Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication

Click here to see this image in my Society6 shop.

Sea glass and shell collected on the beach in Caesaria, on Israel's Mediterranean coast.

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Pink Petals

Buy this image now from Around the Island Photography.

Visit Wordless Wednesday to see what else people aren't saying this week.

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My photography is available for purchase - visit Around the Island Photography and bring home something beautiful today!

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If the photo you're wishing for is something you've seen here on the blog which isn't in my etsy shop yet just let me know and I'll happily list it for you.

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Life is for living

It's hard to sit here, just two days after RivkA's funeral, and blog as if nothing happened, as if we haven't just lost one of our brightest shining stars, but if there's one thing that RivkA taught us it's that life is for living. Each day is a precious gift that should be treasured, not squandered. So yes, I am grieving for the loss of my friend, and no, my world will never be the same without her in it, but at the same time there is a life out there to be lived, a family to love, friends both here and absent to treasure, and a world full of beauty to discover. RivkA somehow always managed to focus on her blessings, not her burdens, and by doing so inspired countless others to find the best in themselves, to be the best that they can be. That is RivkA's gift to me, and I will honor it as I know how - by loving my family and my friends, by telling them - YOU - so as often as I can, and by continuing to seek out and create beauty in the nooks and crannies of creation.

Ooh, look what I just did!

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Just listed in my etsy shop and customized to match your decor!
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Cool, huh?
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Sending my blog flowers

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I just realized that this is my 1,000th post. I've been doing this since November 30th, 2006. We've come a long way together, this blog and me. I'd tell you all about it if this wasn't Wordless Wednesday (or rather it will be tomorrow morning when I post this link over there), but since it is, I'll just share this:
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But since it's also Wordful Wednesday (see above) I'll tell you that while you're admiring, I'll be packing - I'm heading out Thursday morning for a glorious one night/two day girlfriends getaway to a Dead Sea spa. There will be massages, and treatments, hours wiled away by the pool with umbrella drinks, and a great deal of hilarity and good conversation. Everything you'd expect when eight good friends ditch home and family for a night in the lowest place on earth.
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Have a great rest of the week everyone. I'll be around to visit this weekend.
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Pink Chrysanthemum

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Hot off the press camera - shot this one this morning and loved it so much that it went straight to my etsy shop! Those pink petals really pop against the black background, and the faint checkerboard pattern on the petals (how does Mother Nature do that anyway?) add some great depth and texture to the image.
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Let's just say this is red

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I know, I know, it's actually much closer to pink (ok, it is in fact pink), but I'm getting sick and haven't had much time for shooting lately and pink is basically just a lighter version of red anyway. Work with me here.
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Happy Holidays everyone.

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Just because it makes me smile

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Visit Wordless Wednesday to see what other people aren't saying this week.

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Red Gerbera Daisy

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Happy Ruby Tuesday everyone, and Happy Hannukah to all who are celebrating.
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Hmmm... Now that this is up I don't like it at all. It looks squished. Bah humbug. The center looks right but the petals are all wrong. It didn't look that way when I was working on it. I was a lot happier with yesterday's flower. Grrr...
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Lisianthus Bud

And now for something completely different...
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I've been frustrated lately with an inability to make the types of macro shots I want, the ones I can see in my mind's eye, without a proper macro lens so when a photographer friend offered me two magnifying filters to play around with until I can get my hands on a poor man's macro lens set of extension tubes from the States (I'd REALLY love to get the lens but I just can't justify it right now) I jumped at the chance to take them for a spin, even buying cut flowers especially for the occasion.
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Unfortunately the weather wasn't cooperative. My under normal circumstances almost bright enough kitchen was dark and dreary, and the work surface closest to the window was completely covered with fresh pasta waiting to be cut. (Photography is my passion, all things dough is my husband's. Yes, it's a tough life.) The vase of flowers ended up stuck in a dark corner between the sink and the refrigerator. Being an impatient sort I decided not to let this stop me and grabbed the camera and the filters "just to see what they can do". Ninety-seven very grainy ISO 1600 images later I finally conceded defeat and decided to try again tomorrow morning.
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Determined to salvage something from the photo shoot I decided to try for moody and brooding instead.
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It's not at all what I was going for originally but I like the way it turned out. It's fun when that happens. I quite enjoy the creative process in and of itself, and all the better when I'm pushing myself out of my comfort zone to create something new (to me) and different.
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More monochrome images from around the world can be seen at (the apparently newly renamed) Monochrome Weekend.

