Creative Challenge

One of the photographers that I follow on Instagram suggested a

Creative Challenge

this morning.

Her idea intrigued me so much that I began working on the challenge today. Her challenge was to photograph the same thing (an object, a person, a scene) every day for 30 days. I decided that for myself, I needed to really love something before I could stick with photographing it every day for 30 days.

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook — a different set of priorities.

   — Mary Oliver

I looked inside our house, and out the windows at the backyard. And I finally decided to make the river birch tree in our backyard my photographic subject for this creative challenge. (I’ve photographed it so many times in so many seasons and I never seem to tire of it.)

The photo at the top of this post is my first day’s image for this 30 day challenge.

Openness,curiosity, experimentation

In addition I decided that I would try different ways to photograph the tree including up close, far away, with intentional camera movement, in monochrome, etc. Those of you who read my blog regularly may get very tired of seeing this river birch tree over the next month. I may get very tired of it as well. But I am also feeling open and curious about what I might learn through this experiment.

No one yet has made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more likely to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.

   — Mary Oliver

Now that summer is drawing to a close and fall will soon arrive is it time for you to commit to a new creative project?

And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”

   — Mary Oliver

May you walk in beauty.

Note: Here are two other subjects I considered for my 30-day challenge…