Author: alejna

dandelion and rose (friday foto finder: rose)

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to find and share a photo for the theme of “rose.” This actually was more of a challenge than I expected. While I take many photos of flowers, either I don’t encounter roses often, or am less likely to be drawn to them to take pictures. I think it’s a little of each. Given my recent run on sharing leaf photos, in a perfect world I’d have constructed some roses out of maple leaves. But, alas, I was busy with other things, and our yard mostly has dried oak leaves, anyhow.

In any case, a moderate amount of digging through my photo library didn’t reveal any photos of roses that inspired me. But in my search for photos I’d tagged as flowers, I did come across many photos of dandelions. This particular one caught my eye: the dandelion is sitting on my mother-in-law’s floral patterned table cloth. Sitting, in fact, right next to the image of a rose. A rose-colored rose, even. So that’s about as close to rose as I’m going to get just now.

You can see a lot more of this particular little dandelion in a series of photos I posted a couple of years ago. I used a bellows in those, letting me get up really close and personal with the dandelion.

For more rosy photos, stop and smell the roses at the fff blog.

take it or leave it

Time ran away from me, as it so often does. Among work and appointments and grocery shopping and a dozen other things big and small, the hours of my day were eaten up. I find myself once more at 11:00 rushing to put up something to post. I had been planning to go all retro and post a ThThTh list, it being Thursday at all, but it was not to be. I still have more work to do before bed, and I can barely hold my eyes open as it is. So, here are some photos I took this morning before the school bus came. These large leaves on some roadside plant caught my eye across the street. Like so many of the plants I photograph, I haven’t the slightest clue what it is. But I liked the shape of the leaves, and the way they dangled from the stems, making a sort of garland.

This oak leaf interloper also caught my eye, trapped in the tangle of twigs over the big stems, and appearing suspended in mid-air.

I would also note that some of these leaves were impressively large. If memory serves (though frankly, at this hour, that’s a big if), I believe the front leaf in this photo is about a foot long. That one had flipped around in the wind, making the patterns of its leafy veins more visible.

That’s all I have for tonight.

photo shoot with a leaf of character

Yes, I’m going on about leaves again. This time about just one leaf, actually. I was out waiting for the school bus to drop off the kids one afternoon in late September when this little guy caught my eye on the driveway:

Naturally I felt compelled to take his picture. And then I picked him up and moved him around, trying to find a good background.

I held him up to catch the sunlight, and enjoyed his dramatic shadows.

Yes, I know that I am easily amused, but this leaf cracked me up.

It pleases me to share photos of this leaf because it follows up nicely on my recent posts featuring leaves, leaf shadows, and found faces.

more multi-colored leaves

I’m thinking of changing the name of this blog to “collecting leaves.” Not really. But I do seem to be sharing quite a few leaves. What can I say? It’s fall, and I live in New England. The leaves put on a show, and I am a captive audience member. Who likes to take pictures.

There are fewer colorful leaves on the trees these days, as the chilly winds of November have blown in and cleared most of the trees. Most of these photos were taken over the last few weeks.


Looking up at the layers of red and green oak leaves in my yard.


This plant is pretty as much for the berries as for the leaves. This is the same type of plant whose leaves looks so purple in my other leaf post.


This plant couldn’t make up its mind about what color to wear, so it decided to try out a different look on each leaf.


I like the way these leaves fell in line on the brick sidewalk in Cambridge, MA.


I was drawn to the flame-like colors of this lone leaf at the playground. (I think it’s some kind of maple leaf, but I’m not entirely sure.)


These leaves are in the shrub at a friend’s house. I was quite taken by what looks a bit like a tan line on one of the leaves. (The yellow triangle on an otherwise red leaf looks like it was a result of the leave below it having previously been on top of it.)

indigo oak leaves

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a set of photos showing a range of colors that can be seen in the fall foliage of my neighborhood. My wise and astute friend Magpie chastised me for leaving out part of the spectrum:

Red, orange, yellow, green, BLUE, INDIGO, violet. That is, you’re missing two. :)

It was a tough order, but I think I found some indigo leaves in a photo taken a year ago today. While the leaves in front are of a more expected rusty orange hue, the leaves showing up behind them appear to be a of a deep indigo. (That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Maybe.)

fall, falling, fallen

Here are a few photos I took this afternoon in Boston.


Bay State Road in its full fall glory.


A group of students standing among the fallen leaves while a fire alarm went off in their building.


A BU brownstone residence, wearing fashionable fall colors.


A sculpture I’ve never noticed before. (It was on a route I don’t typically walk.)

I had this goal of finding photos each month taken on the same date in a previous year, but my available November 3rd photos of years past fell short of my expectations. (The only 2 I really liked are ones I already posted, and that’s not as much fun.) So instead I am sharing some largely unplanned photos from today. Now I need to get to work lest I fall behind on my work goals.

found faces

The wallpaper in the bathroom of my grandmother’s house was a repeating marbled pattern with blue and white, looking a bit like swirled paint. There were no clear shapes in the swirls, but my eyes found faces in them. Sometimes the faces would scare me a bit when I was little, especially when I’d need to get up to use the bathroom in the night. In my memory I can still make out the faces (2 men with beards, one young and one old, and a young woman) though the house is no longer in our family, and the wallpaper is no doubt gone. (I really can’t imagine that the new owners of the old house would have kept that wallpaper.)

I sometimes still see faces in other places, and I know I am not alone in this.¹ Here are a few of the faces that have appeared to me in the blotchy or peeling paint of various surfaces.


A column in a subway station in Boston.³


A wall on an abandoned building in a town outside Boston.


A wall in Providence, RI.

Do you see the faces in these photos? Do you find faces in other places yourself?

—
¹ I have a friend who started a tumblr to share photos of the found faces that she has come across. And Archie has mentioned his own found faces a couple of times.²
² For that matter, the face finding feature of iPhoto has also been known to find faces in other objects.
³ This photo was from November 2, 2012–one year ago today. After finding a photo to post yesterday from November 1st of a previous year, I went poking to see what other photos I had in my library from November 2nd when I looked to find something to post today.⁴
⁴ And the reason that I was looking for something to post today is that I have decided to do NaBloPoMo again this year for November, and post daily for the month. I think this marks the 7th year that I done this.

from deep within the library (friday foto finder: books)

This week’s friday foto finder challenge was to share a photo of books Considering how many books we have in our home (where the number is in the thousands), I have surprisingly few photos of books. I’m sure that books appear in various photos in which the clutter of our house is visible, but I’d rather not go there. Instead, I poked through my photo library to find this photo taken in a library. I took this in 2010, whilst in the swing of my participation in Project 365 (a year of commitment to daily photo-taking). When I did that project, I was playing around with a bunch of monthly themes. When I took this particular one, I was working on incorporating motion blur. Hence the ghostly hand. When I saw that I took this photo 3 years ago to the day, I knew that this was the photo I should post.

To check out more books, pay a visit to your local library. To check out more pictures of books, pay a visit to the fff blog.

full-color fall color

With the gray days of winter looming in the not too distant future, my eyes are savoring the flashy colors of fall. The New England trees are putting on as lovely a show as ever, but the vines and shrubs and even some of the weeds are competing for attention.
red leaves

orange leaves

yellowish leaf

green and red spotted leaves

purple leaves

The first 4 photos are ones I’ve taken with my phone in the last few weeks. The fifth photo is actually one I took with my camera a couple of years ago. I have some more recent photos of this same type of leaves and berries, but the leaves weren’t nearly as purple.