Subtract One

It is always better to be slightly underdressed.

Coco Chanel

A lot of what we see, read, hear and consume is about adding. You need to add more servings of fruits and vegetables. You need to add an exercise plan. You need to add some key pieces to your wardrobe or a new positive habit.

And so it is with subtracting. You need to cut calories. You need to de-clutter and get rid of your stuff. You need to embrace a less is more attitude. Edit your Facebook friend list. Purge negativity.

This post isn't about either of those ways of adding or subtracting. This post isn't about Common Core Math either.

This post reminds me of an old allegorical piece of advice by Coco Chanel. I had trouble finding her exact words online - there were many different versions attributed to her. The gist of it is that a well-dressed woman puts on all of the clothes and jewelry she wants to wear. Then right before leaving the house, she looks in the mirror and removes one item.

She does not mean one shoe, a purse or a dress. What she means is an accessory. So if the elegant woman is wearing a necklace, earrings and a bracelet, maybe she removes the bracelet. Or she keeps all the jewelry and removes the silk scarf.

Just because I quoted Coco Chanel once and paraphrased her once does not mean that I admire her. But even if a person is a Nazi sympathizer and a terrible anti Semite, they have small pockets of usefulness and even wisdom.

Coco Chanel is not a person I would want to get to know, but she was a fashion expert. I am not a fashion expert and I am not anti-Semite. I am not nearly as well dressed.

This is not about clothes. It is about time. For today's purposes, it is about what we call leisure time. It could be applied just as easily to any old time. But I'm starting small.

It's the weekend. Or a vacation. It's a free evening or a wide swath of time when you are not at work. Whatever it is, it is a time when you would like to catch up on a few things and also have some fun.

So you make some plans. This is a good idea.  If you don't make plans, time will just be whittled away.

Some people make just the right amount of plans for that specific day. My mother does this really well. I like to think I do too. But it took some trial and error and a learning curve for me.

I got good at it. That's why I'm giving advice. If you're already good at it, you can stop reading now and go do something else.

Here is a weekend scenario.

You plan a Saturday. You'll get up early to play golf with friends you haven't seen in a while. You'll have lunch at the club. Then you'll swing back home to take Billy and Tommy to baseball practice and while they're with the coach you'll stop by the gourmet market for provisions for tonight's barbecue. You'll drive back and watch practice for a few minutes, and take the kids home. Then you plan to jump in the shower, crack open a beer and man the charcoal in time to greet your friends and their kids for some adult fun and conversation while the kids play together.

Maybe you're energized by this day. Maybe you've got this time management thing down.

Or maybe on closer examination, you aren't so happy. You feel frazzled. Your partner is angry because you were 20 minutes late in picking up the kids and in your haste you forgot the beer for the barbecue. Or maybe everything came together fine, but you didn't bet on the traffic and the shower became a casualty. You feel hot and sticky and somewhat grouchy for the rest of the day.

You can't wait to go to work on Monday because the weekend of relaxing activities has left you feeling exhausted.

Here's another scenario. You plan a romantic long weekend trip to NYC. It's a beautiful day and the weather is perfect. You surprise your partner with a day of fun including a view from the top of the Empire State building, a stroll through Central Park and an exploration of Chinatown topped off with dinner. After that a cab ride to the theater district for the hottest show.

The whirlwind may be perfect for just the two of you. Some people are invigorated by this wall-to-wall activity.

But maybe your partner wanted to linger at one of these places. Or it's actually over-stimulating for both of you. You find yourselves bickering at dinner, and secretly wanting to go back to the hotel and bag the Broadway play.

Add a child or two to the above plans and expect some meltdowns.

This is supposed to be fun.

If you're enjoying yourself most weekends, having a sense of accomplishment and rejuvenation, are feeling good and refreshed after an evening out, then keep doing what you're doing.

But if you are miserable, your friends are mad because you're always late, your kids aren’t having as much fun as you imagined, you've over-complicate and over-plan,  you wonder where the time goes, the neighborhood association is complaining because you never cut the lawn, dinner is always sneaking up on you, you have a pounding tension headache on vacation, and the office feels like a spa after your ski excursion, then I have a simple solution.

Make your plans for the day. Then remove one thing from the schedule.

There are fancier ways of managing your time. I'm suggesting something simple.  Tweak later when you're better at this.

Subtract something. Just one thing. It’s the little black dress of time management and it will change your life.

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30 Minutes A Day: Re-framed

Late last spring, I embarked on a new tradition. I stumbled over it by accident. I started taking a 30-minute walk every day. I wrote about that experience here.

