photo challenges

weekly photo challenge: the journey home

The last part of the Diary [Sarashina Diary] is concerned chiefly with accounts of pilgrimages and dreams. She married, who and when is not recorded, and bore children. Her husband dies, and with his death the spring of her life seems to have run down. Her last entry is very sad: “My people went to live elsewhere and I lived alone in my solitary home.” So we leave her “a beautiful, shy spirit whose life had known much sorrow.” ~Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan

Nikon D750   f/5.6  1/400s   125mm   4000 ISO

Image and excerpt from Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan submitted in response to Traveling at Wits End’s photo challenge: the journey home.

lens artists photo challenge: splash

     

Even water could not live on– 
So lonesome is the mountain 
Of the leaf-scattering stormy wind. ~The Sarashin Diary (Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan)

Snowy Range…   Nikon D750    f/5.6   1/3200s  145mm   2800 ISO 

Visit Patti at  P.A. Moed to join this week’s lens-artists photo challenge: splash

weekly challenge: photograph when one door closes…

This week Traveling at Wits End’s guest post is St. Louis-based photographer David Adams.  He writes that doors:

can be many things. They can be barrier, they can be invitations. They can be utilitarian, they can be ornate. Doors show personality or they can protect us from the world.

David challenges photographers to find “closed doors…no peaking inside” and to look for color, shape, decoration, as well as details…to find a door with personality.

The first time I found myself photographing doors was about 40 years ago while we were living in Newport, Rhode Island. Since then I also found that the doors within historical districts of the southern part of the United States, Australia, and Europe to be intriguing–the west…not so much.

Yesterday, while on an out-of-town trip with camera in hand and this challenge in mind, I undertook a photo walk through a small rural community.  Regrettably, the doors within this town are…boring.  Yet, I found myself thinking how sidewalks, steps, and porches are like a preface to the stories behind closed doors.

door 3

door 4

door 5

While the images above are not beautifully composed and do not specifically “focus” on doors, they do invite me to story the lives of the people who live behind these closed doors and to ponder the question, “how is the war economy doing for you?”