What’s your style?

This is an easy question for me to answer regarding my clothing. I like comfy and casual, loose-fitting, not faddish or trendy. My preferred daily attire of jeans and a t-shirt, flannel shirt, or sweatshirt and tennis shoes or Birkenstocks has not changed much in the last forty years. The sizes have just gotten a little bigger.

As far as food, my style is definitely home cooking with a little comfort food. I don’t like “fussy” foods. I don’t want to have to use fancy names, ingredients, or kitchen tools.

My style of music composition is easy to categorize as well – minimalism with a hint of neo-classicism.

Our home reflects the same stylistic elements as my clothing and food – simple, casual, and comfortable. I don’t like fussy here either. There will always be an Afghan (aka dog blanket) on the couch. You can put your feet up on whatever you can find to put them on. Hot coffee is always ready in the coffee pot and iced tea in the fridge. And, you are always welcome…as long as you are not expecting a fussy environment! We live here and have no housekeeper so there is usually a dish or two in the sink, books and newspapers laying around, and very likely a stray glob of dog hair on the floor somewhere. Call it our style.

However, when it comes to photography, I have not figured out my style. Yes, there are certain subjects that I like to photograph, but every other photographer shoots them as well, so it is not a fondness or talent for a certain subject that speaks to my style. I often include quotes on my photos, but I’m not sure that that is a stylistic element. Many others do that as well, I have no particular “look” to which I am drawn. My daily shots simply reflect my daily moods; therefore, their look is all over the place as my moods are equally all over the place. Lol!

I have fretted for a long time over the fact that my photography does not have a look that is unique to me. Recently though, I had an epiphany. There are several photographers whose work I see regularly and who have a personal style, one that is easily recognizable. I have seen so many of their photos done the same way over and over and over again that I now find them boring, uninspired, and lacking creativity. I shocked myself with this realization. Maybe I’m glad that I never discovered a style!

So what then is style when it comes to photography? Is having an always identifiable look to one”s work a positive or negative thing? Is it OK to be all over the place in your choice of subjects and mood? Does it really matter how my personal style is described by me or anyone else? Do I still want or need a personal style?

Maybe the best I can do is make people ask, “I wonder what the lady in the jeans and t-shirt is photographing today?”

What’s your style?

I have mentioned before that I have been a journaler for most of my adult life.  Over that time these journals have run the gamut of being trivial daily diaries to poetry to pages that hold my deepest secrets and desires.  The thing that was missing from my journals for most of those years, however, was any entries about the bad times, the sad times, the hard times, the ugly times in my life.  Those aspects of my life were marked simply by the absence of any writing.

When I started taking a photo a day as an extension of my journaling process, I was not able to avoid documenting those not so good days.  When you commit to taking a photo every single day and you want that photo to be an authentic and honest depiction of your life on that day, you will inevitably end up with some photos that are not pretty and may be difficult to take.  From my perspective five years in to a photo a day, I say, “Do it anyway!”

The first time that I was really tasked with taking that difficult photo was the day of my dad’s burial.  I was a year and a half into my photo a day project.  I had become comfortable with carrying my camera with me almost every place that I went.  So I picked it up that morning.  For probably the first time in my life, I honestly did not care what anyone thought about the fact that I was taking photos.

Technically there is probably lots wrong with this image, but I can’t see those things.  What I see is a photo that was taken on the most difficult day of my life and the one photo that I am most grateful to have taken.

Since that wet and cold day in October of 2014, I have not shied away from the difficult photos, though none have been as hard is this one was.  I also have become much better about writing about the not so pretty times.  With maturity comes the realization that the tough days in life make us appreciate the joy-filled days so much more!  With experience we learn to take nothing for granted.  And that is truly a gift.

i hit one of those ugly patches in life last week and it has carried into this week.  I was miserably sick for several days.  It would have been easiest to not take any photos at all, but I didn’t want to break a 1500 day streak.  I have grown to a place where I am perfectly ok with my photos not being “good” as long as they are authentic.  It doesn’t get much more real than this!  I literally rolled over in bed, grabbed my phone, and snapped this.  Done!  Sadly, this was my day!

This sums up where I was after five days of this fever.

About the time I started feeling better, our 12 1/2 year-old lab was hospitalized with pneumonia.  It makes me sad to see him sick.  I don’t like seeing him feeling badly.  But yet again, I pulled out my camera.

And I have documented each day of his hospitalization.

Some day I will be able to look back on this series of photos and take comfort in knowing that we did everything that we possibly could to take care of our boy.