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Red Hibiscus

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The hibiscus are still blooming here in Israel. Not quite as many as during the height of summer but still enough to add delightful bursts of color here and there. That's actually one of my favorite things about Israeli winters - they may be cold (relatively speaking) and wet, but they are full of color. Because winter is our rainy season, it's actually peak season for many wildflowers and plants. The summers are hot and very very dry, making it easy to plan picnics or a day at the beach, but things do start to get a bit parched looking. In winter all those brown fields and hills burst into colorful bloom and new growth is everywhere. There were no roses blooming in January when I was growing up in New York, that's for sure, and certainly no wild daffodils like the ones below, blooming right now in Nahal Shimri.

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Have an image with a bit of red in it? Or a lot? Come share it for Ruby Tuesday over at Work of the Poet.
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PS Notice anything unusual about the images in this post? They're bigger! I finally learned how to override Blogger's automatic resizing thanks to CoffeeShopBlogger. So much nicer this way, although they do make me think that a two-column template might work better with the larger format images. I think you can still click on them to see the image full size as well.
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White Not-A-Rose

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I don't know what this flower actually is but I love it. When I bought it the woman in the store told me its name (and no, it's not a rose) but I can't remember what it is to save my life and a search of google images didn't turn up any likely candidates either. [Commenter Abbi to the rescue - it's a lisianthus!] I'm really pleased with how soft and subtle this image turned out with the application of a few textures, too.
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On a completely unrelated note, Maya woke up this morning dancing, singing and asking for latkes - and completely fever-free* - so we danced, sang and made latkes, and then we all joined our friends for our planned hike to Shluchat Ayala and Nahal Shimri after all (the hike link is Hebrew only, but there are a few photos on the site - my own will follow eventually). It was a good choice for today - easy (which our post-slumber party and post-fever kids both needed) but very pretty and not overly crowded once we got out of the parking area, and close enough to home that soccer-obsessed Itai still made it back in time to join a friend at today's game, where the internet has just informed us that his team creamed the other guys 7-1. I expect he'll be bouncing wildly off the walls from all the excitement when he gets home.
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And just like that another weekend has come and gone. Tomorrow it's back to work in our corner of the world.
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* I suspect her fever was a reaction to the second half of the flu shot she'd received the day before. It passed quickly though and hopefully getting the shot means that the flu will also pass her (and the rest of us) by.
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Frailties and Flowers

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I've got a sick and feverish one of these (she did perk up a bit for a glass of "choco" as it's known here)
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So I didn't have time to play much with these
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I did manage to get in a decent (or at least extensive, decent remains to be seen) photo shoot this morning with the flowers I'd bought yesterday but I haven't gotten a good look at the results yet. I may find myself with some unplanned downtime to have a go tomorrow though - we're supposed to join friends for an afternoon hike but at the moment it's looking like Miss M and I will be sending the boys off to go play in the woods without us. Hopefully this is just a short-lasting reaction to the flu booster (regular flu, not H1N1) she got yesterday and not some really evil virus but either way she's definitely feeling under the weather today, to say the least. Poor thing was most upset about missing kindergarten this morning.

