{"id":175,"date":"2011-07-11T03:45:34","date_gmt":"2011-07-11T03:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/?p=175"},"modified":"2011-09-05T04:06:26","modified_gmt":"2011-09-05T04:06:26","slug":"july-week-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/?p=175","title":{"rendered":"July – Week 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There is a Jewish chant that I often find myself singing.\u00c2\u00a0 It has been used in the Sunday Divine Liturgy at herchurch<\/span><\/strong> <\/a>during advent.<\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Return again, return again, return to the home of your soul.<\/em><\/p>\n

Return to who you are, return to what you are, <\/em><\/p>\n

return to where you are, born and reborn again.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d <\/em><\/p>\n

There is something comforting and even enchanting about returning to some place, someone or something familiar.\u00c2\u00a0 I of course find this true when I go back to the water\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s edge, where the Pacific Ocean kisses the California coast.<\/p>\n

This past week I returned again to the low tide sands of Pescadero State Beach.\u00c2\u00a0 Even though it is a familiar place I constantly find something new to photograph.\u00c2\u00a0 On the morning of the 4th<\/sup> of July at 7:00 AM the beach was still people-less.<\/p>\n

The pebbles and stones at the water\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s edge were being covered with sea foam. When dead and crushed plankton is pushed ashore it creates foam and bubbles when the ocean moves in and out over low tide pools.\u00c2\u00a0 The organic material in the plankton is responsible for the iridescent colors.<\/p>\n

I thought the turban snail in the colorful sea foam bubbles made a wonderful composition and provides scale to the bubbles.\u00c2\u00a0 The turban snail here is about the size of the diameter of a quarter. Using a 28-135 mm lens I was able to get close enough for this capture.\u00c2\u00a0 I use a tripod 95 percent of the time even in situations with lots of light.\u00c2\u00a0 The tripod helps me take time to frame the image.\u00c2\u00a0 But I was standing in the incoming water for this image so I went to hand holding.\u00c2\u00a0 Some of the images with just the bubbles alone were interesting as well as using them in the foreground of a very wide angle shot.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The second image I am sharing from the first week in July is from the small \u00e2\u20ac\u0153country\u00e2\u20ac\u009d cemetery in the town of Pescadero<\/span><\/strong>.<\/a> I love walking through cemeteries to see how people remember or neglect their ancestors and loved ones.\u00c2\u00a0 There was a particular area where four babies were buried next to each other.\u00c2\u00a0 In somber contemplation I stood beside them momentarily mourning for all the children\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s lives that are extinguished before their intended future.<\/p>\n

A small angle statue in a cement base caught my eye, especially as a dandelion grew beneath it.\u00c2\u00a0 Two things I never cared much for, death and dandelions, were now the focus of my attention.\u00c2\u00a0 I couldn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t quite get the selected focus I wanted for this image so I blurred the background a little in post processing using Gaussian Blur<\/span><\/strong><\/a> in Photoshop CS2 (yes I know I have to catch up to Photoshop 5 soon).<\/p>\n

Aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the angel\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pink lips just adorable?\u00c2\u00a0 The following poem with its citation below captured the essence of my seeing.<\/p>\n

Statue<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Tom Clark<\/a><\/p>\n

The angel asked, as his shoulders were pressed into the stone<\/address>\n
Why me? And taken away from the inhabited body,<\/address>\n
Like the lyric voice rustling from memory forests,<\/address>\n
Childhood rushes toward death, a wind in those woods,<\/address>\n
Crashing through trees, dying out,<\/address>\n
Settling like a white mist over everything.<\/address>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a Jewish chant that I often find myself singing.\u00c2\u00a0 It has been used in the Sunday Divine Liturgy at herchurch during advent. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Return again, return again, return to the home of your soul. Return to who you are, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-2"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hkEw-2P","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/stacy.awegallery.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}