I have finally collected the seven portfolio projects I completed for the Enchanted Lens Camera Club in Albuquerque. There is one for each year, beginning in 2018-19. They were scattered in various computer files where I had to search for them. I now have them in a Mixbook book. I am looking at them and pondering the variety of topics I chose and how well I executed each one. What will be my topic for the 2025-26 year? It is a difficult decision. What do I enjoy photographing? What do I want to convey, and what will help me grow?
Today, I am adding six projects to the blog, from newest to oldest. I did not include the 2024-25 portfolio, which has its own post. This will give me another way to find them. It allows me to share them with you.
I welcome your questions and responses. Some possibilities for 2026 include old buildings (such as businesses) in Albuquerque, as well as themes like people and books, people and food, and sacred places. What would you like to see next?
This was my 2024-2025 Portfolio Project Completed for the Enchanted Lens Photography Club (ELCC), Albuquerque, New Mexico. The aim is to compile a group of pictures on a theme. Click on the individual photos to enlarge them
It is one week before Christmas Eve, and I’m still not feeling the Christmas spirit, despite participating in Advent readings with a small group and attending a glorious performance of Handel’s Messiah. I brought the Swedish straw goat and a wooden Santa Claus up from the basement and put a wreath on the door this evening. Decorating done, maybe.
I was briefly tempted by the pretty Christmas trees from Mora, NM in the lot on 4th Street, but the thought of putting everything up and taking it down deterred me. I have not baked a single cookie (yet) or bought anyone Christmas presents (besides a tip to our faithful newspaper carrier). I’ve invited guests for Christmas dinner but have not come up with a menu. Unless we get inspired, we will not set out luminaria on Christmas Eve as we did last year when the neighbors came to the end of the driveway for hot cider and cookies, happy to see each other, even in our masks, after the long months of lockdown.
Kent and I were relieved to get our first Covid vaccinations in February and March – thinking soon Covid would be gone, and we could resume life as we knew it. As we all know, that did not happen, although the threat of death was much lessened. We traveled to San Francisco several times, happy to see the family and take long walks. In August we drove to Wyoming for a gathering of Kent’s high school class, and in October and November we ventured on our first pandemic era foreign trip to Mexico City, Puebla, and Oaxaca.
We have much to be grateful for, but I am feeling sad for the future of the world. My generation, in the 1960s railed at what our parents had done, but now we are leaving behind a worse mess. Tomorrow, one full week before Christmas, would be my father’s 120th birthday. He was born on December 18, 1901, and although he suffered from a burst appendix, smallpox, and tuberculosis, and survived the 1918 flu pandemic, he lived to be 90 years old. After more than thirty years without them, I still miss my parents.
We worked extensively on Kent’s book We Ran Away to Sea, writing and re-writing several times and cutting out enough stories to fill another book. We hope to finish it in 2022.
I participated in the local photography club through meetings via Zoom and moved out of the beginner level in the exhibitions, although I still struggle with Lightroom, Photoshop, and my camera. The judges especially liked some of the pictures taken through the glass of our small bathroom’s shower. So much for traveling to get good pictures!
Last night just at sunset, I drove to La Montanita Co-Op to replenish our supply of rye crisp. The Sandia Mountains glowed deep pink, as they often do in winter. When I returned, the light had faded, but a perfect full moon now hung over the deep-blue peaks. Had I looked more carefully earlier, I might have seen the pink mountains and the rising moon together, but I missed the opportunity.
Despite my lack of Christmas spirit, I don’t want to miss this opportunity to wish you all the blessings and joys of the season. May our hope be renewed. When I asked Kent if I should add anything, he said, “How about a little cheer?”
Click on the photos to enlarge them and display captions.
Creating this portfolio was a year-long project that involved working in a small group with other members of the Enchanted Lens Camera Club to help each other develop a selection of no more than twelve photos that together conveyed a theme or a story. I had no idea what I was going to do when I started, but I had lots of ideas about windows. I don’t think a single photo I started with ended up in the final selection, which I narrowed to photos of windows that distorted or transformed what was seen through or reflected by them.
Half of these remaining photos were taken through two windows in my tiny bathroom — one covered with condensation and drops of water that transformed the trees outside, and the other a wavy glass window in the shower that transformed flowers, a face, and the light behind it. Others came from shattered and bubbled glass in San Francisco, through a dirty window and a window screen in our garage, and a graffitied window high up on the outside of a cathedral in Quito, Ecuador. One of the delights of the project was learning to pay attention to what I was seeing, and discovering beauty in unexpected places.
I also enjoyed the oxymoron that a window, which should enable us to see clearly, was also a means of distortion and transformation. The reviewer of the project commented on the lack of window frames, and he liked that — I hadn’t noticed — and indeed when I started, many of the pictures had shown window frames. When discussing illustrations in children’s books, we often consider whether frames distance viewers or bring them closer into the pictures and the stories. What do you think? I always rather liked frames, such as those often used by Trina Schart Hyman, but without frames perhaps the distorted vision could be our own, and not the fault of the window through which we are looking?
Caminobleu 