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Alaska photos: Ketchikan

Posted on September 9, 2013 by Naomi

SO MANY PHOTOS! Let’s just start at the beginning, shall we? This is early morning in Ketchikan, Alaska, as our ship pulled into port.

“By non-Alaskan standards, Ketchikan was village-sized. If the streets were empty, it would take three or four minutes to walk the city center end to end. In summer, it suffered thousands more strangers than it could reasonably bear: logging crews, cruise passengers, seasonal cannery workers, commercial fisherman, boat tourists like me. The little town was bursting with us.” Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau In case you missed it, you can see what equipment I took with me here. You can view more Alaska photos in the gallery here. Many more still to come.

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The 21-day Kindness Challenge begins on Wednesday with thousands joining from 74 different countries! Register now to receive a daily email with inspiration and ideas. There can never be enough kindness in the world!

Posted in Photography | Tagged Alaska, cruise, ideas, Jonathan Raban, Ketchikan, Kindness Challenge | 9 Comments

Alaska: photographically speaking

Posted on September 6, 2013 by Naomi

As soon as we booked our Alaskan cruise back in February, I started researching which lenses to rent to take with me. I changed my mind several times, but finally went with the Canon EF-S 15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM and the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS USM II with the Canon Extender EF 2x III from Borrow Lenses. They are incredibly responsive and helpful there. I was hoping that with what is essentially a 400mm telephoto, I’d be able to shoot some good size images of bears, eagles, and other wildlife.

Here’s what I took with me in my Lowepro backpack:

In the end, I’m happy with my photos all 2200 of them. 🙂 I shot most of them in RAW, so I am sorting through them to select which ones to spend time editing. I’m about halfway through.

The wide angle was awesome… lightweight, sharp, and fast. Here’s one taken from a helicopter over Juneau’s spectacular glaciers and mountains.

The telephoto was super heavy but worth it for sure. I was able to get great shots of Orca and humpback whales and to zoom in to capture bald eagles, harbor seals, and sea stars. Rather than tiny dots in the final photo, they appear true to size and crystal clear. Because of its weight and size, I couldn’t take this lens with me on our helicopter tour and I chose not to carry it around Seattle for the few days we spent there.

Switching between the two lenses would be my single complaint. I wish I’d rented another camera body so I could have both around my neck, at least for our Tracy Arm Fjord excursion. Someday…

Next week, I’ll be sharing some photos of Ketchikan and Misty Fjords. Come see! If you would like to see more photos from the first half of our trip, I am posting them to the gallery here as I edit them.

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The 21 day Kindness Challenge begins September 11. Join me?

“Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.” ~ Lao Tzu

Posted in Photography | Tagged Alaska, Borrow Lenses, Canon lenses, cruise, extender, glaciers, helicopter, iceberg, photos, RAW, telephoto, Tracy Arm Fjord, wide angle | 5 Comments

Photo-heart connection: an infinite storm of beauty

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Naomi

“Standing here, one learns that the world, though made, is yet being made; that this is still the morning of creation.” ~ John Muir, Travels in Alaska

I always enjoy being part of Kat’s Photo-Heart Connection and visiting the other participants’ blogs. Haven’t done it before? You can learn more about how to find your Photo-Heart Connection here.

This summer we cruised Alaska’s Inside Passage. Many have already done so and many more still will, yet the experience of being amidst the glaciers and seeing them before me felt individual and powerful. When I think of the sheer time and the amount of snowfall it takes to form such beauties, I am speechless. We are but dust in the grand scheme of the universe, and yet I clearly felt that each of us was formed with intention and great love. I felt a surge of purpose while staring in wonder at the giant marvels before me. I am profoundly grateful to have photos of the experience.

Since returning home, I have been reading individual narratives of wilderness exploration and life in remote areas of Alaska. John Muir, perhaps the quintessential conservationist, who had such passion for the wilderness of Alaska and California, says it much better than I ever could.

“When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty.” ~ John Muir, Travels in Alaska

Click here to view my other Photo-Heart connection posts and here to see a linky list to the other participants’ blogs.

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The 21 day Kindness Challenge begins September 11. Join me?

“Nothing can make our lives, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.” ~ Leo Tolstoy

Posted in Photo-Heart Connection, Quotations, Spirituality | Tagged Alaska, beauty, John Muir, kat eye studio, people, photo-heart connection, South Sawyer Glacier, space | 16 Comments

September 1 OLW blog hop: out into the world

Posted on September 1, 2013 by Naomi

Hello friends! Boy those calendar pages are flying, don’t you think? September brings such a feeling of new beginnings. New school year, the Jewish New Year and High Holidays, the promise of Autumn freshness on the horizon. The air trembles with possibility!

