Photos In “Frames”

Tyler is a photographer whose blog I follow. His shots almost always feature trees or at least some aspect of nature. Lots of leaves, stones, logs, and lichen. You should go there and take a look at The Ancient Eavesdropper.

His most recent photo challenge was to frame our shots in an interesting way. I’m by no means as good as Tyler, but I like to fool around with the Fuji and see what I can come up with. I’ve been meaning to take some pictures by the Kalamazoo River near downtown in my fair city. The river’s usually pretty quiet there, but the critters can be lively. Last night I stopped on my way home as the sun was setting. These are what I captured.

Canada geese flock all over here. Some even stay in winter if they can find food.

ducks framed 2

Looking northwest to the Hart-Dole-Inouye Federal Center, I took this long gander at a lone park bench (pun intended).

Fed Center framed

A lamp post ‘tunnel’ and a pattern in the railings frequently seen in Cereal City.

lampost tunnel

The path goes both ways and I thought of Robert Frost and that road less traveled.

lampost center framed

Next time I take the camera down to the river, I believe I’ll try early morning when the sun is on the other side of these same scenes. Perhaps I’ll even wait for December and venture out in the snow.

Be a blessing to somone today.

Turrets of the Castle

Today’s challenge was easy as far as selecting a subject. Not so easy getting the shot since this home sits on a busy street corner. My favorite elements of the structure, which we call The Castle, are the turrets. People live in the house, but probably feel like they’re in a tourist attraction. If you have friends visiting, it’s customary to drive by with them so they can see it too.

The Castle Architecture

Castles are cool. And I’ve liked dwellings made of stone since I was a child. This home sits in one of the historic neighborhoods of our fair city.

Treasures

Let me tell you about my little Bible with the bonded leather cover.

It was one of the first Bibles I purchased for myself when I finally decided to go back to church and get serious about following Christ. Mom might not have approved of my scribblings in the margins or the highlighting and underlining, but this surely has helped me to make this Bible a Treasure.

Obviously, this little Bible has seen a lot of use. In fact, I’ve used it so much and marked it up so much that I’m sometimes stymied to find a passage unless I have this one in front of me. Measuring 6 5/8 inches x 4 3/8 inches, the type is pretty small. That’s okay; I can still read it with my old lady reading glasses.

Treasure-Bible

My “treasure,” which is the subject of today’s blogging photo challenge, was with me in a near-fatal auto accident thirteen years ago next month. It has brown stains from transmission fluid on some of the pages. That’s okay too. A  couple of years following the accident, I decided I’d better have the strap sewn back on by a local tailor before it fell off. It was hanging on by a thread as a result of the beating it took. When I mentioned that feature to a friend she said, “Kind of like you were.” She knew the details of the accident and how blessed I was to be alive.

For this photo, my Bible is open to John chapters 15-17. Chapter 17 is one of my favorite passages in the Bible because Jesus prays for us. To think that Jesus knew he was going to his death and wanted to talk to his Father about us sometimes makes me weep.

Those words are treasures to me.

 

Sew and Sew

The challenge today is to depict a “connection.” With this photograph, I’m showing you how crocheted edgings are being connected to pillowcases. On the occasion of my mother’s funeral, Dad told us five sisters to go through some of Mom’s things to pick out something we’d like. We went through the drawers in the buffet where she kept her large tablecloths and found these edgings which her mom, my grandmother, crocheted. I’m guessing they were done some time in the 60s. She died late in that decade.

I took the crochet work home and cleaned them up because after all that time, they’d yellowed. Now, after connecting the edgings to the pillowcases, each of my siblings and their spouses are going to get a little bit of Grandma after all these years.

They’ll also have a connection to Grandma they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to make.

lace on pillowcases

 

Chicken Crossing

For today’s WordPress blogging challenge, I took a trip down one of my favorite local country roads. This family sells fresh eggs and raises miniature horses. See the colt and its mother? The farm scene isn’t fully captured here and, sad to say, my photo doesn’t do it justice. But in my mind, for a rather busy country road, the scene is idyllic. I could live here.

chicken crossing