I thought I would join The Daily Post photo challenge. This week they’re asking for CONTRASTS. I hope I captured some interesting contrasts.
This is looking up the staircase at the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Fla. I took this with my iPhone.
I captured a macro photo of a strange spider in its web. This was taken with my iPhone as well.
I really liked the contrast in colors on the leaves of this polka dot plant in my backyard.
For The Daily Post’s weekly photo challenge, we are supposed to show perspective. The eye can be fooled.
“Don’t color outside the lines,” I said. “And make the eyes blue.”
“I like to do it my way. Use different colors. Change the shapes a little,” replied Opal as she chewed the inside of her cheek. Coloring took a lot of concentration.
Exasperated, I said, “Are you using orange for the eyes? And blue for the skin? Giant blue ears are scary. You made them almost as big as the head.” It was a horrifying representation of a young girl with her dog. Who ever heard of a girl with giant blue ears and orange eyes walking a green dog with yellow polka dots?
“Can you at least make the hair normal?” I asked.
“Whatever,” she said with a crooked smirk.
Opal frantically colored the girl’s hair, swirling and scratching with violet and indigo until she created what looked like a bruised and battered Medusa head. Satisfied with her work, she leaned back in her chair and flashed a dazzling smile at me. Her sizzling red, coiled tresses and protruding ears eerily resembled her drawing.
“I’m all done. What do you think?” Opal asked.
“I think I’m a little worried.”
“I’m gonna sign my name now. Ready?”
With hesitation, I said, “Ready.”
Using the black crayon, Opal scrawled her name in big, wobbly letters. As she trailed off at the end of the L, the room seemed to spin. I felt as if I were caught in a vacuum, the air sucked upward. Then, in the next instant, I became real, a real girl plucked from the pages of a child’s coloring book.
I stood in front of Opal with my Dumbo ears, feral hair and carroty eyes, and tried to look happy. She covered her mouth with her tiny hands as a giggle escaped. I looked down at my grassy green dog and cringed. I mumbled a wish to be normal, pretty.
Opal said proudly, “You are normal and pretty. I made you look just like me.”
This fantastical story was written for Trifecta. This week’s challenge was to write a story or poem between 33 and 333 words containing the third definition of the word: WHATEVER (adverb) Used to show that something is not important.
I also incorporated The Daily Post’s daily writing prompt to use Roy G. Big – that is, all seven colors of the rainbow — Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet — somewhere in the story.
This week’s photo challenge for the Daily Post was to show Community. For me, ancient rock art, petroglyphs, and dwellings of the indigenous people of the American Southwest represent community. I took these photos a few years ago in Arizona, near Tucson and Sedona.
Petroglyph of the Hohokam near Tucson, Arizona, Saguaro National Park. The Circle of Life.
Kokopelli petroglyph at Honanki Heritage Site near Sedona, Arizona
On a recent road trip, my husband and I stopped at Lookout Mountain in Chattanooga, Tennessee. We took the Ruby Falls cave tour. For those of you who don’t know about Ruby Falls, it’s a spectacular 145-foot waterfall located 1,120 feet beneath Lookout Mountain.
This week’s Daily Post photo challenge was to show GRAND. I thought an underground waterfall qualified.
The weekly photo challenge for The Daily Post is to show saturated. Here are my photos saturated with color. Please enjoy in moderation or with tinted lenses.
I took close-up photos of a U.S. five dollar bill to show the lines, textures and patterns that are generally missed by the naked eye.
These are images of a cholla cactus skeleton. After all the succulent flesh and spines dry up and fall off, this is what’s left. I love the texture and pattern.
I took close-ups of a Hawaiian Ti leaf, one newly emerged and the other aging. The colors and lines are amazing.
She dragged her wounded, useless legs behind her. They felt of lead, heavy and dead, as they rustled against the wood floor. She tried to be quiet, but the fear of being discovered amplified each movement of her injured body. She had to find a hiding place, one the intruder would never find.
At the sound of footfalls, she froze. They were thunderous and closing on her. Her brain said move, but she was paralyzed. Her body couldn’t endure more torture from him.
Her eyes scrutinized her surroundings, frantically searched for asylum. The closet. It would have to be the closet. Obvious, but her only choice in the sparsely furnished room. But it seemed so far away to her exhausted body and terrified mind.
Exerting all her remaining strength, she wriggled across the open space and slipped into the shadowy closet. She waited. Listened.
Time seemed to fester. The stillness asphyxiated her. Where was the intruder?
The urge to look overpowered her good judgment. She peeked through the door crack. Nothing moved on the other side.
Feeling confident, she slid though the opening. She saw the mammoth foot hover above her for a fleeting moment before it smashed her furry, eight-legged body into a pulverize pile of tissue.
The young boy twisted his size 11 foot, ensured the spider was officially dead and exclaimed, “Gotcha you creep!”
I wrote this weird little tale for The Daily Post’s Daily Prompt: What a Twist!
The prompt: “Tell us a story — fiction or non-fiction — with a twist we can’t see coming.” They asked for, “SURPRISE!” I hope I delivered it.
In honor of randomness, and because I like using that word, I’m sharing some arbitrary photos for The Daily Post’s Weekly Photo Challenge. This week it’s about focus. Something I often lack in life and can’t achieve in a photo.
I picked these photos because I don’t know where else I would share some of this odd stuff, if not on my blog.
The beachy photos were taken in Florida. The catamarans are a shot from the island of Dry Tortugas National Park, 70 miles west of Key West. One of the least visited national parks in the U.S. You can learn more about the park here. It’s a spectacular place to visit. I used the tilt-shift effect on the photo.
The seaweed comes from Ft. Myers Beach, as well as the sand dollars. The sand dollars were dead when I found them. I decided not to remove their prickly spines or bleach them. They are all natural. In case you didn’t know, some sand dollars are brown and furry in life. The white ones you typically see are bleached and cleaned over time by the sun or humans. Both photos were shot in macro/microscopic mode.
The weed roots and the lizard skeleton were taken in macro/microscopic mode. I suppose I should explain the skeleton. He was found that way in the pool skimmer; snuffed out by drowning in chlorine water. Poor thing. A moment of silence would be nice. He’s commemorated in a grotesque photo for all of eternity now.
Using tilt-shift again, I created the effect on the Pike’s Peak Cog Railway atop the mountain, at over 14,000 feet, near Colorado Springs, Colorado. It’s a dizzying ride up.
I hope you enjoyed looking at my focus photo ensemble. Please let me know what you think. Feedback is always appreciated.
I wrote this based on a daily prompt from The Daily Post: The Art of the Open Letter. Some of you will understand why I wrote it.
August 13, 2013
Dear Mosquito,
Your fixation on my blood has become quite disturbing. You lie in wait, watching, hovering until my scent elicits action. The covert attacks happen anywhere and everywhere. In my house. On the screened in patio. In the yard. While writing, shopping, eating, sleeping, swimming. Continue reading
Here is another attempt at the weekly photo challenge from The Daily Post. A landscape and portrait shot of the same subject.
This is an aloha lily leia with a perfectly posed water droplet. Beautiful pineapple shaped spikes teeming with tiny, pink flowers. It’s one of my favorites.
This is my attempt at the weekly photo challenge from The Daily Post. Two photos of the same subject or scene, one in landscape (horizontal) and one in portrait (vertical) orientation. I decided to use one of my favorite subjects, a plant, close-up.
This plant, growing in a pot on my patio, has turned out to be quite invasive. It sprouts and drops new sections that grow anywhere, including in the brick. A hearty plant indeed. And as an added bonus, I captured a stray hair or some such thing on the leaves.
Chronic Nonsense 