Photography
a few of my favorites from here and there now and then
This is not a great photograph (at least it did not win any sort of ribbon when I entered it in the county fair), but it is one of my favorites. It comes from our first trip to Vietnam, in March 2009. There's a simplicity to the shot that I find very appealing. A woman, in a traditional hat, alone in a boat alone on the water, and a lone flower in the foreground. I took the photo in Hue, where we spent five weeks while the husband taught physics at Hue University.
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Hand-spun, hand-dyed yarn drying in Colonial Williamsburg. We took our sons there a couple of times; this shot is from a long weekend the husband and I took after the sons were grown to college age. They sell some of the wool they make and dye in one of the gift shops; let's just say that it is not inexpensive. I did get some but have never used it. Tangles and knots won the battle that started with my trying to turn the skein into a ball. It's very different visiting with no accompanying kids. We could spend more time at things we chose, though many of those turned out to be what the sons would have chosen on their own.
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This is another shot that did not win a ribbon at the county fair. This is from Trondheim, Norway, in 2009. We have relatives in Trondheim and visited them on our way back from Vietnam. We wanted to show our younger son his birthplace in the Netherlands, and thought we should add on a trip to the home place in Norum, Norway. We'd visited in 1990; one souvenir of that visit is a photo of our younger son, then four months old, lying in the same cradle that my husband's grandparents and earlier generations used. Needless to say, our younger son had outgrown it by 2009. Norway is a beautiful place and one to which I'd make return visits. In fact, I've now been there four times, two family visits and two voyages on the coastal ferry. I've been places that once seen, are no longer appealing and drop from the list of possible destinations. I do not think I'd ever drop Norway from that list.
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I think of this as one of the best photographs I have ever taken. The colors don't really transfer well scanned from an over-40-years-old slide. I took the shot in 1977 at the St. Ignatius Mission Parish in St. Ignatius, Montana. I've always loved shooting stained glass windows, and that's what I was shooting here. I don't remember noticing the cross at the bottom left when I shot the slide. I only really saw it later, in the slide itself. It's what really "makes" the slide. The stained glass windows on the own aren't really noteworthy. The cross adds the oomph that pulls it all together,
I was born in Montana and lived there through my grade 5 year. I've been back three times, a 1977 trip when my mom was teaching a week-long summer seminar in Missoula; a 1992 fossil-hunting trip when we were spending the summer in Saskatchewan; and a 2011 trip on which my stepmother, brother, sister-in-law, and I scattered my dad's ashes at one of his favorite duck hunting spots. I'd love to go back once again and show my husband some of the spots that were special to me as a child. |