5 - Spoon!

Emma, bringing me a spoon to stir the oatmeal we were cooking for breakfast. She's so marvelously creative and spontaneous, and -- even better! -- ever willing to let me photograph her.

4 - White Winter Hymnal

Awakening to find that it had snowed as we slept, unknowing. The fascination of looking at the white-covered world made new while we sit beside the window and gently smooth and brush the sleep tangles from Emma's long red hair.

3 - The Immaculate Heart

I had just dropped the boys at school, a frigid January morning, 19 degrees F and a stiff wind. Exactly the kind of morning you want to speed back home and then stay there. Except that I spotted this plastic bag stuck in some briars along the road, backlit by the early morning winter sun still low in the sky. It struck me how much it looked like El Corazon, the heart card in the Mexican game of Loteria -- played like bingo, only using pictures, and the iconography is simple and traditional and incredibly, compellingly beautiful. Or maybe the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I saw this and thought this even as I drove on past.

But. Then I turned around. And got out of the car, and took pictures til my fingers froze, got back in the car, looked at the pictures, saw how they could be better -- I realized I probably needed to lie on the ground to get the angle I wanted -- cursed, hopped back out of the car and walked back down to the spot where the bag was flapping in the wind. A few minutes later a Baltimore County Police squad car slowed to a stop, to inquire if the woman rolling around the frozen mud and shredded silage at the edge of a corn field maybe needed any assistance. Thanks, officer, but I'm fine, I told him. He looked skeptical but drove on.

And here is the image. It exists. I almost tremble now to recall the moment that I decided to stop, and really look. To make a photograph. Because, recently, I have simply kept on driving.  Even as I feel remote photography has once again become from this life I live every day, the only one I get. Later, I'll do it later, I'm always thinking. But later never comes, and I've also been around long enough now to be all too keenly aware that it's also always later than we think. (Time -- or, at least, my experience and expectations of time -- ceased being infinite awhile ago. I think when I turned 42 and realized that this 40s thing, it wasn't going away, and even if I'm not yet on the downside slope of this mortal coil you can see it from here).

 It was such a tremulous, fragile instant -- so bitter cold outside, I had forgotten my coffee and desperately wanted more, the pressure of the ten million things that I needed to be getting done. I could have glanced, noticed, kept driving -- I've been doing a lot of that recently. But I stopped. And when I drove home after, half-frozen and giddy from the unexpected side trip my morning had taken, I realized how good it feels to have this expectation in the day. That I will set aside a few brief moments to stop. To look, really look. To do nothing else but. My hectic life isn't going anywhere, but doing this pushes back the walls the tiniest bit. Makes some breathing room. 

I am not religious, but the way this image resonated in my head afterward kept calling to mind the prayer for the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
 
Hail, Heart most holy,
Hail, Heart most meek,
Hail, Heart most humble,
Hail, Heart most pure,
Hail, Heart most devout,
Hail, Heart most wise,
Hail, Heart most patient,
Hail, Heart most obedient,
Hail, Heart most vigilant,
Hail, Heart most faithful,
Hail, Heart most blessed,
Hail, Heart most merciful,
Hail, most loving Heart of Mary,
mother of us all.

2 - Onward, and Upward

Goofing in the kitchen, Tuesday morning before school.  Cole in his size 6 shark underpants, doing his best imitation of a rocket blasting off.  "Mama, watch me. Mama look, I'm a rocket. Mama, WATCH!!!!  Fiiiiiire...POWER!"

That's when the urge woke up from its long slumber, tucked way back in a dark corner of my brain.  Yawned, turned over, then reared itself up and looked me square in the eye: start posting photos again, girl. And I realized I want to. A quiet third attempt at completeing a 365 photo project. Why now? Things are as unsteady and unreliable in my life these days as they've been during the first two go-rounds -- I'm in even more dire financial straits these days, not enough work coming my way and I rarely even get an acknowledgement that I've sent my resume, much less an interview, when I've applied for jobs. Other fun goings-on include being in the nerve-wracking end game of divorce negotiations, and watching mostly helplessly as my younger son struggles unhappily with school and life in general. All this stress and existential wear and tear is manifesting itself physically -- I'm still on the tail end of a monthlong bout with pneumonia.  So. Not a promising set of circumstances for success this time around. But perhaps the third time's the charm.

My beloved friend Amy, who commenced her own 365 over the summer, was very supportive when I finally confessed how it's hard for me to visit her 365 site and admire the brave, creative work she's doing (http://interspace365.blogspot.com/).  "It's very difficult to maintain creativity when personal stress is so thick. I have been there and I know I did very little during that time," she wrote. "The important thing is to care for yourself as much as you can and just give yourself a pass. Once you feel like being creative you'll know things are healing."

Here's to healing.

1 - Third Time's the Charm

It seems I've begun again.  Let us see where this trail leads us.

37

This photo was a total accident, but I've really found myself drawn to it.  I was zeroing in on an exposure -- my biggest takeaway from the Maine workshop was that one reason I hated digital images I'd made was that I'd been letting the camera call the shots on the exposure, so now I do everything manually.  Which means, sometimes, I miss wildly on my first few frames and they're crazy dark or way blown out.  I took successfully exposed images after this one, but this is the one I keep going back to.  Sometimes our accidents turn out better than our intended efforts....

36

Thanks, everyone, for the well-wishing and supportive messages I got wishing me luck on this photo assignment.  It was a feature story for the Baltimore CityPaper, about a once-beloved local beer -- National Premium -- that disappeared 15 years ago and is now being resurrected by a local businessman.  My job was to meet the businessman at the brewery and get a variety of shots to illustrate this.  Once upon a time I would have been apprehensive about taking this job because I have struggled so mightily to make pictures I like, using digital cameras.  For the past few years I've ended up hating the results of  pretty much every assignment I've shot. 

I left feeling pretty good about this one, though.  In Maine I'd made some peace with digital, and felt more like this would work, that I would make some photos I actually like.  It was a good experience -- the guy was friendly and, although he would pretty much just woodenly stand there waiting for me to take his picture, he would stand anywhere I asked.  After Andrea's class this time around I felt much more comfortable being very directive -- stand here, hold your head this way.  So instead of just photographing whatever happened to happen, I made some things happen, and that felt good.

So what might be funny about that experience is that the picture I like best is this one, a grab shot at the very end when he was walking out.  Which is exactly how I've always worked.