The Life in My Years

An anthology of life

This week, Anne, author of the site, Slow Shutter Speed is leading the Lens Artists Photo Challenge with the topic, Monochrome. Love it. For most of my photographic life, I’ve stuck with color photography. Why black and white when you can see life and things as they are. Oh, what a fool I was. A …

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Banner photo: Shipshewana, Indiana Dan, author of the site, Departing in Five Minutes, leads this week’s Lens Artists Challenge, and he’s selected the topic, Unbound: Escaping Your Confines And Seeing The World. Once again, I’m combining the Lens Artist Challenge with my Monthly Monochrome series. Dan writes, “From a day trip to a road trip …

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This week Tina of Travels and Trifles has challenged us to a Treasure Hunt. She’s proposed a list of treasure items which includes: A pet or pets (yours or someone else’s) The moon or the sun (extra credit for both in one image) Clouds (extra credit if you also include rain or snow) A reflection …

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Parke County, Indiana. Looking for the Mill Creek Covered Bridge, I turned left when I should’ve turned right. The road winds through some cornfields until the cornfields end and the road dips into a dark, woody hollow. It’s a foreboding place. A twinge of anxiety in my gut. Just about to the bottom of the …

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This week’s Lens Artist Photo Challenge, hosted by Tina Schell of Travels and Trifles, is all about the Rule of Thirds, a theory of composition which divides a photo or a painting into horizontal and vertical thirds, forming a grid of nine equal segments (Picture the opening credits of The Brady Bunch or a typical …

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This week, on her site PHOTOGRAPHIAS, Sofia focuses on the unfocused or, more formally termed, bokeh. Bokeh is a Japanese word that refers to blur which serves to enhance the subject of a photo (as opposed to motion blur as one might see in a photo of a race car in action). Photo Techniques magazine …

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I was browsing some interesting photo blog posts and, while I wasn’t particularly lost I did find a provocative challenge – lost. Debbye Smythe hosts the the Sunday One Word Challenge and one could get lost in all the possibilities. And so….. I hear the word lost quite often in our house. One of my …

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This week’s Lens Artist Challenge hosted by Ann-Christine is curves. Looking through the archives, I found that I wasn’t at all thrown for a loop. So allow me to throw a few curves. A bend in the road always adds some drama to a photo. The viewer is left to put the imagination to work. …

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“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.” ~ Bruce Lee …

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It’s been some time since I’ve submitted to a photo challenge. Cee Neuner’s Midweek Madness Challenge is, Pick a Topic. Some suggestions are; sky, clouds, trees, grass and landscape. So here goes. Below, cornfield in rural Indiana Below, Clouds and sky outside of Shipshewana, Indiana. Below, a tree lined road outside of Saxesville, Wisconsin  Below, …

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A chapter in an occasional series of posts documenting an autumn 2021 road trip through the Midwest. Throughout the years that I’ve been blogging, I’ve often searched for new blogs to follow. Maybe I was looking for something in my areas of interest; history, photography or politics. Maybe it was a search for new ideas, …

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The Red Lodge, Montana area attracts hunters, fishermen, hikers and campers, but my single purpose was to drive the Beartooth Scenic Highway. Sixty five miles long, starting at Red Lodge, the Beartooth snakes up the Beartooth Mountains to an elevation of just under 11,000 feet before dropping down into the twin towns Cooke City and …

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At the northernmost edge of the town of Red Lodge, Montana, a cabin hewn of logs and caulking sits amid a ring of river stones in front of the Red Lodge Visitor Center. If the old cabin were sitting deep in the woods at the end of a dusty road it wouldn’t draw a glance, …

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Fashionably late.  Again. I’ve managed to lag behind in the photo challenges so why should this week be any different? The subject for LAST Saturday’s Lens Artist Challenge is Getting Away. What an appropriate title for 2021. We were stuck in 2020. Cabin fever, depression and not a small amount of despair. In the late …

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“Black and white is mix of toughest simplicity and easiest complexity.” ~ Vikrmn, Corpkshetra I’m a late arrival to this party, the black and white photo challenge, hosted by Anne Sandler. Better late than never? “There are some locations I go to and they scream black and white to me because of the ambiance. For …

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When we started out, we hadn’t included a ghost tour in our plans. Thing is, when you cover 8000 miles over sixteen states, the diverse American story is bound to offer up a collection of spectres. The ghosts that we encountered weren’t those mischievous, annoying spirits who move the furniture about while you’re out of …

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Friday, May 21, 2021 Day four Mother Nature. Sometimes she can be a real; you know, that “B” word? When she gets to feeling a little fishwifey, she’ll cut loose with an earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. I had a friend in Missouri who used to hunker down when the …

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Thursday, May 20, 2021 “Pardon me, you left your tears on the jukebox” That’s George Strait on the radio. It’s day three of a month-long road trip. We’ve travelled down the eastern side of California’s San Joaquin Valley and are now passing through the Mojave Desert on the Southeastern edge of the state. When it …

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The fish house The carcass of the Nantucket Restaurant lies at water’s edge on the northwest corner of Crockett. The Nantucket was a local seafood joint, one of those simple, honest, unpretentious places that offered an easy atmosphere, neighborly service and a good meal at a fair price.  The best thing on the menu was …

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Crockett, California (known to locals as Sugar City) can be a hard place to figure. At a glance you might take it for a Rust Belt community of the Midwest, sitting on the shore of one of America’s great rivers. There’s a factory, the big old brick C&H Sugar refinery that sits on the edge …

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