Alone at the edge of the forest. Sap quietly circulating everywhere, like a myriad of creeks finding their way through every twist and turn. Rising through the trunks, splitting at every crossroads, distributing itself through the branches all the way up. Feeding everything. A sea of trees communicating and cooperating through subterranean networks of fungi. One giant organism living, breathing, regulating itself, interacting with the environment. A web of life bringing together plants, fungi, insects, animals. Lifeblood flowing everywhere, unseen and unheard.
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We say that somebody sees the world in black and white when they seem to be lacking nuance and attention to detail and specificity. But there’s a whole world of shades between black and white. A spectrum of nuances and possibilities. And sometimes it’s exactly because we restrict ourselves to black and white that we can better express visually what is unique, interesting, or unusual about our subject.
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We are all faces in the crowd unless somebody looks at us with the kind of attention and care that takes us out of the crowd. The attention and care that reveals what is unique and lovable and just ours. Or unless we can look at ourselves like that. Tough call. In this week’s Lens-Artists Photo Challenge, John asks us to explore what it means to be a face in the crowd. Or to be portrayed as one.
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This week, Amy invites us to explore different ways of framing photos. What is framing? For me, it’s how we use physical delimitations, leading lines, light, color, texture, and focus to highlight the photo’s subject matter and to create a coherent narrative.
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In this week’s Lens-Artists Challenge, Ann-Christine invites us to share some work in progress. She is the first to notice that, after all, everything and everybody is work in progress. Endless choices seem to be opening up here. But too many choices can make it as difficult as too few choices.
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Dawn is hosting this week’s LAPC with the topic “Fences”. I will illustrate this with photos from last year when I was traveling between Belgium and France. I was playing with the idea of a photo project focused on borders. The idea did not turn into a project so far. I guess its time didn’t come yet.
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Let me take you for a moment through the streets of old Brussels. At the end of a certain Impasse Sainte Pétronille, carefully hidden just a few steps from Grand Place, there’s an old brick and wood house that holds inside much more than it gives away at first glance. Weekend tourists may know the beer-tasting tours that invariably pass by the pub downstairs. The pub where you can drink the amber beer produced by the monks of the Orval Abbey, in the south of Belgium, while patting the cat of the house. But locals and people who’ve been living…
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This week’s Lens-Artists Photo Competition, hosted by Brian, focuses on Fragments. A story is a collection of fragments that fit together. What’s interesting about it is that there is no predefined way in which they fit together. It’s the storytelling that does the trick. Life is a collection of fragments that we try to infuse with meaning, that we try to turn into a story. What’s interesting about it is that there is no predefined meaning. We are creating it as we go along. We are the storytelling it.
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“I Think It’s Nice That We Share The Same Sky,” says Sophie to her father in Aftersun, a movie about parenthood, growing up, connection, and loss. It’s nice that we share the same sky because, in a way, we’re together under this sky even when we’re apart. If the sky can connect us with loved ones far away, it can also connect us to ourselves – the version of ourselves that we used to be. It’s still the same sky. It’s just that the planets and the stars have moved across the sky so many times, each one describing its…
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The train won’t be on time. The vegetation has long taken over these abandoned tracks. I’m standing here as the sun goes down and this incredibly warm light washes over me. In the background, everything lits up like a giant bonfire.