A New Year...

It’s a New Year…2013. This past year seemed to drag on at times, but when the end came I wondered where the time had gone. I can still make out the holiday season of 2012 if I turn around and squint, but as Christmas no longer has much meaning to me it didn’t really register when I was in the thick of it. The retail job I was able to snag carried me through in a cloud of ‘bustle’, but aside from that my yuletide time was fairly low-key. I did decorate my rather thin fake tree I paid less than $10 for last year, and I hung the fake wreath I have on the front door. For me it’s either fake tree, or no tree. I dig trees way too much to put a dying tree in my living room. I’m not necessarily including my current tree when I say that there are some really well done fake trees available today. I enjoyed mine…cheap as it is.

Juggling my time between a job and life in general put a bit of a damper on my blog time. I have a list of posts that I need to catch up on. This post is tagged to start the ball rolling…we’ll see how it goes…

(I kind of have a 'thing' for "Thor"/Chris Hemsworth...I created the above to entertain my friends more than anything.  *grin*)

(I've always thought
Morticia is the coolest...she has
been my FB profile pic of choice
for awhile.)

As many people do these days I keep in contact with the majority of my friends through the avenue of social sites, Facebook being my chief site. As they are spread hither and yon, it is the easiest route. Last Yule I received the ‘Photoshop Elements 10’ software package. Up until the last month or so I had only been using it to clean-up my photos. ‘Elements’ has many functions, and the latest one I have been playing around with is pasting and layering elements into one photo. “Thor”/Chris Hemsworth, and Morticia Addams, have been two of my test subjects. Yule/Christmas and the New Year seemed as good a time as any to start playing. The feedback I got from friends was complimentary, so I appear to be doing well so far. I haven’t done anything too difficult yet, but I think that will soon change. I tend to push myself creatively, and I have been creating collages with my photos (predominantly my cemetery work). I see a Deviant Art page in my near future…figure that would be a good place for posting them.

Photography has been my latest passion.  “Latest” meaning within the last three or four years. It is such a creative art form. It really opens the eyes to a new and different perspective on things. As I have spent more and more time making excursions to various areas of interest (cemeteries being chief), I am finding that I look at everything in a different way. For me it’s a momentary thing. I don’t spend a lengthy amount of time framing things up, focusing the lens…I glimpse something, point, and shoot. I often surprise myself when I later review what I’ve taken. Not to toot my own horn, or anything. *grin* I’m just satisfied with my photographs, and my photographic sense…but then that’s why I take pictures. Because I enjoy it. No better therapy. Situated by the marsh as I am, with nature all around me, it’s all out there for me any time I need to go for a walk and get a dose of the sublime.

New Year’s Eve I walked to the dock remains near the cul de sac to take some pictures. My last marsh shots for 2012. As I snapped them off, my mind wandered to a Christmas many years ago. My dad had a farm in Duluth, Georgia, on 300+ acres of land. I was spending the Christmas holidays with him (my parents had been divorced a number of years at that point). It was 1974 (I was 10), and I received my first camera as a gift…a Kodak Pocket Instamatic camera. A cool little gadget, it was in the days of film cartridges and flash cubes. I was thrilled with it. I don’t know what happened to that camera. Kind of wish I still had it.

(To play this video, you can scroll to the bottom of the blog page to pause the music player.)
Having snapped my final marsh pictures of 2012, the dim light level of evening was waning fast, so I headed back in. It dawned on me that I have a few pictures that I took with that old Instamatic. After rooting through my boxes of old photos, I found them. To say that my picture taking “eye” has improved over the years would be an understatement. I obviously suffered from some serious framing issues back then…

Example #1 of my first photos with my first camera. The subject of this photo was to be my dad wearing the Stetson hat he got for Christmas. Well, at least I got the top half of his head in frame...

Example #2 was intended to be a shot of 'Bullet', my dad's new Blue Tick Hound puppy. At least I got part of him.  Oh, and the foot is my brother's...

2012 is over. Still trying to wrap my head around that. The oft used saying of "the older you get, the quicker the time passes" is so true. As I said before the past year had its plodding areas, but now that it's officially over it feels like it passed in the blink of an eye. Then again, if the Mayans had been right, we wouldn't be here at all now. *eyeroll* Did anyone really think the world would end on December 21st? Sadly enough, I bet there were at least a handful of dooms-dayists who did. I've had a rant or two on my blog about the supposed Mayan prediction of the end of the world...now that the day of doom has come and gone...well, nuff said.

So...what about 2013? As I look at the clock, we are almost 4 hours into the second day of it. There are a few things I would like to accomplish during the coming year, but I am trying not to put the cart before the horse. If I think too much about future days I stress myself out. Living in the moment...the now...that's what I'm trying to focus on. The past is history, tomorrow is a mystery. Living in the moment is said to get easier as time passes. It is proving to be an ongoing effort for me. An effort well worth it, but an effort nonetheless. I have some mental windmills I have been tilting at. Worries about things that haven't happened yet. They too shall pass, but for now...living in the moment.

I am hopeful for a peaceful, productive and prosperous year to come...for all of us.

Happy 2013.