Day 28: Mystery

Today’s prompt is actually from the Capture Your 365 prompt list for October.  I decided to go with this over the Skillshare prompt as it is Mystery. The Skillshare prompt is Your Friends, which is one that I’m not able to actually do since most of my friends don’t live in the same place as I do. Mystery is a little more doable as I have an entire bookshelf full of it.

Mystery  novels have been a favorite genre of mine as far back as I can remember. I remember as a child going to our public library, picking up a Nancy Drew novel, pulling up a dinosaur chair and getting lost while my mom browsed the shelves looking for a book for herself.  From Nancy Drew, I moved on to the Sherlock Holmes novels, and those were the stories that hooked me as a mystery genre fan. I have multiple copies and sets of these novels, one a pop up version of A Scandal In Bohemia and The Blue Carbuncle that was given to me as a gift.

As an adult, I started working at the public library for the town we lived in, and it was there I discovered the novels of Sue Grafton. The first book in the series, A Is For Alibi was released in 1982, the latest, Y Is For Yesterday came out in 2017. I have every novel in the alphabet series. As she passed away in December of 2017,  the alphabet ends with Y.  A couple of shelves below beloved Sue, is the ever popular James Patterson, and I have enough of his novels to take up multiple shelves. His writing is so detailed and intriguing, it’s hard to put down one of his books once you’ve started it.

I could go on and on about the different mystery novels I have and authors I enjoy, but instead I will recommend that you take some time and go to your library or local bookstore and spend some time among the shelves and discover some of the brilliant and ingenious books and authors that will leave you on the edge of your seat, hooking your chapter after chapter. I will forever be a fan and lover of great mysteries and spend time in their pages whenever I get the chance.

 

Day 13: Self Help

Self help is a subject I had to ponder for a bit as I had to reflect on what it really is for me. I am the type of person that tends to put themselves on the back burner to make sure everyone and everything else is taken care of first. When I sat and thought about, the two things that have always been what I turn to when I need to decompress, or uplifting or to relax are books and music. Throw in a nice cab sav and we’re cookin’ with gas.

Music has always been a constant in my life. My mother told me that I was singing before ever started talking. And while I do enjoy singing, it was never a passion to the point that I wanted to pursue it professionally. As far back as I can remember, there was always music playing in our house, on vinyl and my mother always played a variety of genres, so we grew up well rounded. At the age of 6, Heart was my favorite band and you could hear me rocking to Barracuda with the Wilson sisters. Saturday mornings were set aside for house cleaning and Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band was frequently played for that. Everything from Alvin Bishop’s Calling All Cows to Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA came across our speakers.

Growing up in the 80’s we were exposed to a plethora of fantastic music and in our little town, I was the queen of the hair bands. My first concert was Def Leppard and Europe and I remember vividly to this day. Tonight I will be going to the first concert I’ve been to in a while and I am beyond excited as it will be my first A cappella show to attend. I first saw Home Free when they were on the tv show The Sing Off and was blown away by their talent. There are a handful of singers who can stop me in my tracks where I have to just listen. Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Urs Buhler of Il Divo, Avi Kaplin, and both Austin Brown and Tim Foust of Home Free.

Music is powerful and can drive your emotions. This is demonstrated how it’s used in movies, commercials, at sporting events and can even further or change the mood of a listener, depending on what they choose to listen to.

While music brings me back to center, reading is my escape. I can go anywhere in any country in any century. My taste in books is as eclectic as my taste in music. Like with music, I have had a book in hand from my childhood. And again, like music, what genre I read is often determined by the mood I’m in. Currently I am in True Crime mode and while I don’t get to pick up one of my books as often as I would like, I do spend time in the children’s genre as my granddaughter is becoming a bookwork just like her grandmother. I will not apologize.

No matter what you do as a mode of self help, it is important to take some time to invest in yourself, doing some good to you. We live in a busy world and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down, so taking the time to purposefully slow down is something that we have to do on and individual basis and then we have to make the most of those “me moments”.

 

Day 12: Seasonal

The actual day 12 prompt is entitled “Your Sketchbook”, however I don’t sketch or journal so I opted to use one of the bonus prompts. As we are getting closer to Halloween, and it is a favorite holiday around this house, I decided to go with that one, but am already rolling around the many possibilities that I can go with this particular prompt.

With the exception of last year, we have always gone over the top decorating for Halloween and have done a different theme each year. This has resulted in us collecting decorative items and homemade props that we have stored in two different buildings. I will never run out of photo prop ideas for this holiday.

I did some playing with the flat lay layout before and after the breakfast photos, giving the creepier feels. The first flat lay photo I actually shot I call “Creepy Tea”, utilizing one of my favorite tea cups, my skull tea diffuser, dragon tea bag holder, lose tea and dried thistles from a Halloween flower arrangement my husband bought me a couple of years ago.  I knew in my mind that I wanted hard shadows in the photo because I wanted it to have that film noir feel and that you were fixing to sit down to tea with Alfred Hitchcock or Vincent Price. Out of all of the flat lay style photos I’ve done, it is my favorite.

