Category: photos

of spoons and spools

We are down at my in-laws’ again this weekend. I realized that I typically take a lot of pictures when we are here. Here are some reasons why:

  • When we come down here, I go into travel mode. Because we don’t have childcare when we visit, I don’t typically expect to do much work. This seems to lead to a bit of a sense of vacation, even though I am usually still busy all day with the kids and helping out my in-laws with meals and such. But I keep my camera handy!
  • The yard here is more amenable to playing outside. (We live in the woods at home, and if there is no breeze, our yard can be ridiculously buggy.) It’s nice to take pictures of the kids out with natural light. (For that matter, the light inside is also better. Living in the woods as we do, our house is often pretty shady.)
  • The inside of the house is much less chaotic than our own home. I can take pictures of the kids without being annoyed that the background is dominated by gigantic piles of papers or toys or whatnots. (It’s the whatnots at home that bug me especially, with their annoying whatnottishness.)
  • There are lots of different odds and ends here than are at our house. (I feel like, especially with project 365, I have pretty well tapped our house for subject matter.)

Case in point: there is a rack of spools of thread in the basement, right by a very classic looking sewing machine. I’ve also frequently found myself taking pictures of utensils and housewares. Not that we don’t have housewares at home, but they are different ones. Our spoons have different shapes. So, yes, I took a photo of the spoons in the silverware drawer.

So I posted my spools on Instagram, with the caption “Spools.” Then I posted my spoons, with the caption “Spoons.” And it pleased me well to notice at that point that they were only one letter off. Naturally, I tried to think of other things that started with “spoo,” but there were no spooks or spoofs readily available to photograph. I did, however, take a photo of this juice glass, which I think I will have to dub a spoob. Or maybe spoop. Spoot? You be the judge.

Spools.

Spoons.

A spoo_.

playing with Instagram

First with the Tumblr, and now with the Instagram. It would appear that I’m all about jumping on the social media bandwagons. (Or maybe on the trailers that follow the bandwagons, since the bandwagons passed me by ages ago. I’m a late wagon jumper.) (Not that I’m about to start a MySpace page. That wagon is long departed.)

Having been without an iPhone, or other mobile device with a decent camera, I had only looked on to the Instagram posts of others with interest and some envy. The cool filters! The hipness of it all! But for my birthday, John got me an iPod touch, which comes with not one, but two cameras. Woo-hoo! I rushed to load the Instragram app. (Well, maybe not exactly rushed. It was probably over a week. I was busy.) First I played around a bit with some very lackluster photos taken with the iPod, with disappointingly lackluster results. But then I figured out that I could use photos I’d taken previously, with my real camera, and futz with them in Instagram. I have to say, I find the filters a lot of fun.

Here are a few photos I’ve played with. For most of them, I failed to make note of which of the many available filters I used, so I tried my best to reconstruct. However, if anyone can tell that I’ve got the filter wrong, please speak up.


This was a photo I took on my commute during my first week or so of Project 365, in August 2010. (I think this filter might be the one called X-Pro II. You can see the unmanipulated one on flickr.)


This one I took on my trip to Japan in 2004. It is (I believe) an old cemetery in the hills just outside of Kyoto. I love the photo, but the highlights were blown in such a way that I’ve had trouble adjusting it. Putting it though an Instagram filter gave it new life. (I think this might be with the filter called Walden. Here is the original.)

Here’s one where I tried applying the tilt shift doohicky, as well as a filter. (I think this filter might be the one called Sutro.) I like the composition of the original, but I really think that changing the focus and the palette adds to the nostalgic feel.)


I joked that this one was a composite photo of John’s and my 1977 school portraits, with the filter called 1977. Although I realized since posting that the school portraits were probably actually from 1979. (How I could I have been so far off?) Actually, in this case the filter didn’t add much, but it amused me so. Here is the “original,” which John made a few years back from photoshopping our two scanned school portraits together. (We didn’t know each other in the 70s, and lived on opposite sides of the country.)