I felt all kinds of benefits from the walk. I meandered. Except for the 30-minute part, I had no agenda. I took photographs. I invariably felt refreshed. I continued more or less consistently. I wrote another post about it last July.

This kind of stroll might be my version of meditation.

I thought I was going to keep doing this. I imagined the benefits of the 30 minutes a day building upon one another. I imagined writing about my experience in the fall and then the winter.

That is not what happened.

What happened instead was that I'd go out for my walk and enjoy it very much at the time. But sometimes, before and after the walk, I'd feel stressed out. I wasn't stressed out about other things then found later that taking the walk was worth it. The stress was about the walk itself.

The walk was becoming another obligation. The walk was becoming a nag.

One thing I value about myself is my consistency. For that reason, it was difficult initially to switch gears. One of the drawbacks to making blanket proclamations and plans is that it can lead to rigid behaviors. I started to see the writing on the wall.

Oftentimes, we make plans before all of the information is in. Sometimes we don't acknowledge when things have changed. Commitments made during one period of life may not work for another. That is what happened to me.

I gave myself permission not to go for a walk for 30 minutes a day. That was a start.

While out for a run or folding laundry, I thought about the walks I was taking. That is when I do some of my best thinking. More information trickled in.

The 30-minute walks were ideal for some days and not for others. This is not an all or nothing situation. It has nuances.

Going out for a 30 minute walk makes sense when I am doing the type of work that benefits from a break. Certain types of paperwork, organizing and unpacking, research, cleaning house and repetitive tasks done over a long period of time and keep me housebound are obvious things. Days where my schedule is flexible enough and not interrupted by outside forces are also welcoming to this walking experience.

Days where I spend a great deal of time out of my apartment do not make the most sense in terms of the 30 minute walk. Nor do days where interruptions are built in. Days where every moment is accounted for means that the walk may cause more stress than it alleviates.

There are days when my teenagers are around and need a great deal of interface from me. Sometimes the walk is not practical. Other times it's an excellent idea. It gives me a break. It gives them a break.

Finally, there are the kinds of days where creativity and very pleasurable work is the actual order of the day. The walk is not really needed the same way on those days. Those times I set aside for blogging, making collages or photography are examples of this. These activities are already akin to meditative experiences for me.

This change of plans may seem like a small thing. It is in fact a small thing when stacked up against more important stuff. But my being able to switch gears with this has other implications. Making distinctions between good walk days and bad walk days is great practice for sorting out matters of much larger consequence.

Sunday was a good day for a 30-minute walk.

I was doing a lot of scheduling, school paper signing, organizing and filing. There was minutia. There was banality. And while everything was timely, I had a bit of flexibility in terms of my time.

I used the 30-minute walk as both a break and a reward. I set out at the designated time. I made sure to pack an umbrella because the sky was getting dark and it was windy. Rain seemed imminent.

Barring a thunderstorm, I planned to stay the course.

This might not seem like a good time for a walk. For me it was ideal.

For one thing, I've noticed that people are very adverse to rain. They will go right inside once it starts looking dark and foreboding. I found the streets to be nearly empty. Not only did this make my walk more peaceful, but also I had fewer folks to worry about when taking some of the weirder photographs I do.

Once it started to sprinkle people started running in a frantic attempt to go inside before more water hit them. There was screaming and flailing. There was wrestling with umbrellas.

The rain began while I was in a lush garden. I positioned myself under some trees and saw some interesting stuff to photograph. Sometimes I used my umbrella propped up on some branches or the ground to keep my iPhone dry so I wouldn't have to worry about it.

I took a video of raindrops hitting a marble bench and making an interesting dot pattern, but it was a little too boring for anyone but me, so I deleted it.

It never became torrential and it reduced to a steady, misty drizzle. I dispensed with the umbrella and walked out on the sidewalk. The flowerbeds were very interesting.

I'm going to let you in on a little secret about rain. It can be good for photography.

I'm not referring to stormy situations. I am not talking about high winds. I am not talking about weather-advisory thunder and lightning.

I am talking about a lazy drizzle.

When there's a lazy drizzle it is highly uncomfortable for most people. But it is fine for me. It might be okay for you too. If I were putting out a singles ad, I could honestly that I enjoy long walks in the rain. I have already mentioned that this alone is a good thing for photography. Less people mean fewer headaches.

Cloudy skies almost always accompany rain. This gives you a nice, even light. This isn't the time to get all experimental with shadows. There won't be many. But you can explore a softer look.