The second flat lay shot was inspired of course by Edgar Allen Poe, one of my best-loved authors. While he is famous for The Raven and this poem is inspiration for tons of Halloween décor, his other poems and shorts stories are haunting and fantastic. He was in a class of his own and probably my favorite American Lit author. The one non Poe element in the photo is by an artist called Twisted Spiders.   These fantastic arachnids are made from any type of bead you can think of and come in multiple sizes as necklaces, pins and earrings.  This particular spider, whose bead reads “Enjoy the journey” was a perfect edition to this shot.

The third shot was a montage of different Halloween items that I pulled together for Halloween At Home. The idea of the shot was not to be creepy, more so spooky, family fun. I couldn’t help but include one of the Pop! action figures from The Walkind Dead that my granddaughter commandeered for some quirky fun.

Fall is our favorite season. The cooler weather, the changing of the leaves, trick-or-treating, corn mazes, the 31 days of Halloween. There is so much to capture with the camera, so much to experience each and every day.  And with a camera, you don’t have to be dictated by the calendar for a seasonal shot. Any day can be Halloween!

 

Day 1: Morning Reads

Welcome to my 30 day photography project, courtesy of Amanda Creek Creative. Day one is titled “Morning Reads”. Like most people, I am more apt to enjoy my coffee while checking my email and scroll through social media instead of reading a paper or a book first thing.  As I watch my soon to be 2 year old granddaughter, reading isn’t something that I get to do as often as I would like, which is sad when I think of the books on my bookshelves that call out my name. I’m the type that has more books than bookshelf space, with books of just about every type of genre.

When thinking about this project, I decided to do a set of photos with 2 different books. One that I am currently reading, when I get a few moments here and there. It falls in the true crime genre, which is something that I am a huge fan of. I don’t know if it’s because I’m an officer’s wife, or if like most people, I’m just morbidly fascinated by the subject. It does open up an avenue of communication between my husband and I as we discuss cases on different true crime dramas and books. I let him know that he never had to worry about me murdering him because I know I’d never get away with it. Just because I live with a cop, doesn’t mean I’d be able to outthink them and not leave behind evidence. All of that is a moot point however as I love my husband very much and kind of want to keep him around a while longer.

Recently, I got to sit in on a class presented by Phil Chalmers.  This is unquestionably one of the most informative classes I have been to.  Titled “Profiling Teen Killers, School Shooters, Mass Murderers, & Serial Killers”, it was an eye opening experience to say the least. He covers so much material looking at the whole picture on this topic and not just an view through a needle’s eye. The most entertaining part of the class was when a convicted serial killer called in and answered questions that members of the class had. He was asked if he had ever been through Oklahoma to which he answered “yes”. As a truck driver, he’s driven all of the country and he loved Oklahoma and said that we treated him as one of our own. He stopped in Hooker, OK and said “You know, there wasn’t a single hooker in Hooker!”  When asked if he had ever killed anyone here, he replied “no” and if he was remorseful for any of the killings he was responsible for, it was another “no”.  It was quite a chilling experience, to be sure.

The inspiration behind the first photo for this project is Phil’s book, “Inside the Mind of a Teen Killer”. There are so many heartbreaking stories of teenagers who carried out school shootings, or killed family members. Our minds tend to jump straight to Columbine, but sadly there are so many other tales that we haven’t heard as they were never pushed out over the national news.  As a parent and now a grandparent, the information that he provides in this book is worth it’s weight in gold.

One of my favorite set of stories ever, are the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. My love of true crime may have easily been generated by my love of Sherlock and how he had a crafty way of solving cases. A few years ago, I picked up a book that is a sister novel to the original series entitled “Moriarty” by Anthony Horowitz.

I was left dumbfounded by this novel and was by no means prepared for the ending. It went a direction that I never saw coming. With the exception of this,  I refuse to go into any detail about this book as I don’t want to ever be guilty of giving anything away as everything is important.   A character that Doyle had introduced in his own story, “The Sign of Four”,  Inspector Athelney Jones, is a major player as this story unfolds.  What really happened after Moriarty and Holmes fell into the watery depths of the Reichenbach Falls? You will find out between the pages of this exceptionally written who dun-it. I highly recommend Horowitz’s other works as well, specifically “House of Silk” and “The Magpie Murders”.

Accompanying the book in the photo is a one of a kind creation by the incredible Lilly B. Haven. She is an artist like no other and I can honestly say that I’m addicted to her work. I own seven hats and numerous necklaces, each with a unique name and home to exquisite bullet accessories. This particular hat I have plans to work a Sherlock Holmes costume around, therefore I knew that I had to use it in the shot of this book. Reading is one of my greatest loves. It’s something I’ve had an enjoyment for as long as I can remember. I can’t remember not having a book on hand and experiencing  adventures from the written page. It is something I am trying to instill in my granddaughter as she already has a plethora of books and will still for long stints of time looking through them. It is a passion that I hope grows with her as she grows. Take some time to get lost between the pages of a book and see life from a viewpoint that only the genre you are reading can provide.