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(click on the photo to enlarge)To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
-- from Auguries of Innocence
William Blake
original photo by kirsten
taken in vancouver, b.c.'s stanley park, july 2007
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Beautiful! I love the new photos that done your sidebar now. Ahhh, you have a designer's artistic eye, my friend, and I love to revel in it!
ReplyDeletei second, christianne! lovin' the photos.... what vibrant colors! looks like you have your camera up and running again. :)
ReplyDeletei know i'm over the hump with moving when i start taking photos again.....
Ah, thank you my dears!! I have had so much fun with my camera lately. I felt so blessed to have captured this photo! The flower is beautiful, but I love how you see the bee, the rain, the stamen, and the leaves that capture the sunlight ... all without which such beauty would die.
ReplyDeleteMuch like the Body, no? One body & many parts. If you'll allow me to transliterate ... the bud cannot say to the leaf, "I do not need you," nor can the leaf say to the rain, "I do not need you." When I see this photo, I couldn't help but think of one Body with many parts.
Anyway ... yes, summer is giving me ample material to photograph. How am I to take in all this beauty?
I'm so glad to hear that you're nearing the end of your unpacking & settling, Blue. It takes awhile, doesn't it?? After 3+ weeks, I am just now starting to feel like things are in their places.
Blessings to you both!
:o)
I love this seasonal approach. It gets us looking at life Right Now, appreciating the bee, the stamen, the bud. (And making me hungry for strawberries!).
ReplyDeleteBeautiful new look.
I agree with LL -- a beautiful new look.
ReplyDeleteI was so moved by your transliteration of the Body passage, applying it to this flower. I was not only moved because it made the passage that much more clear to me, that much easier to understand and go, "Oh, I get it. Of course that's how we should also regard one another!" but also moved me because you saw this in this one silent moment beholding the flower. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I love the way God made you into someone who would see this moment the flower was carrying with all its essential parties involved and that it would cause you to think of it in this way, applied to the Body.
I've decided that what I really need is a small but highly pixellated digital camera to keep in my purse. Any recommendations?? What kind do you use? Any thoughts on the price range? Also, do you use an online photo aggregator (like Flickr or Picasa), or do you always upload from your hard drive? I'm trying to get a good, smoothly running system going with all our pictures but have yet to find the perfect, seamless one that works for us. This, I know, has a lot to do with my own illiteracy with all the new technical gadgets and applications that abound these days. :O)
Christianne, I really like flickr.com. But then I don't have any particular standards or anything like you might have. (For your photos, I mean.)
ReplyDeleteLL & Christianne - So happy you like the new look. Since so many other things are changing in my life, I thought maybe "lattes" could use a bit of freshening up. So glad you like the look; I've had a lot of fun with it.
ReplyDeleteChristianne - your response has touched me deeply. When I took this photo, I was simply in the moment & had no such thought of the Body. I just thought how amazing it was that I had the chance to capture pollination in action. It was only later as I was looking at it & taking in all its elements that God gave me the grace to see the symbiotic relationship between petals, stamen, leaves, rain, flower ... all so different. Perhaps the buds are the most noticeable and the most beautiful, getting all the glory (so to speak). But the buds need all those other things. Lets not forget the soil, either! I couldn't help but think of 1 Cor. 12. Again, I'm glad so glad this illustration could bless you, also.
As far as the more technical things go, I have a camera from HP (I want to say the model is M627). It's 7.0 megapixels and 24x total zoom; I love it. Compared to other digital cameras I've played with, this I love because it is so intuitive & easy to use. So many others have far too many buttons and menu options for my liking. I upload all my photos to Snapfish.com; I get unlimited photo storage there & can order prints from them too. Each photo has its own unique URL, so I use that (most of the time) when posting photos to the blog. This way, I don't use up precious memory (which seems to be plentiful, but I like to spare it all the same)! Some photo-hosting sites I know of (besides Flickr, as LL suggested) are Photobucket, Shutterfly ... I'm sure there are others, but I'm afraid I'm not terribly savvy in this area.
I love reading your blog, dear friend and would love to see what you could also capture on film. I hope you can find what you're looking for!
Kirsten, very nice photograph! I grabbed it and adjusted it by the numbers in Photoshop and have to say it is very well balanced in color and value.
ReplyDeleteI am encouraged as well by how you related the image to the Body of Christ.
I would like to link this post to my February post 15, with your permission.
Thanks for sharing.
23 Degrees - I would be honored to have you link to me! Thank you so much for asking. :o)
ReplyDeleteThere is something about posting here that makes the photos fuzzy - maybe it was the size I chose. I just received an 11 x 14 print I ordered and the image is so striking & sharp. I love it!! Amazing how this little digital tool has helped me see the world more closely ...
I've reposted the photo from my desktop -- this seems to give a clearer shot. :o)
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Can I just say that I love that you ordered an 11x14 print of this??? It made me smile. In fact, I still have a smile on my face! And that's because it makes me think of how you surround yourself with all things beautiful. I'm thinking, too, of the photo you took for the contest in your office and how you got that massive-size print to take home with you. (Right? I seem to remember you got to take it home.)
ReplyDeleteI really like the way you said that God gave you the grace to see the relationship between all the parts later, and also how you were just drawn to and in the moment when you actually took the picture.
Thanks for all the great tips, LL and Kirsten, on cameras and photo sites. I'm not looking for anything high-tech, just something intuitive that also lets me do everything I might want to do (like write captions, create a beautiful photobook to order with captions included, provide URLs for ones I want to post to my blog, etc.). I signed up for Flickr a few weeks ago but got so confused by the Flickr Uploader software I had to download in order to upload all the photos stored on my desktop that I gave up trying in the end. I'm probably making it harder than it has to be! Wouldn't be the first time. :)
Thanks for your encouragement about my blog, Kirsten. I need to get a new post up! Unfortunately, all my post ideas require photos, and my current system is clunky for making that happen! I get lazy. Grr.
Oh how right you are, Christianne!! I do so love to be surrounded by beauty & color. Any art I have ever participated in has been more or less not visual (i.e., performance or written), so I'm thrilled when I actually like one of my own photographs enough to order a print of it. This picture in particular is a blessing to me & a reminder of the one body, many parts concept from 1 Cor. 12 we were discussing earlier. I also just love being reminded how full of wonder is the world that God created for us.
ReplyDeletePhoto-posting is a bear. I try to avoid uploading via the desktop if I can, but using URLs is another type of hangup sometimes, I find. Best of luck to you in finding what works. I do so love my HP camera -- so easy & intuitive to use. I know everyone has their favorites, but that is certainly my pick. :o)
Love the strawberry picture - yum! Have a coffee date with a guy tomorrow night, a guy who i met through my neighbor, and we've been chatting on myspace. Gotta love modern technology. Will let you know how it goes.
ReplyDeletekirsten... i'll have to check out the camera you mentioned, as i need a new one, too. i'm a point-and-shoot kind of girl, as i don't know much about all the buttons and options....less gadgetry is better for me. i'll also have to check out that photo-uploading site. thanks!
ReplyDeleteI love your take on this! The flower, the raindrops, the bee - magical! And that is a great quote, isn't it?
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