Today’s photo is brought to by snow, without which the kids would not have played outside for an hour and a half, come inside frozen, and begged for hot chocolate.
By the way, the candy cane is actually a “peppermint stir stick”, made specifically for hot chocolate. My older daughter thought it was interesting how the red stripes tended to melt almost immediately when inserted into the drink. I’m sure that’s perfectly healthy. Better living through chemistry.
A quick shot out my front door tonight. For a change, the snow storm is hitting everything south of us. My little slice of Massachusetts is going to get maybe an inch of snow. So far, this is the sum total of our snow. This includes leftover snow from a few weeks ago.
Taken with PureShot, and cropped, tuned, and bordered in Snapseed.
This is a shot of a quilt my mother made for my in-laws at the request of my mother-in-law. My mother is a very accomplished quilter, which is made more impressive when you learn that she’s legally blind. She lost a huge amount of vision twenty-some years ago. Yet, she loves quilting and refused to give it up. She opened her own business quilting the backings onto quilt tops with a sewing machine called a long-arm. She has more swatches of cloth than a Joanne’s Fabric, so much cloth that she actually said, “I don’t need any more gift cards to Joanne’s, there’s nothing more I need to buy there.”
This particular quilt is called (I think) a wedding ring quilt and covers the king sized bed in the bedroom where my wife and I sleep whenever we visit my in-laws. The patterns you see in-between the rings is a stitched pattern that repeats over and over. It always boggles my mind how much work must go into making one of these things.
Went to visit some family this weekend in New York. The skies on the way down were nothing short of awesome. This is a view of Manhattan from the Whitestone Bridge.
Taken with PureShot and cropped and tuned slightly with Snapseed.
This is my town’s common this morning after last night’s light snow.
Taken with PureShot.
Today’s photo was a tough choice. I had another picture I took this morning that I wanted to post, but, in honor of the first real snowfall in the Northeast tonight, I though this one would be a better fit. It’s kind of a blurry mess, as night photography with an iPhone is a skill I have yet to master, but whatever. I like it. So there.
Taken with PureShot, cropped in Snapseed, converted to black and white with Black Cam.
I met up with a couple of writer friends last night so that we could go over our works in progress. It was a strange misty foggy night. The weather is changing, going from chilly and overcast yesterday to warm and rainy today. As the warm air came in, the fog came with it. Heading to my car, I was struck by the way the woods behind the pub looked in the fog with the sodium lights of the parking lot hitting it.
The end result is above. Photo taken with PureShot, lightened with Sanpseed, and a layer of stacked filters applied from Formulas.
Sometimes Mother Nature just makes it easy.
I took this one while once again playing around with the macro lens. It caused me some problems at first because I couldn’t get enough light at the bottom of the picture. My phone kept throwing an unwanted shadow across the penny.
Then it occurred to me that this might make for an interesting black and white photo. The high contrast between the reflection of the light and the shadow from the phone gives this picture, to me, a slightly unsettled feeling.
This unsettlement, coupled with the subject, “E PLURIBUS UNUM” feels timely. The Latin translates into “From many, one”. This refers to the states, and how they all came together to form a single union. Yet, these days, the union feels threatened. Not by Obama, or Trump, or a whole host of other players each of whom as a finger in the pie. No, I find the union threatened by our devotion to divisiveness. You can see this on social media every time you open Facebook or Twitter. There, in your newsfeed, you find someone yelling about how their side is right, and your side is wrong, about how the current administration is the savior of all humanity or the devil incarnate. The headlines are getting snarkier, with things like “You Won’t Believe How This Caller Shut Down Rush” or “What Obama Is Taking From You Next.”
We must learn, or perhaps re-learn, that we are one nation, and that, to make this nation stronger, we must find common ground. This means that we must do what is unthinkable these days. We must “compromise”. This does not mean that we give up our values or our ideologies. This means that we agree to work together to get things done, that we realize that this country cannot be led by a “my way or the highway” mentality that has plagued the last two administrations, that we agree that to come together and be stronger, we much each give ground to the other side so that a common bond can be reached. The extremists in both parties hate the word compromise. They feel that it means “to completely surrender your beliefs to the other side.” That’s not what it means. What compromise means is to “settle a dispute by mutual concession.” Mutual. Both sides coming to an agreement.
We have our differences. We should. It’s what makes for great conversation and thoughtful discourse. Great things can come from conflict. But when we treat each other as the enemy, then we are no longer a union. We are AB UNO MULTI, “From one, many.” Let’s try our best to avoid that.
(Oh yeah, picture taken with an iPhone 6 using PureShot, macro lens by CamRah, cropped in Snapseed, and converted to B&W by Black Cam.)
I came outside after work today to find this: a smidgen of light left in the sky. The days are getting longer. Thankfully.
Scott Lyerly 