You may not be able to look at the photos of your difficult times immediately.  They may need to reside safely hidden on your hard drive for some time before you are ready to look at them.  I feel confident saying, however, that one day you will be glad to have the photos that depict the harder side of life rather than leaving big holes in your story.

Photograph it all!

The political climate in the U.S. appears to be creating division rather than union; I hear at least once a day, “I have had to unfriend another person on Facebook.” In light of this, I have found myself examining closely what I think friendship means, the rights and responsibilities of both being a friend and calling another person a friend. As with most things in life, friendship, what it is and what it means, is complicated!

I looked up the dictionary definition of friendship:

“The state of being friends.”

Well, that was helpful…not! What happened to the rule about not using the word or any form of the word in the definition of a word??? I would have failed many fourth grade spelling tests with definitions like this one!

This led me to look up the definition of friends:

“a person whom one knows and with whom one has a bond of mutual affection, typically exclusive of sexual or family relations.”

Am I any closer to knowing exactly what a friend is? I am hung up on the “mutual affection” part. If we each like the other equally then we are friends. But, if I like you less than you like me, we are not friends because we do not share a “mutual affection” for one another?  Hmmm…maybe I don’t understand what is meant by “mutual affection.”

Mutual – “held in common by two or more parties.”

Affection – “a gentle feeling of fondness or liking.”

Fondness – “affection or liking for someone or something.”

Liking – “a feeling of regard or fondness.”

Regard – “Attention to or concern for something.”

Let’s just say that the dictionary was of no use in helping me to define in concrete terms what a friend really is. The best that I can discern here is that a friendship exists as long as the feelings between the two persons are equal. If we only like one another a little, and it is equally a little, we can be friends.

To me, this sounds more like an acquaintance.

Acquaintance – “a person one knows slightly, but who is not a close friend.”

I almost thought that I had this all figured out. An acquaintance is just someone you know slightly, but for whom you have no mutual gentle feeling of fondness. And then the definition had to use the qualifier “close” friend. I just want to know how to define friend. Don’t complicate the issue with close friend!

After spending a few minutes laughing about my useless travels through the dictionary, my thoughts became a little more serious. Though friendship is a noun, it is hard to define it as such. When I was a child, I was taught that a noun was a person, place or thing. That definition has been expanded to also include an action or an idea. Ah! Now we are getting somewhere. An action or an idea…
Friendship is one of those…but which one?

I started to jot down my personal ideas about friendship.

• Always be there, in the good times, in bad times, and in the in between times.
• Don’t be afraid to speak the truth or to hear the truth.
• Be loyal in words and actions.
• Laugh, cry, laugh, cry, and then laugh and cry some more.
• Celebrate each other’s wins and losses as if they are your own.
• Honor both your similarities and your differences.
• Create a safe place for vulnerabilities.
• Be a positive mirror for one another.
• Don’t let the little things tear you apart, or the big things be the not things that    keep you together.
• Share at least a little bit of joy with each other as often as possible.

Be. Don’t be. Laugh. Cry. Celebrate. Honor. Create. Share.

Friendship is definitely and action! At least in as much as I understand it.

I would not be writing this post, at least not here as a Tuesday in Texas post on Sifted Together, if Tracey and I had not become friends, sharing a friendship that has given me the insight to create the above list of what I believe friendship to be. We have laughed and cried over big things and over little things, during good times and during not so good times. We have shared the thrill of success and the agony of defeat. Some days the agony of defeat has come in the form of recipes and photos that just didn’t work. Such moments have elicited both laughter and tears from both of us, often simultaneously. Lol! In the end, I’m fairly certain that we have laughed way more than we have cried, though. We are brutally honest with one another. It’s a fact; sometimes that brown food just does not look good no matter how pretty the plate on which you place it. And sometimes the photo that you think is terrible is really pretty good!

During the early part of this month when Tracey was so sick, I kept things going here on the blog. And last week, after she was feeling a little better, she gave me a break and handled Friday’s post so that I could enjoy time with a friend who was visiting from out of town. Neither of us had to ask for help or worry about ill feelings. We both knew what the other needed…and those needs were met with sincere words and loyal actions. That’s what friends do for each other. It’s as simple as that.

We might even qualify as close friends, but that’s a whole other discussion for another time.?

During my excursion through dictionaries, the best definition that I found for friend is from The Urban Dictionary:

…people who are aware of how retarded you are and still manage to be seen in public with you, people who make you laugh till you pee your pants, people who cry for you when one of your special items disappears. When you don’t have enough money to get an ice cream, they chip in. Friends are people who know all of your internet passwords. Friends would never make you cry just to be mean.

Well, you can skip the money for ice cream, but coffee…if there’s not enough money for coffee, you bet there’s some chipping in going on!