Weekly Photo Challenge – Details

Never mind the big picture. This week’s photo challenge is all about details, so let’s consider the details of what that might mean.

Some pictures take a superclose look at something that was already small.

Others zoom in to consider part of a picture, like this bright-eyed fledgling quail who’s small enough to hold in the palm of your hand. Yes, we’re looking at the entire bird…but it’s a small detail cropped out of a larger picture. Oops, I guess we’re back to the big (and not very interesting) picture after all.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Look Up

Just one photo here encouraging you to look up, but you’ll have to look WAY up – all the way up from the base of the Space Needle in Seattle, a relic of a long-ago world’s fair.

That’s not a flying saucer way above you – that’s the base of a rotating restaurant designed to give views of the whole Seattle area. Not hungry? Well, there’s an observation deck even higher up. From the ground to the tip of the tower, it stands 605 feet tall (about 185 meters).

Opposites

This week’s Photo Challenge asks us for a single photo containing opposites, and this one – taken about ten years ago in Williamsburg, Virginia – is full of them.

There’s the past and the present, of course; the eighteenth century meets the twenty-first. But not really; there’s also fact and fiction, since the colonial-era uniform is a reconstruction, as modern as the little boy’s stroller. And then, the child is perfectly serious about what he’s doing, while the man is engaging in a kind of playacting – but it’s serious make-believe; it’s what he does for a living, and it’s meant to be as close to real as modern historians can make it.

It’s enough to make me dizzy, so dizzy I’ll try to spin in opposite directions at the same time.

Ah, the WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge. This week, they’re requesting that we go completely over the top with the most ornate picture we can find…

And here we are: the Chinese Friendship Gate at 10th and Arch Streets in Philadelphia.

It’s definitely ornate; but it’s hard to grasp how complex the patterns are unless you concentrate

on a few

areas of

detail.

Ephemeral

It’s here – and it’s gone.

Blink and you’ll miss it.

That’s what it means to be ephemeral…like the temporary local yarnbombing this March. I nearly missed it myself – I didn’t hear about it until about a week and a half ago, and since then the weather has been dreary and drippy and soggy more days than not. So I spent a little while this morning taking pictures for the current WordPress photo challenge, before the clock loses its hat and scarf and the knitted benches and the pompomed fence v a n i s h.

Weekly Photo Challenge – Rule of Thirds

Oddly, the photo I have on hand that works best for this week’s Photo Challenge looks something like the example…

Wildflower, Glacier Park, July of 2014

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Scale

This week, says WordPress, we should post photos that play around with the idea of “scale“.

Well, okay. I’ll see what I can do. But scale can be tricky in photographs, where you don’t have the kind of built-in clues to size that the real, physical world gives us automatically.

For example, let’s think about the waterfall above. What size is it? Is it a trickle as high as the length of your hand? Maybe it’s a torrent racing down half a mountainside. How could you tell? There’s nothing in the photo to give you a sense of scale; rocks, yes, and a few plants, but good luck identifying them. When I look at the plants in the picture, I’m not sure what they are – and I was there to take the photo.

No, we need something for reference. Something that comes in a range of sizes that everyone is familiar with; something – well, someone – that actually was right next to that waterfall. (Yes, the picture above is pretty tightly cropped.)

Let’s show a little more of the original image. And now – if we look at the lower right corner – we can judge the scale.

Problem solved 🙂

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Depth

What’s the WordPress Photo Challenge asking for this week? Illustrations of depth! Physical depth, emotional depth, metaphorical depth…no matter what kind, looking down over the edge is unsettling.

Sometimes it can be a little shocking to see how much the world changes over time – for example, most people have heard of the ancient city of Corinth.

But it’s amazing to realize that the place people could walk around and live in a few thousand years ago is deep under today’s town.

Angularities

WordPress is asking for photos illustrating “angular” – so here goes. Hold tight – there are corners ahead.

Some things are artistically angular –

while others have both aesthetic and practical reasons for their angles.

-And then there’s the ultimate in practical angularity –

the rigging on a sailboat makes a pleasing design, but every one of those lines is there because it’s needed to control the boat.

Dreamy

…is what WordPress wants to see this week. Romantic, maybe a little strange.

Maybe a little like this.