So there. Instagram is fun. (If you are on Instagram, you can find me there as alejna99. Yes, the username alejna was taken. Again. I haven’t yet dared look to see who is using my name.)

distorted reflections

During my short visit to New York City last August, I left the conference to stop back at my friend‘s hotel room to collect my luggage. (She had been kind enough to put me up the night of my arrival.) The room was up on the 16th floor of the hotel, high up but still deep within the canyons of the tall buildings. I looked out the window, admiring the view, and was struck by the reflections on one of the buildings opposite. The glass of the windows revealed its subtle curves in the shapes reflected back to me. The hotel I was in, as straight-laced and straight-lined as you might expect from a Manhattan hotel, was rendered in improbably wavy and curving lines. It looked as if the building had been designed by Gaudí.

As the late afternoon sun lowered, the light reflected through the mazes and canyons of tall buildings shifted. The scene reflected before me changed, offering more and more architectural reinterpretations. I stood at the window taking photos, barely noticing the passage of time. (Though later I realized that I had been watching and photographing for at least 20 minutes.)

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As with many things that I really like, it’s hard for me to pin down why they appeal to me so. In the case of distorted reflections, I like the way reality is visually reinterpreted. I find it fun to recognize the lines and the forms, but rearranged. Depending on the nature of the distortion, the effect can be beautiful or ridiculous. Human forms are typically redrawn in ways that are both amusing and unsettling. Landscapes are often abstracted in pleasing ways, such as the look of bold brushstrokes from rippled water. The reflection on a small, smooth curved surface can show an intriguing miniature world.

I also find the term distorted reflections to be appealing in its own right, as it carries a double meaning. It reminds me of how our thoughts and perceptions of the world are always filtered through our own experiences and personalities. If you and I both witness the same event, we likely will both interpret it differently, as we each see it through our mind’s own lens.

Interestingly, I hadn’t listed distorted reflections on my working list of topics “40 posts on things I like,” which is surprising given that I had considered making it my theme for an entire year of project 365 photos. (I decided instead to spend only the first month working with reflections, and didn’t stick to distorted ones at that.)

However, I like distorted reflections so much, and have amassed such a large collection of photos with that theme, that I was compelled to finally start a Tumblr. If you are so inclined, please go have a look at distorted reflections.

(This post makes #3 in my planned series of “40 posts on things I like.”)

eat or be eaten

This afternoon, when I stepped out on my front porch, the glint of a new spiderweb caught my eye. (I knew it was a fairly new web, as it was connected to some things I had moved around in the last week or so.) I looked at it admiringly, and saw that the spider appeared to have caught an insect. They hung there together in the center of the web.

As I looked again more closely, I saw that my first impression was wrong: It was not the spider who had captured the insect.

What looked to be shaped like a rather large mosquito, with a body perhaps a centimeter long, was affixed to the abdomen of the small green spider. I could see slight movement from the pair, and as I looked closer, I could see fluid moving and pulsing in the insect’s translucent abdomen as it drained the spider.

Upon further examination, I saw that the insect looked rather like a small dragonfly, but with wings lying down flat along its abdomen. (I have since decided that it must have been a damselfly.)

I’d never seen anything quite like it, this tiny drama of life and death. The embrace of the two creatures looked intimate, their bodies pulsing slightly and glowing in the late afternoon light. (Ever the voyeur, I naturally ran inside for my camera.)

I watched (and photographed) for a few minutes before I tore myself away to run an errand. When I returned, perhaps an hour later, I found the web empty. It was remarkably unscathed from the recent drama. The damselfly was long gone.

I looked around for the spider, so obviously not on the web. I found its little body just below the web. I nudged it out into a patch of sunlight with a straw that had broken off a nearby broom. The body was stiff and very light, drained as it was of fluids.