The wetness has a lacquer like effect when it lands on things. That shine, plus the soft even light makes colors pop. It's like the palette is on steroids.

While rain gives a nice jolt to colors that are already intense, it does something equally interesting to more muted hues. Mauve, silver - grey, olive green, terra cotta and taupe look decidedly richer.

Things become dotted and splattered in a way that I like. The video I took may have been boring. But I loved what the rain did to this leaf.

When it's raining, the differences between what is light and what is dark can be intensified. Case in point: the dirt in this flowerbed became darker and blacker when wet, while the dead stems remained light in color. This is a lovely edition to an ongoing series called Past Their Prime. It also reminds me of a scratchboard.

I worked to capture an image that is the essence of wet. After several attempts, the rain and I came up with this.

Moving forward, I anticipate taking more 30 minute walks - some of the time. I'll move through the crisp autumn days a half hour here and there and slog through snow the same way. There are times to be disciplined about something. There are times not to be. Today I'll be talking about a walk outdoors. Tomorrow it will be something bigger.

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30 Minutes A Day: The Summer Edition

This past spring I stumbled onto a new resource for stress reduction. I take a leisurely 30-minute walk every day. I go out each day, regardless of weather.

I've skipped a walk here and there due to tightly scheduled time or unexpected circumstances. On those days I clearly missed the walk. So I'm prioritizing it.

The walk is no less or more than 30 minutes. It's not meant to be exercise. Errands don't count. I can stop whenever I like to take photographs with my iPhone. Sometimes that means I don't make it very far from my apartment. That's fine. Distance isn't the point.

You can read about how I got started here.

When I wrote my first post about this topic last spring I was just beginning to take this walk each day. I liked what was happening and decided to continue. I wanted to see if it kept on helping me with stress. I wanted to see what would happen.

Here's what happened.

Spring turned into summer. Daffodils and tulips made way for roses. Many of those have drooped then died. Lilies are everywhere. Lilies are having their moment.

There was something of the miracle in spring. The flowers did their delicate dance, poking through like it was the first time ever.  There was something pure and primary about it.

I'm a city dweller but the natural world has a way of jostling through the concrete. And so it is with summer. This summer is good and settled in now.

Where spring was young and gay, summer is languid and a bit sexy. The flowerbeds are a jumble of just bloomed, slightly sour and gloriously cloying. It's like too much perfume only good.

There is the hint of the exotic in this summer. Everything I see has been around the block and back.

The heat and humidity slow me down. I don't complain. This walk is only 30 minutes long and there's no need to exert myself or hurry. Given a choice I walk on the shady side of the street. I'm a shade-seeking individual. So is my camera.

I take photographs every time I'm out. I keep some, delete others. One of the reasons I find these walks relaxing and rejuvenating is there is no real agenda except to stay out for 30 minutes. There's something meditative about it. Walking slowly and looking around, taking photos, some good, some bad.  This might really be my version of meditating.

In practical terms, my walks serve as a much-needed break or incentive when I am working on things that are demanding and require discipline. It seems to help with stress. It's free. It's available.

I keep doing it because I enjoy it. I keep doing it because it's working.  I keep doing it because it's something I can count on.

Most of the time I go out for my walk at a predetermined time, based on what else is happening that day. I don't choose my 30-minute block when it's "nice" out, because it's sunrise or because it's cooled down. It's more of a process of elimination. I can't go when I have a meeting. I can't go while I'm cooking. I can't go when I'm taking care of my children. I can't be in two places at once.

So from 9:00 - 9:30 or 2:30 - 3:00 or 7:40 - 8:10 it is. It doesn't matter. Whatever is out there is out there. Morning rain shower, late afternoon sun with long, inky shadows, hazy miasma, warm, forgiving dusk light. It's all good.

My thirty minutes are up. I walk into my apartment after my tiny journey. My air conditioner and iced coffee with soy vanilla greet me. I left the meandering outside and I snap to, smart, sharp and ready to take on whatever it is.

I took the photographs below during two thirty-minute walks on July 7^th and July 8^th.

I was attracted to the rare coloration of this saturated and fragile bloom.

I don’t know what kind of plant this is. It sure is orange.

It’s unusual for me to go inside during my strolls. I’ve been eyeing this lobby for a long time and saw an opportunity. This is the latest addition to a series I am working on called Mid-Century Modern. I love the clean lines, optimistic looking palette and whimsical tiles paired with the poignant wear and tear.

This might be one of the last Hydrangeas to bloom. This is but a section of the giant white orb, drooping ever so slightly in the heat.