Ali’s One Little Word class assignment for last month was to bring our word out into the world. Write it or create it somewhere and take a photo and then print it big to fit in our albums.

I never really found a way to spell stillness with pebbles on the driveway or anything, but when we were in Alaska this past month, I imagined climbing this glacier and carving the word into the snow and ice. The awesome beauty seen out on this fjord was palpable. Photoshop helped make it happen. (Glaciers are anything but still, but I’ll be telling you more about what I’m learning next week when I start sharing some of my photos with you.)

For some reason, I was constantly seeing the word simplify this past month. I wonder if I would have been as tuned in to this if I hadn’t been purposefully looking for my word. I found it on books, on websites… even vacuums and tractors! Who knew?

And so I am listening.

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Be sure to visit these other participants to see what everyone is up to. You can see other posts about my OLW project here.

Lee: http://thelinarstudio.typepad.com/embracelife/ (our amazing organizer!)

Cheri: http://cheriandrews.blogspot.com

Margareta: http://www.paperpilekitten.com/

Veronica: http://www.veronicanorris.typepad.com/

Ruth: http://suburbansahm.blogspot.com

Missus Wookie: mrswookieswanderings.blogspot.com

Naomi: http://www.poeticaperture.com/ <— You are here.

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The 21 day Kindness Challenge begins September 11. Join me?

Posted in Mindfulness, One Little Word | Tagged Alaska, Ali Edwards, glacier, Missus Wookie, OLW, print, simplify, slowing down, space, stillness, time | 7 Comments

Tipping the balance toward love: my motherhood journey

Posted on August 30, 2013 by Naomi

The other day I realized that we have slowly worked our way through 4 boxes of princess bandaids in the past month or so. My daughter has a ~~psycho~~ very strong aversion to any slight scratch, as well as loud noises, eating most foods, and even washing her dear blanket.

A usual day with her contains lots of energy drains – whining, long bedtimes, trying to get some nutrition into her, her continual separation anxiety/my lack of any semblance of privacy. She is growing. She’s not perfect; nor am I. Yet now it’s much less exhausting to me and much more OK.

She has not suddenly outgrown her fears. Rather, the change has come from within myself. I have stopped wishing to escape the situation. I have simply accepted what is and realized how humorous it sometimes is. Somehow I have started laughing at these things rather than getting irritated. Sometimes I see the situation from above, or as if it were on a sitcom, and I find it hilarious. What can I tell ya? It works!

By being more accepting, I am actually much better able to be present for my daughter in what are clearly difficult or fearful moments for her. I am better able to guide her toward changing these annoying behaviors from this mindset than from the perspective of exhausted frustration.

Every time I see from the perspective of LOVE rather than of LACK, I am stretching my heart to be able to let more love inside. Love is what it’s all about. I celebrate the baby steps, the small progress, and the courage to keep trying. And I try to remember that the more I nurture myself, the more love I have to give to those around me.

My daughter will continue to freak out at loud noises or the tiniest of scratches… at least for a while. Yet I love her tiny self so much and I want to fully experience her childhood. I want to love her exactly as she is today. Sometimes she is so dramatic that I can practically see the Hollywood marquee with her name on it in lights. These are the times I know I’m tipping the scale toward more love… for her and for me.

Have a lovely Labor Day weekend, friends. Monday’s post will run on Sunday this week… the calendar pages are flyin’ and it’s already time for another OLW update. 🙂

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The 21 day Kindness Challenge begins September 11. Join me?

Posted in Mindfulness, Motherhood | Tagged balance, journey, LACK, Love, Monday, perspective, princess | 11 Comments

WOYWW: messy fun art in progress!

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Naomi

I have never participated in What’s on Your Workdesk Wednesday (WOYWW) but I absolutely love looking at the desks of those who DO! I love seeing craft rooms and works-in-progress and all things crafty. Here’s an explanation from Stamping Ground of what WOYWW is. Since there’s no commitment and I’ve been a lurker for so long, I decided I should probably play along every so often. 🙂 So if there are any new friends visiting from that link-up… WELCOME!!

I made this small canvas in Junelle Jacobson’s Wild Art Summer class and I very much wanted to try making one (or two!) on a huge scale. I envision this pair of 12×30 canvases hanging together in our living room. I’m trying to have the colors complement each other and pick up tones from around the room.

Until last Wednesday, I hadn’t done any art for about a month. Crazy, I know, but it was too hard with my daughter underfoot all that time. It was a painful hiatus and one I probably won’t inflict on myself again. The very second I got home from dropping her off at her first day back at preschool, I headed directly to the craft room and gooped up a bunch of heavy body paint onto these canvases. It felt SO GOOD!