I know I have said this before and I am sure I will say it again: you never know what a week has in store for you.
May 15 was the date to shoot photos for the One Day project that I mentioned a couple Sundays ago – and I hope some of you remembered.
If I needed to depict what my life is about on May 15th, it needed to be about the garden.
May 15 is the first safe planting day, and therefore, the official start of the gardening season, although we have had an early Spring here and I have been planting for weeks,
I often tell my students that a monkey with a cell phone can take a good flower photo, so if my subject would be flowers, I would have to come up with something unusual – and challenging.
So I chose a time close to sunset, and limited myself to only flowers with sunset colors. Photography students also know that yellows, oranges, and pinks are very difficult colors to expose correctly. So it was a good challenge.
The Petunias above are called Pink Lemonade, but to me they had the sunset colors I was looking for, and they were tossing in a breeze so the colors were changing several times a second. I shot a whole series. This was my favorite.
My Peonies also usually open around May 15, and on Monday, it was SO close that I went out and had a conversation with the plant about the One Day project, and asked it to please cooperate. It did, and I was able to get this shot by Tuesday evening. These are “hot” pinks and yellows – even more difficult than pastels.
And finally, I went after an orange and yellow begonia . . .
I have uploaded to the project here
http://www.aday.org/profile/18734
and on May 30, they will launch the official website with the thousands of photos that tell the story of May 15, 2012 around the world.
A Cinderella Fella Story …
Ok, HIS name is not Cinderella, it’s Timber, and he doesn’t even have wicked step-sisters, but his story is just as good – you’ll see. I did not shower him with rose petals here – my wild rose bush did that.
I actually met Timber two weeks ago at an adoption event at our market center. I could not believe that a perfect angel dog like this had been stuck in the shelter and rescue system for more than a year!
A Husky-crazy friend of ours wanted him right away, but she was moving to a place without sufficient fencing. Siberians are hard to place because of the “call-of-the-wild” side of their personalities. It is inbred because though they worked in the Winter and lived in the house with Chuchri families who originated the breed, they were let go to survive on their own in the Summer.
When I found out our friend could not take this boy home, I wanted him, of course, but we have three rescue Huskies already and Mark was being difficult about it – or sensible – one of those.
Not me. I sprung Timber from his kennel cage and took him home – only to foster, of course. It took until this past Wednesday to spring him (paperwork, you know).
So we went to town to shop for flowers and met a wonderful person named Carol, who has been looking for the “right” dog, and who fell in love right away like I did.
Long story shorter, on Friday, I took Timber to his new home in the foothills in Santa Fe . . .
From a cage in a kennel to this in two days. That’s what the magic of love can do.
Dogs don’t care about palatial digs like we humans do, of course, and what matters most to Timber is how much room there is for him in Carol’s heart, not her house, but this makes a wonderful picture story anyway.
When I showed the pictures of Timber’s new home to the animal rescue ladies, they literally grabbed their hearts, and one gal said she would love to jump in the air and click her heels together – if she was only that coordinated. Yay for Timber!
Mark is going around singing “Movin on up . . . to the Eastside”.
I love happy endings – and I still get to be Timber’s babysitter when Carol needs one!
A Very Important Twenty Minutes . . .
If you make art, if you want to make art, do not miss this fabulous commencement address by Neil Gaiman.
Artist of the Week
Sue McNenly’s blog is one I read consistently. She is on my Blogroll in the sidebar.
http://suemcnenly.blogspot.com/
I sometimes try to analyze what makes a blog one that I read consistently – because I would like to make my own blog one of those (at least I am *writing* it consistently now and that’s progress!)
I love to read an artist’s “story”. I don’t mean their bio or their mission statement. And I don’t mean what they have for breakfast on Tuesdays.
What I mean is hard to put into words, but it is access to the artist’s process. What do they think that moves them along the path of creating? What discoveries, which mistakes, which inspirations and which frustrations lead them to the amazing art they make.
Sue works mostly in Silver Metal Clay – but her work is not what you would expect. She creates little worlds to visit, and invites you in.
I LOVE her work, and hope to be able to collect some one of these days.
Happy Sunday. I am off to plant flowers, and I hope I have planted some seeds of inspiration for you this morning!
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