expands as you move through the mountains. On the coast of Georgia the horizon is flat and the sky is one size: big.
As a person who seeks out a strong sense of place, I thrive on the contrasts between my two homes: the one where we are raising our kids, and the one I was raised in. I am grateful that by growing up in the mountains of Virginia and visiting their grandparents on the coast of Georgia, our children will have the chance to experience both.
Sunlight shines
on evergreens browning. River
rushes on below.
This entry for the Between photo challenge is in honor of my husband’s favorite tree, the eastern hemlock, which is suffering widespread death in the Appalachians due to an exotic insect, the Hemlock woolly adelgid (HWA). Where 20 years ago we ran our hands over hemlocks’ feathery branches on every Appalachian hike, all the hemlocks we see now are brittle and brown, denuded of their soft needles, or if they do still have leaves, they are encrusted with the egg sacs of the insects that are killing them (the skeletal trees in the foreground of the picture are hemlocks). If you have hemlocks on your property, please see this Nature Conservancy article for information on how to treat the infestation.
Butterfly Mind 