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PS She's eating omelettes now! (Well not NOW now, NOW now she's lying on the couch with her eyes half closed staring blankly at Spongebob, but yesterday and the day before she did.) Anyone who's been reading this blog for a while will know that among other factors at play Maya's also got enough food issues to qualify her as officially neophobic. This child leaves picky in the dust. We were told all along to focus on the other issues and the food would take care of itself eventually. It didn't really, she'd add a new food at the rate of about one or two a year (yes, a year), BUT, and this is a huge but, since she was doing so well with everything else we told her that once she turned six she'd have to start trying new foods. No more saying she doesn't like it without even tasting it. She'd have to have at least one bite of something new each day. She wouldn't have to eat more than a bite if she really didn't like it, but she would have to at least taste it. We gave her a full month to get used to the idea before we began, and so far it's working. She certainly isn't breaking any land-speed records for the rate at which she's adding new foods, but in the past few months she's added carrot sticks and red peppers (vegetables! my daughter is eating vegetables!), homemade chicken fingers made out of actual food rather than only the frozen processed ones, pizza with sauce (still no cheese, but it's not just naked crust anymore), brown rice instead of white, and now plain omelettes! She decided she wanted to try it on Wednesday evening (mid-yogurt I might add). I jumped on the initiative and made her promise that if I made it for her special that she'd eat at least three bites, and more if she liked it. Damned if she didn't eat the whole thing. She was so excited about it that she called her dad at work and her grandparents in the US to tell them! The next night she even accepted her brother's offer to make her another one.

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Maya funny: after eating the omelette Itai made she promptly declared it "the best in the world, better than god makes", then thought about it for a minute and asked "does god even make omelettes?" This kid cracks me up.

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A single rose can be my garden...a single friend, my world *

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Getting this one in just under the wire today. I'd say it's because I was busy and needed a quick NaBloPoMo post, which I was and which I did, but the truth is that even though I spent half the day on a (nearly cancelled due to weather) photowalk in Abu Ghosh and returned in the evening to find my house full of company I did have plenty of time after that to put a post up. Or at least I would have if I wouldn't have spent it all photoshopping this image from today's walk. It needed a bit of work to pull it out of the doldrums and even now it still isn't really zinging for me. Conditions today weren't great. It was overcast and dim most of the time with intermittent drizzle, and by the time we got to the heart of the trip the light was pretty much gone but we did have fun and a few truly great experiences along the way which I'll share later. I lost some would be great images because it was simply too dark, even with my ISO bumped up to 1600. (And then I lost a few more truly incredible ones because I'm an idiot. My camera suddenly wouldn't focus, I kept snapping and image after image were blurry. I began to panic, wondering what on earth I'd done, when my friend pointed out that I was still on manual focus following some experiments with his extension tube. Unfortunately by then it was too late and the shot was gone. I could have kicked myself.)
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I'm going to revisit the whole batch tomorrow with a fresh eye. Sometimes the best images take a while to make themselves known. Right?
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* Leo Buscaglia
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This one's going on the wall

Click to enlarge (really, do, this one's worth it)

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Visit Wordless Wednesday to see what other people aren't saying this week.

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Hibiscus

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Last Friday we snuck in what may be the final trip to the pool of the season before it closes for the season at the end of this week. Knowing that it would be almost deserted (despite the still hot daytime temperatures no one ever seems to come once school starts) I brought along my camera to grab some last shots of the kids (check back tomorrow for a few of those). After I was done shooting them I wandered around a bit and caught this hibiscus blooming along a fence.
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Visit Ruby Tuesday for more ruby red images.
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First day of school, sort of

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My children were incredibly uncooperative this morning when I tried to grab a few quick "first day of school" pictures so I'm going with this instead - the flower that my daughter Maya picked for me as she skipped (or rather make that dashed) off to her first day of school.

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She's come a long way my Miss Mouse, from the challenges of years past, to new hope at last year's communications kindergarten, to this year's mainstream just like everybody else regular kindergarten. She's had a tough go of it over the years but she's grown and thrived and reached heights that were barely imaginable just a year ago. I could tell you so much more about how far she's come and how very, very proud I am of her but what I have to say could fill volumes - getting me thrown out of Wordless Wednesday for sure. Suffice it to say that she has the heart of a lion and the spirit of a giant, and she is rushing out to meet the world head on, on her own terms, and succeeding beyond all of our dreams.

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And at the end of the day, her first day had been as wonderful as she'd known it would be. I'm so proud I could burst.

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Life comes easier to Itai, my third-grader, it always has, but he too is growing and thriving and is one hell of a kid. A world class procrastinator too (unfortunately he comes by that honestly, so am I), but one hell of a terrific kid.

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I'm one lucky mom.

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Pink Hibiscus

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Visit Wordless Wednesday to see what other people aren't saying this week, and don't forget to come back this weekend for Summer Stock Sunday!
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