Sometimes things really don’t turn out how we expect. The spider had built such a lovely web only to be caught in it itself. It met an insect that was rather more than it had bargained for.

portrait of girl with violin

Phoebe and I have now had 7 violin lessons together, and things are going a bit better than the first lesson. We managed to switch to Monday evening, which is much easier, as Phoebe doesn’t have a karate class on Mondays. It’s still been a bit rocky, though. Really, the early stage of learning the violin is not all that exciting. (Well, I suppose there might be different ways of teaching. But Phoebe is learning to do things right. In fact, she’s learning to do them better than I do. I have learned that the way I hold my bow is not entirely correct. ) At this point, the focus is still on how to properly hold and position the bow and violin. It’s been pretty hard to figure out when and how to get Phoebe to practice. The novelty has worn off a bit, and she gets pretty loopy at the end of the day. Plus it’s hard to fit in one more thing to do before bedtime.

On the other hand, I’ve managed to find time to practice, myself. And I’ve been really enjoying it. We have still been working on a book that I used before, from maybe a year or two into my lessons. It’s review, but it’s still challenging, and I’m learning (or relearning) from it. The pace has felt slower, and I like it. I’ve never really been in a hurry learning the violin, as I don’t have any particular goals. (I don’t expect, for example, to ever join an orchestra.) I just like making music. My teacher has had a tendency to push me faster than I really feel the need to, and I suspect that much of this is because most of her other students are eager to get to some sort of destination. I’m just along for the ride.

The lessons themselves have still been a bit of a mixed bag. We’ve figured out a system that works pretty well. Phoebe gets the first half hour lesson, and I wait out in the hallway (which is what other parents of students typically do) and have some time to myself. (It’s not quite peace and quiet, though, as the music store where we have lessons usually has a lot going on. People trying out instruments, and whatnot, and lots of people coming and going.) Then I go in for my half hour lesson, and Phoebe stays in the room and plays games or draws on my iPad. It’s been tricky sometimes as Phoebe will ask me questions, and sometimes talk to me when I’m in the middle of playing. And then tonight we had to interrupt my lesson to run to use the bathroom, because I noticed that Phoebe was bouncing. But overall things have worked enough such that I feel like Phoebe and I are both getting lessons.



Phoebe was being a bit of a goofball when I asked to take her picture after our lesson. An adorable goofball, though.

a few crusts of bread

Tonight was Phoebe’s pre-K graduation, and I signed up to make finger sandwiches for the party afterwards. (I’m still not sure I used the right number of fingers in the sandwiches. The recipes were all so vague.) Since we didn’t have time for a real dinner before heading out, and since the party with foodstuffs wouldn’t be until at least 7, it was clear we needed a snack. Seeing as I had just cut the crusts off several loaves of bread to make dainty-looking sandwiches, I offered up some bread crusts for a snack. They were received much more enthusiastically than I would have expected. I insisted that they should have some water with their bread crusts, though. Because I’m caring like that.

Theo’s few crusts of bread.


Bread and water: nothing but the best for my children.


Phoebe with her meager portion.


Here is Phoebe in her pre-K graduation regalia. She has been excited about this event for weeks. This is about as happy as she looked during the festivities though.

But lest you think that they are miserable, here are some photos of Phoebe and Theo looking happy on the playground after the graduation party…

(I can’t hold my eyes open now, so I’d better get to bed. Tomorrow I’m heading into Boston to attend a conference. I was concerned that the commute might not be reasonable, as there was a chance of parade, and such parades have in the past led to crowded trains, heavy traffic, and more-than-usually-difficult parking. However, I’m glad to see that the parade isn’t till Saturday. Of course, I’ve also been planning to attend the conference on Saturday, so may well have to deal with the same issues then, and may not be able to make it to some talks I’d hoped to go to, including one by a friend. And doesn’t that just rain on my parade.)

Caption, anyone?


Since this photo came up in the comments of my sort of non-post last night, I thought I would share it. Before I go and ruin things by explaining my motivations for this shot, does anyone want to have a go at giving it a caption or story?