Life: Through the Lens

Today was our annual egg hunt...grandchildren and eggs and decorating...and delicious food. And sugar. Lots and lots of sugar. This year's culinary experiment was creating cupcakes to look like Easter eggs in the grass. Interesting. I usually create the first few before the grandkids get here, just to work out the "bugs," then we complete the decorating process while their parents hide the eggs outside. It keeps everyone pleasantly distracted and it's fun, too! May you all have a wonderful Easter celebration.

Spring has been long in coming. I'm busy trying to wrap up the semester, and take care of other university business, and that distracts me somewhat. The tease of warmth and sunshine appears periodically. But mostly it feels like we've been waiting and waiting...snow, rain, sleet, sun, snow, rain, sleet....you get the picture. I just heard thunder, which is a really good sign! It makes up for the snow of about an hour ago. The annual Easter egg hunt is here Saturday and it would be so wonderful to have good weather for this event. I'm busy planning the activity I'll lead with the grandchildren while the eggs are being hidden outside. One idea is to decorate eggs, another is to decorate cupcakes. Right now the cupcakes are winning!

Nothing Can Stop Me Now Oshkosh,Wisconsin Husband and wife team, Amanda and Kyle Franklin In a tragic aside, both were recently injured in an airshow in Texas when their engine caught fire and the plane crashed. Both survived, but were burned . Last night was the St. Johns Camera Club " Transportation " competition. Here are some of the top point scorers; there were so many outstanding images it was very difficult to judge. Yes, I was asked to vote this competition, so when my own photos came up I had to enter a "0." There is a formula to compute a fair score. Market Day in Ghana This is the Life Heritage Flight Legends and Mustangs airshow Columbus,OH Fishing Canoes, Ghana It was so much fun trying to pull together creative images for this competition. We had a total of 12 entries and each did well. I will be contacting those wonderful people who helped us collect ideas for this competition, as my folder is very full of images we gathered before making our fi...

And so, after a few weeks of collecting ideas, sorting photos, and taking new ones, the competition is almost upon us. We got some great ideas from some of you - thank you! Of course, until the competition itself, which is Tuesday, March 29, we can't reveal which images we've decided to use. There are some members of our photography group "lurking" on Facebook and visiting the blog and we sure wouldn't want to give them our great ideas! Thank you we blog artists , Meri , georgia b , Char , Jeanie , Dagmar , and Marion (a Facebook friend) for your wonderful suggestions and well wishes. Stay tuned for our decisions, and your thank you gifts. I'll email for addresses to send the selections to:). It promises to be a busy work week, but I also have some wonderful hints of spring to share. Stop back in the next few days, as I hope to pick up my pace and spend more time doing what I love to do best...sharing nature, photography and stories with other creative souls....

As you may have read in my last post, Camera Club competitions happen throughout the school year. "Motion" was last month's theme, and it was a lot of fun looking for potential images. This month, however, is leaving me a bit mystified. "Transportation" is the theme, and it's wide open. We have a lot of aviation photographs, which club members will anticipate us entering. We also have a lot of boating photographs, which may garner one or two for us to choose from. However, we want something different. U n i q u e . Show-stopper , would be nice. Please leave us some suggestions for potential images we should take for this competition. If we choose your ideas we will be glad to send each winner a copy of the entered image. There could be a lot of winners, as we enter three themed images each . We need to shoot soon, so the window for this give-away is small. Please post suggestions by Friday, March 11 . Yes, that's right. Only a little over a week away. ...

As I've mentioned before, we belong to a camera club . Monthly meetings 9 months of the year bring us together to have workshops on various photography topics and skills, as well as to have themed competitions. February's competition , Motion, was great fun. Members can enter either digital or print images; slides have gone by the wayside, I'm afraid. But this makes the set-up very easy and the meetings run smoothly between the two venues. Three judges enter scores for the entries and the results are averaged. If someone enters photos and is also judging, this person enters a "0" when their photo is displayed, and the other scores are averaged. It works. The highest score you can get is an 18, which means you've earned a "6" from each judge. Fortunately, neither of us is fiercely competitive, so though our photos compete against each other we haven't had a major meltdown yet:) Here's a perfect example, from this month's competition. Thi...

And he's home.! Photo ops were numerous, to say the least. So many excited children and tearful husbands and wives. And my sister and her husband, and the rest of the family, were among those shedding tears of joy. Justin looks great, and was SO excited to get himself settled in an apartment off base and begin life States-side. It sounds as if there's a decent system in place for helping our soldiers re-enter a more "normal" life. And Justin has people to talk to. This will help. At least three days this week there were flights arriving from overseas 2-3 times a day. And at least three days this week, more groups were departing. God bless those home, and those now so far away.