My Photo of the Month

January 16, 2017January 11, 2017

Photos of 2016

Near the end of 2015, I posted the collage of Instagram photos the Best Nine app considered my best nine. (I think they’re just the most liked.)

Looking at the collage, it didn’t feel very representative of my year, though.

So, with encouragement from Traci and others, I decided to choose one of my Instagram photos every month that felt significant or like it just fit, and then compare it to my Best Nine at the end of the year.

The photos at the top are my “best nine”, and here are the ones I chose for each month…

They don’t really overlap, except for that weather-beaten tree. I remember almost choosing some of the same ones the app did – some months had a couple photos that seemed like a good fit for that month.

I’m still on the fence about whether I want to do this again, but it is really cool to look back and see snapshots of the past year this way.

Locations of Best Nine photos (l-r, from top):

Boyce Thompson Arboretum, Superior, AZ
Seven Magic Mountains, near Las Vegas, NV
Our Airbnb rental [referral discount] in Tucson, AZ
Red Rock Canyon, Las Vegas, NV
Kehinde Wiley exhibition at Phoenix Art Museum, AZ
Nothing, AZ
Downtown Las Vegas, NV
Barrick Museum at UNLV, NV
Phoenix Chile Pepper Festival, Phoenix, AZ

My monthly photos from 2016: January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December.

January 9, 2017January 11, 2017

December Photo: Mission

For my final monthly photo for 2016, here is a photo of the chapel at San Xavier del Bac, Tucson, taken through the fence that separates it from the main part of the Mission. You can see the prayer candles still flickering inside.

December 5, 2016December 5, 2016

November Photo: Tree

We saw this fabulous weather-beaten tree at Red Rock Canyon Conservation Area in Nevada.

I changed my Twitter cover image to this when the yellow brittlebush flowers I had previously chosen seemed too sunny. It looked wild and windswept, and it somehow fit my mood better.

Another day, I didn’t start out thinking about the tree. I was thinking about how I tend to feel my life needs to conform to a certain pattern, like I’m not valid if I’m not checking off a set of boxes, when – in reality – we are all writing our own stories as we go.

Life is not lined up and orderly. It is organic, unpredictable, wild.

The thoughts found their way into a short poem, and one of the images in my mind as I wrote it was that tree in Nevada.

Not a fence post

but a tree,

rough and irregular,

both warped by

the elements and

strengthened by them.

Each meandering ring,

a storyteller.

November 7, 2016November 7, 2016

October Photo: Cactus

The multi-colored lights shining on the cactus outside the Phoenix Art Museum caught my eye.

Before posting the photo, I messed around with the saturation until the cactus started to look like a 2-dimensional tangle of colors. Maybe it was the colorful paintings we had just seen, but it somehow felt like the way it was supposed to be.

October 24, 2016October 24, 2016

September Photo: Coffee

After BlogHer in L.A. but before driving back to Phoenix, I fueled up with brunch at Trois Familia in Silver Lake. I loved how the purple Le Creuset coffee mug they brought me looked against the coral wall I was sitting across from.

I wonder if they chose the colors for their brightly painted walls based on what would make good backgrounds for food photos. What do you think?