Life Lately: In Photos

Nicole social saturday life, lifestyle, photography

(Alberta: Canola in bright, sunshine-filled bloom)

We are a culture surrounded by and immersed in images and photos everywhere we look. Advertisements, magazines and social media: a constant influx of images. Everyone is a photographer, and each one is documenting the world they see around them, the way they see it. I love how these little snapshots are being captured and catalogued. They are memories of a moment in time.

I have always been a person who takes photos daily. I used to carry around my little point and shoot film camera, always hoping for that special photograph I knew was waiting for me. A few years ago, I even challenged myself to a “Photo a Day” challenge: sometimes taking photos of the beautiful, sometimes of the mundane. Today, I don’t always carry my real camera with me, but I have one in my phone (as many of us do) and so I always have it ready to capture an experience, or something interesting. Do the photos I take need to be perfect and professional? Do I need to have a “purpose” for the photo? Do I have to share them on my blog or on Instagram? No. Sometimes it’s just nice to look back and think- “Oh yes, remember that time?” Or, “When did such and such happen”, and you have a picture to refresh your memory. Sometimes the photo serves no purpose, but to be there and bring a smile to your face. And really that is all they need to be. Snapshots; offering a glimpse into one little moment that was, no matter how fleeting it may have been.

So, here are some photos, taken over the last month or so. Not related to anything, or related to each other, but I like them nonetheless. Do you take “purposeless” photos too?

berry picking, my Grandma’s beautiful rosebush & so many mushrooms this wet year

a weedy clover bouquet & my favourite country lane near my house

books read/reading (we are reading Little Dorrit aloud, as Dickens was meant to be)

baking, tea- always tea & the latest sewing refashioning project

berry picking bounty & after the rain

July 1, 2016

Photographic Memory: Doors of England

Nicole art + photography england, life, travel

Doors of England the artyologist

Happy Canada Day!

On this most momentous Canadian holiday, I am marking the day by posting. . . nothing to do with Canada. Whoops! Oh well, I’ll be celebrating the day in some patriotic way I suppose (though I will NOT be dressed in Red and White- as the colour red makes me look ill!) Last week I realized that exactly one year ago, I was in England on summer holidays with my family. And, I actually spent Canada Day last year in Stratford-Upon-Avon, doing nothing patriotic either. As much as I love Canada, I guess I am just not a patriotic celebration kind of person.

Anyways, time does really seem to fly by, as it really doesn’t seem like a year ago, and yet the calendar says so . . . Sigh, at least I have these pictures to remember the trip by.

I was looking through all the pictures again, and I thought- why not share some of them here on the blog? I didn’t before, because I wasn’t blogging last year! I have these and tons of other photographs that I’ve never shared or done anything with, so I’ve decided that I’m going to start a little column here called “photographic memory” where I’ll periodically share old photographs of mine. (get it. . . photographic memory? hahaha. . . ) They might not necessarily be related to anything, but it’ll be nice to do something with them 🙂

So today, in anniversary of that trip one year ago- I present to you “The Doors of England”. Obviously this is not an exhaustive directory, it’s more like “The Doors of Stow-on-the-Wold”, the village where we stayed for 10 days in a little cottage. It was a lovely area, in the Cotswold region of England, and the loveliest thing about it is that because it is an “Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty” (so classified by the British government) it attracts a lot of tourists, and so everything in the area is quite historic and photogenic 🙂 The majority of the buildings are made of “Cotswold limestone” and even the new construction is built to suit the same style. Pretty much everywhere you look there is another beautiful photo opportunity! As a lover of history, I absolutely adored Stow, and the whole Cheltenham area, and I would definitely recommend it to everyone. Coming from western Canada, where we are lucky to find a building that is 100 years old and not fallen to the ground, it was so fantastic to see all of these ancient buildings that are still in use, and still being lived in. The front doors were such a fabulous part of the town as each one was so different and unique.

Can you imagine walking out your front door each day if it looked like these?

I loved the one above, which was the front door to the cottage across the road from where we stayed. It reminded me of a face, and it was so short that the man who lived there had to stoop to walk through it! I also love the ones covered in vines, but really I couldn’t choose . . .

Which one is your favourite?

green doors of england the artyologist