Mid-day light and shade on the weathered wall of Park Terrace Gardens.

I almost never see anything representational in my abstractions. This time, I saw an eye in the knot of this tree bark.

The same sun and rain that nourishes the cultivated flowers also supports the weeds. My latest in the series I call Hardscrabble Plants.

Another view of the elegant and mysterious plant bearing exotic red flowers.

These lilies are heavy with their own loveliness.

A mess of daisies.

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30 Minutes A Day

I've been feeling stressed. Quite a bit more than usual. Then things took on a slightly grayish cast. I took that seriously.

I upped my consumption of powerhouse foods, I continued to exercise. I prioritized sleep. These lifestyle changes have helped.

I visited my doctor for a physical. I am in superior health, but we are keeping an eye on the stuff I mentioned earlier. He is monitoring me. I am monitoring myself.

When I am working hard on various things, I work breaks into my schedule. I drink iced coffee, have a snack, and check out my newsfeed. Then I get back to work.

On a whim one day, I took a half hour walk outside. That was my break. This turned out to be an excellent idea. I decided to implement these walks on a regular basis to see what happens.

These are walks that are not primarily for exercise. That is a separate activity. These walks are completely different in tenor from walking to the subway, or running errands. I make sure to take the walks alone.  There is no purpose to the walks other than taking a walk.

I keep track of my time and keep it to the 30 minutes. I was worried that this would be too big a break if I have so much work to do. This did not turn out to be the case.

Once I return from my walks I feel refreshed. The fresh air, the light and change of scenery are a re-boot. I'm then smarter and better at whatever I'm working on. There’s a big influx of focus.

Another benefit is that I look forward to the walks and use them as a reward for good, sustained and effective work habits.

One of the things I noticed about this particular spring here in NYC is that it seems more explosive, riotously colorful and glorious than ever before. I wondered if the long winter made me just notice or appreciate the trees and flowers more. I don't think it's that. Jeremy and I think that the delay in warm temperatures made everything more intense when things finally bloomed. It isn't just me. He noticed it too.

Here's what it's like for me.

I go outside and the thirty minutes stretches out expansively. It makes me feel rich with time.

I walk slowly and meander. This is not the usual way I am. There's a certain liberation to doing that. It seems to slow time down. It feels like I am out for longer than a half hour.

Since I'm not going anywhere in particular, I stop whenever I want.  I have my iPhone camera with me and often something will strike my fancy. I've taken a lot of photographs during these walks.

I am very literal about the time and manage it well. I stay out for 30 minutes, no more, no less. Once the 30 minutes are up, I feel ready to go inside again.

Here's what I'm doing. I'm going to keep this up. I'll to post about my experience once a season. I consider this my spring post.

Since this spring is audaciously, in your face beautiful, I'm sharing some photographs to accompany this post. I took all of these pictures during my 30-minute walk today.

Taking a walk is not a miracle mental health intervention. Optimizing my outlook and resilience is a multi-tiered process. But these 30-minute walks are a part of my toolbox. A bit of fresh air without an agenda never hurt anyone.

I was attracted to the filmy delicacy of these two plants. The cloudy day cast a lovely, even light that brought out their saturated pastel coloration.

These two photographs make nice new additions to some series I am working on.

 

I am exploring the beauty intrinsic in old, dying and decomposing plants and blooms.

 

I first photographed these flowers at the beginning of my walk but was unable to capture anything I liked due to a large bee buzzing uncomfortably  close. At the end of my walk I was able to spend more uninterrupted time and realized my artistic vision.

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Wading In

I've said this before. I'm a very consistent and disciplined person. I wrote a blog post about it called I'm Consistent. I also wrote another blog post related to consistency and sameness called Every Day, No Matter What.

This quality is a good thing when you want to accomplish things, establish a routine and get stuff done. There is a flip side to it. Sometimes all of this discipline can start to weigh on you. It can feel more rigid than what is called for. I've noticed this and I am working on it.

Recently, my family and I embarked on a major renovation of our apartment. It isn’t completely finished. It's a process.

That said, the major elements are behind us. The paint job is done. Most of the furniture is in place. Everyone has their own bedroom.

An apartment renovation takes a lot of planning. During the research, design and early packing phases, I kept on blogging. I kept on blogging while collecting estimates, getting people's insurance certificates in order, talking to re-finishers, taking trips to the Salvation Army and going to our new storage unit facility. I kept on blogging when our apartment got emptier and emptier as we packed, gave away, threw away or re-purposed most of our belongings. Sometimes I blogged about these activities.

