A Photo a Week: Palm Trees with the Rule of Thirds

Nancy Merrill’s topic for her A Photo A Week challenge is “the rule of thirds.” She explains it this way: The rule of thirds is a standard photographers use to frame their images. You divide the frame into a grid of three across and three down, and then don’t put your subject in the middle […]

A Photo a Week: The Beauty of…

Nancy Merrill’s A Photo a Week challenge this week is Beauty. This is a difficult one to choose only a few photos, for the Earth is full of beauty, natural and manmade! So I am going to choose some of my favorite “beauties” from my photo collection. Beauty of a sunset: Rio de Janeiro, from […]

A Day of Sunshine

Nancy Merrill has a perfectly lovely prompt for this week’s A Photo A Week Challenge: Sunshine! Sunshine is what I crave most after enduring a cold winter in the Midwest, and spring begins to show its face. There is nothing like a sunny day to warm my face, my heart and my mood! I have […]

A Photo a Week: Lining Up to Celebrate

On January 26, we happily celebrated the marriage of our daughter, Tamara, to her soulmate, Liam. It was a very eclectic group of friends that came to celebrate with our families. For Nancy Merrill’s A Photo a Week, here is my interpretation of her theme, Getting Your Ducks in a Row. These are the members […]

A Photo a Week: Contrasting Colors in Nature and by Design

Nancy Merrill’s A Photo a Week challenge this week is about contrasting colors, using a color wheel which shows which colors contrast with each other. In art, we often see paintings with colors that seem to pop out of the image. An artist may use what are called “complementary colors” (contrasting colors) to emphasize something […]

Photo A Week Challenge: Lit From Within

Nancy’s Merrill’s A Photo a Week Challenge has a very creative and season-related theme this week: Lit from Within. Most holiday lights are “lit from within” the tiny bulbs, such as these at Macy’s (formerly Marshall Field’s) in Chicago… but here are some other Macy’s holiday lighting from within. Yesterday my friend Marcia and I […]

A Photo a Week: Things With Wings

Nancy Merrill’s A Photo a Week challenge this week is Things With Wings. Yesterday a friend and I visited Christkindlmarkt in Chicago – an annual German market that sets up for the holiday season at the Daley Plaza. Someone must have been generous with bird seed to attract this plethora of pigeons! Then today it […]

A Photo a Week: The Bridges of Madison County

No, I am not talking about the movie The Bridges of Madison County, but the movie was inspired by the covered bridges in Madison Co., Iowa. However, the movie only featured two of these bridges, while we visited five bridges (a 6th was burned down) while we were in Iowa at the end of September. […]

Open House Chicago 2018-Part 1

Open House Chicago is an annual event – on a weekend in mid-October, about 250 buildings in the Chicago area are open to visitors. Each has a few volunteers who can tell you about the building. It is sometimes called the “architecture tour” because many of these buildings were built 100+ years ago and some […]

Samba: It’s All About Hips, Legs & Feet

Nancy Merrill’s Photo Challenge this week is movement. In the early 1980s, when I was young and spry, I was living in Brazil and loved carnaval. I have never been much of a dancer, but I love to move to music and I did manage to roughly imitate the hip movement of samba. I actually […]