weekend recap, april 7

1. Friday hike | 2. Finally! GBH | 3. Studio time | 4. Ballpark Saturday | 5. Spring, springing | 6. Instagram Cookbook Club | 7. Unexpected Treasure

Hello my dears. How did your week and weekend treat you? I, of course didn't get nearly as much done during my week-long hiatus as I needed to, and now it's raining, so instead of knuckling down to meet some deadlines, all I want to do is crawl back into bed.

We (a portion of my photogroup, at least) finally made it to The Grand Budapest Hotel. All I can say about it is this: go see it. I actually need to go again. The story is so captivating that I want to go back just to pay attention to Wes Anderson's spectacular imagery. I'm in love.

Our days as parents, our family life these days, revolves around the ball field. Cal plays on two teams this year, and that's kept us hopping. He plays for his school and for a rec league team. One team brings him great joy and the other, well, less so. It's a tricky balance right now. Careening from success and exaltation to frustration and dejection. Is 14 too young for a sports psychologist? (Wink) We remain ever hopeful that one will spill over into the other, the success, that is! Not the dejection. Never that. At last week's game, Neel told me about an article he saw (and heard) on NPR about the concept of hustle. It was by noted sports writer Frank Deford, and you can hear the audio here. What he says is that hustle, a word that in regular life has no real good connotations, means nothing but good in sport. That guy was a real hustler? Not good, right? The team that lost, but showed real hustle? All good. Last week, Neel counted the number of times he heard the word hustle (eight). This week we forgot to count. Our kids played a bigger, better team. They got down early, by a lot, but you know what? They stayed focused and kept their heads in the game and won. Showed a lot of hustle. High praise indeed.

Before I go, I want to draw your attention to the last picture in my collage. It's Neel, as a tiny baby, only two weeks old. He's cradled in his mom's arms and surrounded by two family friends. Neel's mom died many years ago, when he was just 14. The age Cal is now. Neel's brother got his hands on some photos and texted them to us last night, with the hard copies to follow. With his mom gone, each photo like this is an unexpected and priceless gift. I find the look on her face so serene and moving. I can't stop looking at it. Neel quietly looked at it for a long, long time last night. "She was taken away too soon."

weekend recap, end of march

1. spilled milk | 2. annoyed? | 3. slow start | 4. twilight time | 5. new haunt | 6. i made something! | 7. starts | 8. one flower | 9. i made them again!

I have a lot of people talk to me about Instagram. I know I've talked about it here before, but with our class running again, the chatter seems to be increasing so I thought I'd touch on it again. My friend Jackie talks about it as her "tribe," and that's a bit how I feel about it too. These are my people here. I don't have gazillions of followers and I don't get scores of likes on every photo, but, gratifying though that may be, it's never really about that for me.

One of the things we teach in our Ditch Your Gear class is that the best part of using your phone for a camera is how freeing it is. As photographers we're all taught about manual settings and the exposure triangle and how to stop down your aperture to change the look of your photo. With your phone, all the settings are taken care of for you so you're freed to think solely about creativity and composition. (Kim, my co-teacher and I, tend to put our fingers in our ears when it comes to the technical stuff any way!)

On Instagram you can find any number of communities and challenges and prompts, and I tend to jump in and out of these at will. I'm a sometime rule-follower. If the prompt appeals to me, I'll try to make it happen. And when I say "appeals," I mean just that. It can be hard and challenging and still appeal. I tend not to get interested in prompts like "annoyed" (totally went off the rails there and posted peonies...WTH?) or "friendship." I find it hard to shoot what feel like cliches. And really, I don't feel like I'm clever enough to make a prompt like that truly eye-catching. But prompts like "stars," or "one flower" or even "negative space?" Well, I'm all over that. I suppose if I were trying to get noticed or increase my reach, I'd jump endlessly into these forums and be religious about posting pictures inspired by every prompt I see, but the truth is, that's not what Instagram is about for me. As with anything that happens with my creative and online life (at least where they intersect), it's about inspiration and connection. I love seeing beautiful photographs in my feed, as much as I love seeing your puppy sitting in a ray of sunshine. I guess I hope, at least occasionally, I'm putting a pretty photo in yours.

So how did our weekend play out across Instagram? A food styling prompt fell into my lap as literally as spilled (butter) milk, a baseball game with a great catch needed to be recorded, and a beautiful marquee against a steely sky caught my eye. I made some pretzels too (wink).

My experience with this medium has certainly changed. Undergramming, overgramming, snapping endless cups of coffee, camera phone only, or DSLR, all the debates about Instagram will, I'm sure, continue. And yet, still. It's the tribe for me.

So gang, I think I'm going to take the week off this week. We have some things that need tending to around here, and I want to give them my full attention. I like giving my blog my full attention too, and this is one of those times when I can't do both. Thanks for your patience with me. XO