Have you heard of the Mighty Network “Girls with Cameras”? I’m not sure how I found it earlier this summer, but it has helped me kickstart my love for photography. I’m working on getting back into a photography “habit” since I have gone into retirement.

This month the theme in the Creativity Group is Patterns, Textures, and Structures. We are exploring the idea of seeing patterns and textures in the world. I’ve been doing this for a while, actually, and one of the things I enjoy as subjects is the texture of things–peeled paint, tree rings, veins in leaves, flower petals. If there is a texture or a pattern, I’ll try to photograph it! I went exploring last week in the “back forty”–i.e. around the ponds and the backyard. We have had a fair amount of rain in the last week, and mushrooms and toadstools are popping up everywhere! The wood pile is growing as well, and the pines are loaded with cones. There are patterns and textures all over the place. I even tried to photograph the pattern of pond scum, but it didn’t turn out so well.

The other part of the challenge in the group is to find a pattern in the images and create a collage of images that either repeats the pattern or creates a pattern, such as a pattern of shapes, colors, subjects, and the like. I found some mushrooms in the side yard and the logs in the wood pile. When I went through my images, I noticed the pattern of colors and shapes. I created this triptych:

The colors are so similar. In fact, there are some other images that have the same color that I could use to create another collage. Yet, the more I look at the last image in the triptych, the more I’m wondering if it really fits. That’s the beauty of creating, though. . . . it opens up so many ways of seeing. Photography does that for me as well: it opens me up to seeing what is around me. Sometimes, it is the expected, but then sometimes, I find the unexpected. I didn’t get to take the photo, but a snake scooted across my path while I was out walking on Thursday. If I had just been walking, I’m not sure I would have seen the critter!

Another challenge I’m doing this week is Kim Klassen’s See the Sun challenge. The idea behind the class is to get out with the camera during the Golden Hours of sunrise and sunset (either/or or both) and capture the magical light of that time of day. Today was not ideal. It rained all morning, but cleared up for a while in the afternoon. I went for a walk about an hour or so before sunset. As I returned to the car to go to Sonic for supper, the sun was going down behind the clouds. I caught some of the reflections on the water of the lake.

I suppose you can also say that there are patterns of ripples in the water, especially in the foreground of the second sunset picture.

My third “challenge” in photography is the Photography and Self-Discovery class. I haven’t started the photos for that one yet. I’m still mulling over the lessons and prompts. One of the prompts is to take an absence portrait, one in which I am not a figure in it, but that still reveals who I am. That is taking some thought! I’m going to work on that this week. To tell the truth, I do not like to take selfies. I really don’t care to have my picture taken.

I’m going to share one last photo. I didn’t take it. It is of my grandmother, who passed away eighteen years ago, and I miss her still. She was 98 years old. This photo was taken when she was a girl in the 1920s. I think I might look a little like her! When she was a girl before she married my granddaddy and moved from Rincon, Georgia, to Chapin, South Carolina, she would drive for her elderly pastor and his wife when they went to Savannah. I think my grandmother was rather progressive for her time!

My mother says this was my father’s favorite picture of Grandma. Actually, I think my mother looks a lot like Grandma now.