weekend recap, end of march

1. spilled milk | 2. annoyed? | 3. slow start | 4. twilight time | 5. new haunt | 6. i made something! | 7. starts | 8. one flower | 9. i made them again!

I have a lot of people talk to me about Instagram. I know I've talked about it here before, but with our class running again, the chatter seems to be increasing so I thought I'd touch on it again. My friend Jackie talks about it as her "tribe," and that's a bit how I feel about it too. These are my people here. I don't have gazillions of followers and I don't get scores of likes on every photo, but, gratifying though that may be, it's never really about that for me.

One of the things we teach in our Ditch Your Gear class is that the best part of using your phone for a camera is how freeing it is. As photographers we're all taught about manual settings and the exposure triangle and how to stop down your aperture to change the look of your photo. With your phone, all the settings are taken care of for you so you're freed to think solely about creativity and composition. (Kim, my co-teacher and I, tend to put our fingers in our ears when it comes to the technical stuff any way!)

On Instagram you can find any number of communities and challenges and prompts, and I tend to jump in and out of these at will. I'm a sometime rule-follower. If the prompt appeals to me, I'll try to make it happen. And when I say "appeals," I mean just that. It can be hard and challenging and still appeal. I tend not to get interested in prompts like "annoyed" (totally went off the rails there and posted peonies...WTH?) or "friendship." I find it hard to shoot what feel like cliches. And really, I don't feel like I'm clever enough to make a prompt like that truly eye-catching. But prompts like "stars," or "one flower" or even "negative space?" Well, I'm all over that. I suppose if I were trying to get noticed or increase my reach, I'd jump endlessly into these forums and be religious about posting pictures inspired by every prompt I see, but the truth is, that's not what Instagram is about for me. As with anything that happens with my creative and online life (at least where they intersect), it's about inspiration and connection. I love seeing beautiful photographs in my feed, as much as I love seeing your puppy sitting in a ray of sunshine. I guess I hope, at least occasionally, I'm putting a pretty photo in yours.

So how did our weekend play out across Instagram? A food styling prompt fell into my lap as literally as spilled (butter) milk, a baseball game with a great catch needed to be recorded, and a beautiful marquee against a steely sky caught my eye. I made some pretzels too (wink).

My experience with this medium has certainly changed. Undergramming, overgramming, snapping endless cups of coffee, camera phone only, or DSLR, all the debates about Instagram will, I'm sure, continue. And yet, still. It's the tribe for me.

So gang, I think I'm going to take the week off this week. We have some things that need tending to around here, and I want to give them my full attention. I like giving my blog my full attention too, and this is one of those times when I can't do both. Thanks for your patience with me. XO

weekend recap, march 24

1. first game | 2. photo walk | 3. how our saturdays look now | 4. medicinal | 5. sweet ending
 

You don't really want me to recap this weekend. Not really. Do you ever? Yawn. It was, as my mom would call it, a weekend that required a lot of management. I think I mentioned a little bit back that we were finally watching Downton Abbey (much like Erin, we're slow to muster to these things), and at one point the Dowager Countess, Lady Violet describes parenting perfectly, "There is just such an on and on-ness to it." As I told my mom this story during my most recent cry for help on Friday, she said, "I don't want to hurt your feelings, honey. But it's true."

Well.

I've been thinking a lot about raising kids lately. I mean, duh. When am I not thinking about it, right? It just seems that my various feeds, from Facebook to Twitter to whathaveyou, are full of sage articles about all the things that are going wrong with kids these days. (Ha! I actually said that, "Kids these days!") They don't do enough chores. They do too much homework. Too little is expected of them. They're pushed to read too soon. They aren't keeping up with their peers in other countries. They're too involved in electronics. They need to get outside more. Good lord, we're rough on them, aren't we?

All eyes on them, it's hard to be a kid. I hope as parents that Neel and I manage to mostly find that precious balance between expectation and support. Sometimes the way you support your child is by taking the long view, and that can mean being tough in rough times. It's hard. Sometimes you support your child simply by supporting them. Sometimes they need only to know that you have their back.

As I said, it was a weekend in management. It's been Cal's hard work, and we're almost through it. He's a trooper, and he's definitely risen to the occasion. Neel and I've had some managing to do ourselves, and we still do. But after seeing how my son felt shamed instead of supported, after seeing how he felt hurt and criticized instead of heard, I had a bit of an epiphany. And I wondered, how does this help? I want to say (and I may yet!), "When you sent that email (and copied four other people on it), did you stop and wonder, 'how will this help him?'"

So that got me to thinking. I need to operate in this fashion more often. Asking myself before I speak or hit send (and this rings especially true in my parenting), "How is this helpful? How will this help?"

It kind of changed  my life.