Midsummer Macros

Just a few little somethings I happened to find in my yard this evening. 

It's really amazing what you can see when you look close, isn't it?

Day 3 of the SITS Girls Summer Photography Challenge.

On a fun note: Each day the challenge sponsors choose their five favorite photos from the previous day's challenge to feature in the morning email. And guess what? They chose my picture from yesterday for today's list. They said: "We love how she captured the story of her summer day. The photo feels casual, but it is really set up well." How cool is that?

To Kill a Mockingbird

Good lighting... and story telling. Or more specifically, the Summer Photography Challenge for Day 2 is: "...to go out and practice using light and telling a story with your mobile phone camera."

I've been re-reading To Kill a Mockingbird this summer, and I've recently started working on mug cozies again to get my Etsy shop re-stocked for the fall. So I guess the "story" this picture tells is what I've been doing in my leisure time lately.

Harper Lee's long-awaited second book, Go Set a Watchman, goes on sale today. I am looking forward to reading it, but I don't plan to rush out and buy it. I'll read it from the library first. It will likely be awhile before my name gets to the top of the waiting list, but that's okay.

A few weeks ago Lyle and I were in Barnes and Noble one evening and I happened to notice a book discussion group gathered between the bookshelves. As I browsed nearby I overhead them discussing To Kill a Mockingbird. I was tempted to pull up a chair and join the discussion. I expect I would have been welcome, but I wasn't quite that brave.

The group discussed the book and the movie, as well as another book, The Mockingbird Next Door. I remembered seeing that book on the library website in ebook format, so when I got home I checked it out. It is the memoir of a reporter who became friends with Harper Lee and her sister and lived next door to them for a time a few years ago. It was a fun read, giving more insight into the lifestyle of the Lee sisters and the small town of Monroeville, Alabama, which was the inspiration of Maycomb in To Kill a Mockingbird.

As it happens, my dad's people were from the Monroeville area couple of generations back. I don't know a lot about them, but I have the sense they would have been more like the Ewell family in the book, rather than the Finches. (Now that I type that out, it is kind of eerie that my family name is Ezell which is just one letter different than Ewell. Kinda makes you wonder!) Oh, well. It's not where you come from, but rather where you're going that matters, right?

Summer Photography Challenge: Day 1

Just for fun, I am participating in a two-week long Summer Photography Challenge that starts today. I expect to learn a lot, and get some good practice.

I was joking with my sister on Saturday about her photography: "Wow! You must have a good camera! You get some really nice pictures!" She laughed. "Yeah. I do. It's all about the camera." She knew I was being completely facetious. "Seriously," she said, "if a person has an eye for composition, even a cheap camera can take good pictures."

I remember my first camera. I saved up my money for it when I was in about the 7th grade. It was a little Kodak Instamatic that took 110 film. It took a steady hand (which I didn't necessarily have) and even then, the pictures usually turned out grainy. Cameras have come a long way since the late 1970s. And since we don't have to pay for film or developing (Kids, go ask your grandma about that!) it's fun to just snap-snap-snap away and then play around with the results.

Today's challenge covered composition, and talked about using the "rule of thirds" for composing your subject. Even before I knew about today's challenge, I enjoyed playing with that rule yesterday with my road trip snapshots. I had forgotten my "good" camera, so I was taking pictures with my cell phone and then editing them with Instagram.

#westerncolorado #i70 #roadtrip #headedhome #ezell2k15

A photo posted by Karla Cook (@ramblinroads) on Jul 12, 2015 at 6:43pm PDT

When I'm taking pictures from a moving vehicle, it's hard to think about composition, so that's where the editing comes in handy. Here's the original of the "finished" picture above:

First, I cropped off the mirror and window frame of the car. Instagram has the "thirds" grid built in so I was able to zoom in enough to put the canyon cut at the 2/3 vertical line and the guard rail at the 2/3 horizontal line. Then I applied a neat filter and frame. I like the way it turned out.

 Here's another one I did the same way. This one also has "leading lines" with the curving highway.

#utah #i70 #roadtrip #headedhome #ezell2k15

A photo posted by Karla Cook (@ramblinroads) on Jul 12, 2015 at 3:31pm PDT

And the original:

I zoomed in and put the horizon line at the 2/3 horizontal line, and the "end" of the highway (where it goes behind the hill) at the 2/3 vertical line. And then chose a different filter. I don't filter all my photos, but I think they are fun to play around with.

I'll be practicing some more during the next two weeks. I'm not sure if I'll post all the challenges here... or on my Instagram account. We'll see.

Weekend Road Trip

We spent all day Friday and Sunday driving so we could be in Nampa, Idaho for my parents' 50th anniversary celebration on Saturday.

It took us just over 13 hours to get there. We averaged 66 mph with 5 stops on Friday, so it was a long day in the car. Lyle did all the driving. The girls were content with their earbuds in the back seat. The dog and the guinea pig went along, too, and rode in the back of our Jetta wagon. We put our car-top carrier on for luggage.

Laura and I entertained ourselves as we drove along by snapping pictures, posting them to Instagram and Facebook, and texting them to friends and family.

I love the scenery out west!

On Saturday we all gathered in my brother's yard for family pictures.

My sister is the "real" photographer in the family, and she took the portraits.

Me? I snapped a few shots of the men with their heads under the 1949 Chevy pickup...

...and one of the yard, just because I thought it was so pretty with the morning sunlight streaming through the trees.

 That afternoon we had a "party" with cake, family trivia games, and a slide-show of family pictures over the years. It was a fun day.

On Sunday morning we started home again.

We stopped to stretch our legs at Shoshone Falls in Twin Falls, Idaho...

...and then headed on down the road, through the salt flats of Utah...

...and through the mountains of western Colorado...

...and made it safely home again.

It was a good trip.

The Granddaddy Tapes

This coming weekend my parents and their five children, along with in-laws and grandchildren, will be gathering to celebrate my parents' 50th anniversary which was earlier this spring. In preparation for a day of sharing memories, I've been gathering pictures and scrapbooks and all kinds of memorabilia to take along. As I was getting things together I happened to remember the Granddaddy Tapes.

Among my treasured possessions is a small box of dusty cassette tapes, maybe a couple dozen, that I recorded during the late 1980s and through the 1990s. They are mostly of my Granddaddy Easley telling stories of his life. He had a detailed memory and was more than willing to share his memories with me (and my tape recorder). At the time, I had the intention of writing a book about his and Grandmother's life story. They were eager for me to do so, but then my children came along. I was busy raising my babies, and then homeschooling, so that project got set aside. In the meantime, my grandparents have gone on to heaven; Grandmother in 1998, and Granddaddy in 2007. They left an amazing heritage for their 10 children, 26 grandchildren, and more great-grandchildren than I can count at the moment.

I still have a cassette deck that I have held onto just because of that box of tapes. Last Saturday I asked Lyle if he would bring it in out of the garage and connect it to my computer so I could digitize the tapes before they deteriorate too badly. Obliging man that he is, he took care of that for me.

For the past few days I've been listening to the old stories of my heritage, as I transfer them to MP3 files, and remembering again how blessed I am. I was also reminded how important storytelling is. While many of these family stories are very familiar to me, I realized that my children haven't necessarily heard them all.

Maybe I should write that book after all.