SATURATED

This week’s WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge calls for saturated images. For that, I give you poppies….

The poppies above are several different types, all in the poppy family, or Papaveraceae.

The blue ones are Meconopsis ‘Lingholm’ – the famous Himalayan Blue Poppy.

The bright red one at the top is an Oriental poppy – Papaver orientale, probably ‘Brilliant.’ Most of the others are also oriental poppies, but the little orange bud is a California poppy; Eschscholzia californica.

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And here are a few phrases from online definitions of saturation:

The condition of being full to or beyond satisfaction; reaching a maximum capacity; the act or result of supplying so much of something that no more is wanted.

There are hundreds of Weekly Photo Challenge entries to be found here. Try not to get too saturated wading through them!

Inside and Out

Whether inside looking out or outside looking in, it often feels like you’re in both places – you feel the atmosphere and hear the sounds around you, but as your visual attention pulls you through the window, your mind begins to loosen its bonds to the senses that hold you in place….

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This week the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge is to illustrate “inside.” No sooner do I think about “inside” than I want to consider “outside.” How do the two interact? Hence these photos, which were taken through windows, and of windows. I hope they convey a sense of the complex interplay of light and shadow, reflections, and scenes outside and inside.

More views of “inside” can be found here.

A PLEASANT SURPRISE

That’s what it was when Cheri Lucas Rowlands of Word Press contacted me a while back and asked if I would contribute a post on Point of View to the Daily Post Photography 101 series. So I worked on it, which was fun, and here we are. I am frankly uncomfortable about climbing up on the roof to blow my own horn, but it seems I’d be missing something not to mention it here.

So if you’re not a subscriber to the Daily Post series, please feel free to have a look at the post.

It sums up some of my ideas about photography. And maybe life, too.

I can’t imagine a post without an image – I just can’t do it!

So here’s one. I shot this at Tolmie Creek in Mount Rainier Park last year and played with the image today, exaggerating it to express a feeling of being caught off balance by the notion of being published.

Thank you to everyone who has come here and encouraged me, especially to the many people who leave interesting, thoughtful comments. Lately I don’t visit as many blogs as I have in the past, so it’s good to know that most people don’t seem to require that one “like” their posts in order for them to “like” one’s own post. But I try to keep that balance when I can. The blogosphere (how I hate that word), is an enriching, provocative place, but we need to remember to step back from the computer, relate to flesh and blood people, and get outdoors!

Companions – Boon and Otherwise

A “boon companion” is usually one with whom you have good times. There are many boon companions to be seen in readers’ contributions to the current Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge, whose theme is “Companionable.”

My boon companion and I snapped a photo of our shadows one cold day in Manhattan:

These guys may not be boon companions, but they sure make an interesting pair:

I imagine these men that I noticed in a back alley in Seattle spend companionable time together every day – maybe not such productive time according to some people’s standards, but companionable nonetheless:

I’m not sure how much of a companion – boon or otherwise – this man thinks the Great Blue Heron that waits patiently beside him, hour after hour, really is:

These are most certainly boon companions – what trust – a calm face as the toenails are clipped:

Now, to throw a wrench into the flow of this post, did you know that gardeners talk about companion plants? Here’s a perfect example – only foliage, and what harmonious companionship they exhibit:

Back to a more typical view of companionship – this man can often be found playing his portable piano on the sidewalk outside Seattle’s Pike Place Market. He plays as though there’s no better companion than his piano, and his music draws people whose companionship seems to grow deeper as they listen:

On a lighter note, these guys appear to be great companions too, don’t they?

Tomorrow another Weekly Photo Challenge will be posted. But meanwhile, there are a multitude of photos from last weeks challenge of companions to be found here.

Stark Silhouettes

This week’s Photo Challenge from WordPress: Silhouettes. “The proper definition of a silhouette is ‘the outline of a body viewed as circumscribing a mass.’ In photography, often we achieve that effect by putting light behind the object whose silhouette we want to capture, effectively darkening out the features of the subject instead of highlighting them.”

In my mind, a silhouette is not necessarily a “body” and not always a dark object against a lighter background.

You might agree after you scroll through to the end…

In Philadelphia, a statue of a Civil War hero (Union side, of course) points the way amidst a jumble of architectural styles.

In New York City, the Prince Street Station has wonderful public art on a MUCH smaller scale – a series of silhouettes of people going about daily life, exactly like you see in the neighborhood.

Here, a homeless person, a yoga student and a musician –