things i love to like and like to love {in photography and otherwise }... oh, and hopefully a word of wisdom or two

i know it's tuesday... thus i'm a little late for mosaic monday. but i realized today that i have not done a photo collage in a very long time, so i was feeling the mosaic vibe. then i realized i was not sure what to make a collage of.

that's when i just started scrolling through five or six of the most recent folders of photos that i have uploaded and decided to just start grabbing the things i love... visually speaking.

i've always been a visual person... i guess most people who like photography are. but as a graphic designer, i'm much more stimulated visually than i am by any other sense, with the exception of sound... namely music.

each of these images contain things that stimulate me visually in person, but also in a photograph... especially the latter in the images that were captured less realistically {more what my mind sees, less what my eyes see }... such as the blurry shots of the bottled juice, or the stop lights in the night sky, or the "moving" trees in the train shot.

which reminds me of something i recently heard from a friend... helpful advice given after i expressed my frustration at something quite disappointing that was done to me by someone else i consider a friend. i guess it was more of a helpful reminder than it was advice. it was this: "it's easier to change the way you see things than it is to change what you see." the facts of what happened to me {what this friend did } are there, and i can't help but be disappointed in the person who did this thing to me. but i can choose how i will look at it, and what i choose is what will matter in the end. that helped me.

{hmmmmm... i guess this very much hearkens to the title of my blog and the "life." portion of its subtitle.}

anyway, back to the visual stimulation i love. here are each of the shots from the collage individually {with some more jibber jabber about them }. enjoy.

i received these free flowers for planting as a thank you for purchasing something at a local arts/gift store. the plant traveled with me to the cafe down the street and brightened my coffee and scone breakfast.

not much to say about this photo... other than "i just love this!"

have you had this sparking juice brand? it's called izze. it's very tasty. this one was blackberry. i enjoyed taking pictures of the bottle, especially with the way the sun glistened through it. and i liked the packaging design and the color of the juice... a perfect match to the hue of my spring trench coat. i sat outside in the sun at a sidewalk cafe for lunch one day. the other patrons must have thought i was a weirdo for taking pictures of my bottled juice instead of drinking it. but as you can see, i didn't care.

again, what else can i say that the photo doesn't? when the sky is this color at this time of night, i'm swooning!

i'll never stop taking pictures on the train. they may all look the same, but i can't not do it! this was from my most recent trip to chicago. i can't get enough of that captured movement in the foreground, while the background objects remain unblurred. and i love the photo's coloring, which is manufactured by the tinted glass of the train windows. i'm not sure if all train windows are like this, but it's one of the things i like most on our train cars.

you saw this tulip before... a couple of posts back. and you will see it again. {sorry }. it's just that i love the look of a single flower in a vase... especially if it sits on a sill in the light.

i took this recently while looking up under a tree. the camera obviously did not focus, but sometimes those are the very best images, no? this one looks sort of tie-die to me. i think i'd like a skirt made out of this image.