There is a time to push through and stay the course. There is a time to change course. I recognized when it was time to change course with my blogging. When things shifted from spending some time most days packing to almost all time every day packing, I started to post my blog once a week rather than the usual twice.  When it was time for our family to vacate our apartment and the paint job to start I began blogging zero times a week.

Initially, I thought I'd start blogging again once our family got settled in at my sister in law's house. But once that happened, I realized that all of my mental energy was taken up. This is understandable. I was unusually tired. I would check in with the painters while they were working. Watching them scrape, prime, plaster and paint brought on a fatigue that was hard to negotiate with. You would think I was doing the work myself.

There were other things going on too numerous to mention now. There was a lot of adjusting. There was unprecedented novelty and surprise. Most of it was good novelty and surprise. But I still needed to process it. This turned out to be quite the big job.

I put my blog on hiatus.

For a while, things were so busy, variable and utterly out of the ordinary that blogging did not come up as an option. Whenever I thought about it, it would sound like this. I'll start writing when I feel more settled. I'll start writing after I feel more like myself. I'll start writing after the furniture comes back from the re-finishers. I'll start writing once I know what my bed will look like.

On Tuesday, the newly beautified and restored dining table and desk came back to a radically different home than they left from. On Wednesday, I established a reasonable prediction of what my bed will look like after ordering linens, shams and throw pillows online and on sale.

I wrote this on Thursday. The re-finishers have indeed finished. The bed is planned. I feel nominally more settled, but still feel like I'm getting used to things in a basic way. I feel like myself, but somehow altered. My life has changed more than I anticipated.

Having met half of my criteria for blogging again, I am blogging again. Two of the four criteria are rather concrete. Two of the four are not. This unsettled and altered feeling is something without a clear ending and may in fact be something I learn to live with. I decided it was not something to be checked off as much as it is something to be accommodated.

I planned to blog. That is what I am doing.

I’m not doing a cannonball and jumping into the lake. I'm putting in one toe.

I am tentative. I did not expect to feel tentative about working on my blog. I didn't feel tentative about it before the renovation. Now that the renovation has happened everything is both more orderly and also more askew. Instead of waiting until I felt less tentative and on firmer ground, I just went ahead.

So what if I'm tentative? It's not the end of the world. Just like there are much bigger stressors than home renovation, there are much bigger challenges to writing and being creative than feeling a bit tentative. Home renovation is a bigger challenge to writing and being creative than feeling tentative.

My apartment and neighborhood are the same. My family and children are the same. When I wake up in the morning I'm in a different room than I used to be with different things to look at. My life hasn't really changed but the landscape of it has. Things that used to be lying around on tables and desks have designated spots. Suddenly there's room for music and books.

Today, I make my collage at my daughter's desk while she is in school. Last time I did this it was at the dining room table. I put a large book under my work to protect the desk from glue and marks. The scotch tape is still packed so I use tiny pieces of masking tape to gently flatten my finished collage. Previously, I photographed my finished pieces on top of the base of our treadmill. There's no room in our current layout for it, so we reluctantly got rid of it. It was the right choice.

I bring this new collage to my bed, which is next to a bank of windows. I move it this way and that to take advantage of the ample natural light while eliminating unsightly shadows. Satisfied, I take the picture. It really is a lovely spot.

The Soft Closet

Hannah was a toddler. Noah was a baby. Our firstborn, Jacob, had died not long ago.

Jeremy and I were volunteers. We helped other families who had been through a brain tumor diagnosis. Jeremy changed careers. I took over some of the freelance work he had been doing before switching careers.

9/11 happened. The photography industry continued to implode.

We were out in the world with two healthy children. We made new friends with people who had kids the same ages as ours. We lived rich, child -centric, work -centric and ambitious lives.

It wasn't always easy. It was frequently difficult. I'll say one thing. Our lives were never boring.

We were really busy.

We kept up with the laundry. I should say we kept up with the sorting, washing and drying of the laundry. What we weren't keeping up with was folding it and putting it away.

Just like always, the hamper in the bathroom and one additional laundry bag was filled with dirty laundry. But we also had another laundry bag of clean laundry. When we were less busy, naturally, we folded our clean laundry and put it away in the drawers. However, at this time, that situation had taken a turn.

We spent a lot of time in our living room playing with the kids. The bag of clean laundry was always in there too, propped up against the couch or the changing table.

