Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters: the Periodic Table

This weeks weekly photo challenge is letters

“For this week’s challenge, share a photo with letters — no matter the alphabet. You can capture a neon sign, a sentence scribbled in an old phone booth, a random letter that’s seemingly out of place, or anything else. As you look through your lens, think about how your image might convey something bigger: a snapshot of how we communicate with one another, even if we don’t speak the same language. ”

I’ve just started reading “The Disappearing Spoon” by Sam Kean.  It is a book about the elements and the periodic table.

As Kean says “the coordinates of an element determine nearly everything scientifically interesting about it.  For each element, its geography is its destiny”.

If you understand it (I don’t) the letters on the periodic table are like any other language – you draw information and understanding from their order – how they fit together and how they interact.

This photo is my first real attempt at staged, “still life” style photography

Weekly Photography Challenge: on top

 

The New Zealand flag flies from on top the beehive – the building which houses the New Zealand Cabinet (the Prime Minister’s office is on the top floor).

While politicians can spend a career working to reach a position  where they get an office there – it is as a building reportedly not the greatest place to work.  The circular interior is an inconvenient shape, it is very disorientating trying to find an exit when leaving one of the (very small elevators).  Despite a refurbishment, some Cabinet Ministers still prefer offices in the more modern adjacent Bowen House.

Nonetheless the ninth floor office is a symbol that you are indeed “on top”

Weekly Photo Challenge: Threshold

I spent this past weekend in Christchurch – a city where some of my family are and where I lived for ten years.

I had two subjects in mind for photography before I went, and when this weeks theme was posted it all fitted in perfectly.  There was a big sense of being at the threshold – at a place in time and space that separates the past/present from the future.

 

I got to spend a bunch of time hanging out with my nephew.  At four and a half he seems on the verge of turning in to a “big boy”.

 

Of course he can still get engrossed in pretending to fly the kitchen stool to space.  But he can also think quite deliberately about the world – how it works and how he fits in to it.  More and more often he can also articulate those thoughts

He won’t be starting school till next year, but it feels like he is on the cusp of something exciting.

 

He is though doing his growing up in post earthquake Christchurch.  I am not sure that I feel the same optimism for the city as I do for him.  In the time I worked in Christchurch I had four different CBD offices.  All four have since been demolished.  One has some new building going on – three are vacant and derelict. They are all part of a city that is still working out where it is heading