Almost famous

Hey there! I know we've relocated, and I would love for you to come see me at my new blog www.theconstantholiday.com, but for anyone who missed the relocation notice, I'm just popping in to share a bit of excitement.

We're on The Kitchn!

I'm putting this identical post on all my blogs, because it's very exciting, so bear with me if you are an amazing person who reads ALL of my brain ramblings. I do apologize. 

But - I'm published! With the lovely and talented Amy Herr, who is a food photographer in Atlanta and a good friend of mine, and the person who took the photo above. We got accepted as contributors to the blog "The Kitchn", for their Kitchen Tour column, and our first tour went up on the site yesterday. Amy took all the photos and I wrote the text, and you can see it here. 

Relocated!

We are moving!  I have FINALLY  gotten all my stories and photos from the old blog migrated here to http://www.constantholiday.com. We’ve had a great run there and will leave the old blog up for as long as the kind folk at blogspot allow us.

Above, to keep with our relocation theme, is a sunset from 30 thousand feet. I spend aboout eleventy thousand hours in airplanes a year (okay, that’s an exaggeration) but I never tire of watching sunsets and sunrises from the aerial perspective. It’s the closest I’ll ever come to space travel, and I watch the changing light over the textured clouds, so similar to the changing light at the edge of the sea. It’s the space where two worlds come together – not to collide, but to overlap and create something new.

Which is what we’re hoping to do at the new location. Welcome.

Photobombed

I love this picture, which is actually a still snagged from a video shot with a GoPro camera that I bought just before I went to the Keys last September. I look like I'm photobombing my own photo! I'm underwater (hence the snorkel mask) and if you're at all familiar with the GoPro family, you'll know that you have to look at the *front* of the camera in order to turn it on, then rotate it toward what you actually want to shoot - which in this case were some cool fish around a dock near the apartment I was staying in. All over the world there are GoPro vids that start with the same bemused "is it on yet?" expression on the users' faces.

This trip - last September, so you can see I'm a little behind - was a four-day lightning strike just after Labor Day weekend. I spent the four days tooling around the middle Keys in possession of my very favorite object: a rental car. Really, you cannot beat the feeling of reliability and utter abandon that you get with a vehicle that only has two thousand miles on it and you get hand off to someone else at the end of the week. It's like a short term romance on wheels - all enjoyment, no regrets, and someone else has to rotate the tires.

When I wasn't in my automotive fling, I was in or on the water, since the Keys - especially the Middle Keys, including Marathon, where I stayed - are all about the ocean. Talk about being a stone's throw from the beach - I was in a place where even I was capable of jogging from the west coast (the Gulf of Mexico) to the east coast (the Atlantic side).  At it's broadest point the island I was on was all of 150 feet across, surmounted by an endless bowl of blue sky, and fringed with palm trees - the Tahiti effect, without the inconvenient airfare issues (but with plenty of sarongs, thanks to the lovely people who rented me the apartment). And with a dock reaching out into the silvery sea right off the edge of the property, and a kayak available, I did a fairly good mermaid impersonation for most of my stay.

 A mermaid with a camera. Is this thing turned on yet?

Photo of the Week - The Easy Way Out

This week's photo - again, embarrassingly, shot with my cell phone - is from a project I am working on that is sort of an experiment in spontaneous image-making. Twice a day - at 8.45 and at 2.15 - my phone alarm buzzes, and I'm supposed to take a picture within five minutes of something interesting around me. Depending on the day, this is either difficult because I'm sitting at my same desk for the eleventh day in a row, or easy because I'm out on a shoot and there's all kinds of stuff around. I seem to be getting a lot of photos of my cat, since he's usually draped over the nearest surface.

These were some florist-shop daisies, the kind that have their heads grown so heavy that they come with a little plastic green sleeve around their necks to hold them up during shipping, so that they don't nod like a loaded sunflower. I like the way this one is sort of peeking into the sun, but staying mostly in the shade - a prudent course in the southern summer, no matter what your species, as I'm doing it myself - and the direct sun is giving the bottom petals an almost molten glow.

I called this post "The easy way out" because when I pulled up to do it,  I really didn't have any idea what to write about today, and I realized how much I use the photographs I post as a starting point for my writing. Even though my blog is very photography oriented, I primarily consider myself a writer, not an image-maker - but someone who's very focused on visual stimuli. I would never do a purely photography-based blog, but I can't imagine doing one that is strictly text, either. I need the photos for inspiration - to let the writing genie out of the bottle. Nothing earthshaking in that realization, just something I was pondering today :)

Photo of the Week: Savannah's Talmadge Bridge.

 This bridge went up a few years ago, and a lot - A LOT - of people hated it, because they felt it didn't match Savannah's older, antebellum style. I've always liked it though - it seems spidery and ethereal, and glitters in the sun like something made of a delicate, precious metal (Elven technology?) rather than boring old iron and steel. I suspect that years from now, once it's had some time to settle, people will feel about it the way they feel about I.M. Pei's Pyramid at the Louve - a shocking contrast to the setting, yes, but beautiful in it's own right, and somehow fitting for the space.

That being said, this bridge is almost impossible to photograph well - the area around it is kind of cluttered and there's no good sightlines, like you see in some of the famous night photos of bridges in New York or San Franciso - and I am really stoked (do people still say stoked? Am I a complete dork here?) that I got such a good shot, by taking an excursion boat out to the middle of the river. Thinking outside the box, you see. Or the boat. Whatever.

Finally, the definitive photo of the Talmadge Bridge! Let the haters hate. I like it.

Photo of the Week: Misty

Misty morning in the woods beyond our house, taken a few weeks ago when  the weather turned on itself and gave us a last few cool days before the true heat of the southern summer lays in. Shot, appallingly, with my cell phone. C'est la vie.

Silouetted

I pulled this photo this morning to do this entry, because I love the way the statue is so crisp against the soft, bright stone of the building behind it. I didn't realize until I went to re-size it that there is a huge piece of netting on the stone wall at the corner where they are repairing the stonework. Arrgh.

Something made me keep it in though - it sort of crystalizes my mood today. I'm in the middle of moving, and everytime I look up from one of my (many) boxes, I find something else that needs doing/fixing/attending to.  There's a lot of stuff we missed on our first look around, and now we need to make some adjustments so the house can be exactly what we want.

So this photo reminds me that things can be pretty, and pretty good, even if they aren't perfect. Which makes it perfect, in it's own way.




Photo: Statue outside Louvre Museum, Paris. Copyright Tracey Brower, 2009