Sometimes when it was time for us to get dressed, we would still find what we wanted in our drawers. Same with the kids's clothes. But most of the time we would rifle in the clean bag of laundry. You'd stick your hand in and feel around for underwear and piece together an outfit from there. The socks would be challenging. That could take a couple of tries.

We would do the same thing when it was time to dress the kids or re-pack the diaper bag.

Really, it wasn't bad. Because we were doing the laundry frequently, chances are you'd find your favorites in there. Yours and of course, the cutest, high rotation clothes for the kids.

Jeremy started calling the laundry bag of clean clothes, which had become a semi permanent installation, the soft closet.  It was an apt name and it stuck.

Have you seen my jeans? I just saw them in the soft closet.

I'm out of underwear. There's a whole bunch in the soft closet.

Hey! I just found this tee shirt in the soft closet. Do you want to wear it?

Eventually, our laundry situation was more under control. We became better at time management. The kids went from toddlerhood to pre-school where we exchanged one set of challenges for others. More often than not, the laundry got folded and put away. To be honest, this happens to be one of my favorite household chores.

Everything, smoothed, folded and in its place. Tee shirts crisp and stacked. Noah's school chinos clipped to hangers. An organized, orderly life. I'm living a little piece of that dream. I fold up the laundry bag and put it in the basket for next time.

Every Day, No Matter What

I read a quote somewhere that the only constant is change. As far as I'm concerned, this is true.

In my particular life, the only constant is change and there is another constant that seems like the opposite of the only constant is change. In this one area of my life the only constant is the constant.

 

The Farmer's Market

I post photographs on Facebook every day. I have a schedule. I have this one Facebook friend who noticed the schedule and then perceived a change in the schedule. He private messaged me to ask me for the updated schedule. I appreciated this very much. He wanted to know what to expect when. I understand that.

The schedule goes like this. Every Monday, I post The Beautiful Trash Series in the morning. Then in the afternoon, I share pictures I take around the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Tuesdays I do Faded early, and then I ❤ Hell's Kitchen later. Wednesdays it's Hardscrabble Plants and Mid-Century Modern. Thursdays, Flyers on Lamp Posts and other surfaces and Windows. Friday Meditate with Me and Swatch Book. Saturdays I do The Farmers Market and Craft-like. Finally, on Sunday, I do What I see when I go to the Country and This is Inwood.

 

Flyers on Lamp Posts and Other Surfaces

If you are already my Facebook friend then you probably remember the meanings of these titles. You know that Hardscrabble Plants are weeds. If you are not my Facebook friend, I'm going to ask you to read between the lines and make some inferences. Additionally, I've also sprinkled some photos in this post that will give you some idea.

I apologize if the schedule paragraph went on a little long. I have 14 series that I'm posting now. In addition to those, I have some series I'm working on that haven't started posting yet. I can feel some of the series I'm posting may be coming to a natural end soon. I'll roll out something new then.

 

Mid-Century Modern

For a year I took a photograph of my dinner every night and posted it to Facebook.

People have asked me what I would do if something extremely unexpected happened in my life. Would I still photograph my dinner every night?

Fortunately, I'd already thought of this and the answer is yes.

I imagined myself hospitalized. I think I was able to create an accurate prediction based on past experience with adversity. I predict that after a period of shock and extreme anxiety around the issues landing me in the hospital, I would adapt. I'd make the best of it. If I were eating a hospital meal delivered on a tray then I would photograph that. If one of my many visitors brought me something from outside  - and I imagine that with a prolonged stay I would request this - then I'd photograph that dinner. Finally, if I were not allowed to take anything by mouth, then under those extreme circumstances I'd feel obligated to photograph whatever was hanging from the IV.

One of the benefits to all of this photographing and series and posting to Facebook is that I notice improvement over time. I'm better at composing photographs and recognizing what will or won't work. I learn more about the capabilities of my iPhone camera and it's limitations. I play to its strengths. This is allegorical to the rest of my life.

Keep doing something again and again and inevitably you get better at it,

 

Beautiful Trash

I walk out my door and the possibilities are endless. I use my time to accomplish a lot in little snippets. The last few days included commutes to and from school with my son, a trip to the pediatrician with my daughter, various errands and doctor and dentist appointments for me. The photographs posted here were taken in the space between these things.

The photography I post like clockwork is an anchor. It steadies me against the flux. It almost doesn't matter what I take pictures of or what series it is. The everyday-ness and no-matter-what-ness is what's important. That, and all the other reasons I mentioned.

Interested in seeing more of my photography? Friend Karen Capucilli on Facebook!