Country Roads

I spend some time watching Kyle McDougall’s video, 3 Key Lessons I Learned Making My First Photobook. I love Kyle’s book, An American Mile, and add it to my wish list. Studying his pictures sends me back to my own. His views of the American West are fascinating to me because they feel simultaneously familiar and foreign. The East Coast has old abandoned buildings and wide open views, but the skies and the surroundings are different. Everything here in Virginia is so green. This is another of those pictures that I deemed unworthy—mostly because after awhile, falling down houses begin to feel like a cliché. But on second thought, views like this are part of my everyday life. Absolutely worthy of attention. A page in the photobook, A Virginia Summer.

Rethinking

Home is a complicated construct. Not really the charming cottage with curated dinners. At least, not most of the time. Maybe more like the trees that surround us . . . with both roots and wounds that run deep. There is an abiding sense of where we came from—but who we are—that might develop based on the tension between belonging and raging to be set free.

Orange Appeal

A kind friend once pointed out that I have a long-standing love affair with the color orange. At least when it comes to photography. I still can’t believe I hadn’t noticed. But she was absolutely right. These pictures often don’t “fit” with the others I take. But they always bring me great joy, and they definitely make me wonder if there is a bright little girl trying to escape from my fairly neutral life. I remain open to the possibilities throughout my entire story.

We create beauty and magic not in spite of impermanence but because of it. We can’t change what came before, and only the unknown lies ahead. That fleeting nature of whatever this current moment is? That’s what asks of us to to dance a little wilder, color a little brighter, sing a little louder.
—Anna Brones, Creative Fuel

Forest Roses

Sometimes I fret that I overuse the word gratitude. That it might be a cliché to say, over and over again, how grateful I am.
And then I remember, there can never be enough gratitude.

I stood in the forest, marveling over the delicate pink roses growing wild, climbing like vines along tree branches. I tried to take their picture at different times over the course of three different days. Because the forest is dense there wasn’t enough light for the ISO 400 film loaded in my camera. So I had to go home, get the tripod and try again. I waited for pockets of sun to make their way through the trees, and then worried that those small spotlights would record as blown out highlights with no detail at all. I hoped the film would be forgiving. I don’t have a cable release for the film camera (though I’ve ordered one now) so I tried using the timer to see if I could make for a longer exposure. I’m really not a very technically proficient photographer, so these images were mostly a holy grail. Still, it was rewarding to try, and the results are a decent tribute to magic of perseverance.