mountains

The (Most Favored) Photograph

emyloom 2 Comments

For Christmas my niece gifted me a subscription to a service where every week I answer a question that she sends me. The task has been interesting and I find I cannot give short answers! This week’s question was: What is one of the best photographs you’ve ever taken?

Lord knows I take more photographs that any one person can view or admire in one lifetime, but picking the best could prove difficult.

Of course there are hundreds of my friends, family and children. The ones of my sons are ones that will be cherished for a lifetime. These I look through and reminisce about days long gone. One photo can bring a flood of memories and these photos fill my heart with joy and sadness. They bring me to a realization that those days were really the wonderful magical days and how I wish now that I had realized it at the time.

So beyond those and taking many pictures of culinary creations and labels too small read, I take many, many pictures of God’s creation. After all is there really any better subject.

I have been fortunate to travel a bit in my life. Other than living in Texas, Florida, Alaska, Colorado and Washington, I have travel abroad to Korea, Japan, Canada, England, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico, Israel, Belize and Australia. Each one of these places have their own unique beauty and natural wonders. Before the days of digital photos and iPhone cameras, pictures were expensive and did not always come out perfect, as it was a little pricey to buy film, and pay for developing. For that reason there were not a lot of retakes. Still, I enjoy remembering those places even in substandard quality pictures. Unfortunately even today, with digital pictures, the camera is never quite able to capture the beauty of it all.

Once when Josh was in preschool, we were talking about a beautiful scene but we had no camera with us to take a photo. Josh told me that we would just have to take a picture with our hearts. He demonstrated that we look at the scene for a while and blink our eyes several times to capture it. Le sigh… I have so many pictures in my heart now.

I have thousands of photos of the ocean waves, mountains, sunsets, sunrises, clouds, peaceful scenes of freshly fallen snow, rivers, waterfalls, the moon at midnight, palm trees, the gorgeous colors of changing leaves in fall, plants, flowers and wildlife. One of my favorite things to do is take photos of the minutia in nature; close-ups of ice crystals, red berries, moss, weeds, the inner parts of flowers, spider webs, shells and the tiniest of insects. I am in awe of the detail in even the smallest of God’s creation.

So what is my best photo? I don’t know what scale defines best, but a favorite one that was a gift from God was a scene so rich and powerful it set me singing, “How Great is Our God” all day. It was January 4, 2012, I was driving to work and the sun was rising over Mt Si. The sky looked like it was on fire and the sun hitting the clouds looked like huge flames. We don’t get a lot of vivid colorful sunrises and sunsets here and this was the most stunning and vibrant I had ever seen anywhere. It was a gift. I stopped my car and took several pictures (with the camera on my iPhone 4, so the quality was not great) but my heart remembers the beauty. I recently heard someone say we overuse the word awesome. Dictionary.com says, “causing or inducing awe; inspiring an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration…”

Yes, that morning, that sunrise was awesome.

The Mountain

emyloom 1 Comment

I once lived 15 miles from this mountain on the outskirts of Redmond, WA. To reach our home we would drive down Union Hill Road and as we approached our turn we could see the mountain. It looked as if it was sitting right in middle of the road and even at that distance it appeared majestic. When my youngest son was just a toddler and he saw the mountain on the road, he would say, “There’s the mountain of my home.”

This mountain is Mount Si. It is located on the edge of Cascade foothills near the towns of North Bend and Snoqualmie and now I live in its shadow.

It rises 4167 ft and was named after a homesteader Josiah Merritt known locally as Uncle Si who in 1862 built a cabin at its base.

In the early 1990’s, the mountain, along with with the smaller peak Little Si, and the community were made famous by the quirky David Lynch TV drama, Twin Peaks. In the summer the community is filled with fans of the series following self guided tours of the landmarks around the area and taking pictures of the mountain.

Yes Si is famous, however, most of us locals just think of Mount Si as our treasure. We have photographs upon photographs of this magnificent mountain and it’s ever changing faces; sometimes shrouded in the clouds, frosted with snow or bathe in the evening sunlight.

That’s the way it was tonight. There was a colorful sunset and the light hit Mount Si and covered it in a golden glow.

So for about the 4000th time in the last 35 years, I captured another face of “the mountain of my home.”