And the winner is...

The inaugural giveaway from Walter Helena Photography came to a close at midnight last night. How fun. How delectable.

You write about a thing like love, and look what happens ... you have a room full of people able to talk about it, and no one talks about it the same way. Perfection.

Thank you to all who participated. I loved reading through your 'endings'. Your words are precious and I hope you enjoyed writing them (and maybe even had something brought to you that you weren't expecting).

So then!

The winner of one 8 x 8 canvas giclee print from this month's giveaway is ...

Misplaced Mama!

Her entry read: "She winces, her hand burned by the boiling steam the moment her mind lands backwards, on him, and the days where it was not about love, but about power."

Misplaced Mama, congratulations! (Please contact me with your mailing address and which print you prefer from the turquoise series below ... click on the prints to see larger. It will be made and sent with care care care.)








(The turquoise triptych and the single prints are available in my shop.)

I invite each and every one of you to write with me next month during the 2nd WHP fine art giveaway. (A sneak-peak of the giveaway triptych is below.) Clouds to put one sleep.

And, there's also the matter of returning in order to follow (and assist) what our tea-drinking lady will create for herself in the next literary instalment ....

You know, the second of something should really have a good name. 1st gets inaugural. 2nd to last gets penultimate. Lets make one up.

"I invite you to return at the end of May to enter the sasstatiate giveaway."

There, then.

Forecasting: 90% low temperatures and 83% nostalgia

Look here for the contest!

I'm leaving for a short while this weekend for Winnipeg, a city I have not yet visited. A city that has tumbled forth with delight from so many mouths in the last months (years).

I expect it to look like this. (Although I know it will not.) And this fills me with nostalgia. So, I expect I will be filled with nostalgia.

That, and the bottles of red that go with greyed snow and work and people I have not seen since last publishing season. Onwards I fly, over uneven squares of farming plots from British Columbia until I land.

Oh bright afternoon bring to me a clear morning

It's been late nights and rain and grey skies and near-full moons obscured by clouds. I'm using my animals as heat bags. They don't fuss, but it hardly seems fair. So, I needed a bit of sun with my morning coffee.

This breed of photo editing I'm working on is very different from my earlier prints. I see it less as a departure and more of an exercise. I'm looking forward to matching all these clear-eyed prints with a heavy douse, spread about like cream, of fanciful, fuzzy, shadowy, did-I-dream-this-in-some-rumpled-bed prints. The sorts whose atmosphere is laid layer upon layer. And I couldn't describe to you the half of these layers because I didn't imagine how they could all get there, in front of your eyes. But you could most probably tell me what they are.

You know, like these.



If you're looking for the art-print giveaway ... please look below.

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WHP GIVEAWAY DAY...YAY!

Ready?

Set.

Go.

Okay, right right. First, the rules (yours and mine):

* The contest will be open for four days, from 7AM April 26th to 12PM April 29th.
* The winner will have their choice of one of the three featured prints above (turquoise, delicious).
* I will mail to the winner their choice of print with a large smile on my face.
* The 8 x 8 inch print will be giclee printed (yummy) on textured canvas (extra yummy) with a 1/2 inch white border.
* The canvas looks decadent framed. But I don't tell winners what to do.
* I will choose the winner by judgement and discretion and by playing favourites. Or, by the number my cat's paw lands on.

And now, what to do (oy!):

* To win, you must: submit one sentence to finish the short short story excerpt below. Write your one sentence in the comments section.
* Check back the morning of the 30th for the announcement of the winner.
* There. That's easy.



And the excerpt again please:

"It will start with tea because this is how pensive moments are spent in this home. The nature of this moment is concerned with love, as it most often is. The woman with her hand aflutter above the kettle cannot think of a time when her concern will not be love; to understand it, to embody it, or at the very least, to know what it is not. _____________________."

And, in one month I will host another giveaway to choose from a fresh triptych of prints and the story to be completed will be dependent on the winning sentence in this month's contest.

So: scribble, please erase little, and submit to me. I want to know how this portion of the story ends....

[Edit: the comments are now closed. Please return for the next giveaway in May!]

More mist, more blur

Motion, outdoors, the quiet of dawn, the mist of the hills, and sheep -- which I didn't notice until now. How is it that some things need to be seen twice to be seen fully. And then still, how full.

The kind of wind

Where you can stand into it, let your body melt forward, and it holds you there. You waver lightly in the draft but always upright, never a long enough gap in the gusts to let you fall completely. And it tears at you and freezes your cheeks and whips your clothing and at the same time it cares for you, independent of actually wanting to.

And somewhere, there is a lighthouse.

Shutters

What is it about shutters. The way they look better askew. Their sounds whilst being slapped by the wind. Paint peels from them. Smell sticks to them. Graffiti edges them into art and anything behind them will have gorgeous slat-lighted bits falling on it at some point during the day. I think shutters are like cats: the more you have, the happier you will be.

The shade formed by busy hands

I wish I knew what they grew here. But instead of looking at the rows and rows of greenery, I was consumed with wanting to get off the hot bus, taking off more clothes, and sitting beneath the shade of that wicker roof and looking at the slivers of sky through the material above. And there would be wind through the fields to my side. And there would be wine...and introductions in awkward tongues.

The poor poor country far far away

I know there is poor country down the street from me in the downtown eastside, I know there is poor country everywhere. But I don't care to photograph the derelict individuals and shacks of my own home.

I gardened for many hours today; planting cilantro, oregano, English mint, parsley, chives, lettuce, arugula, leeks, broccoli, cauliflower, strawberries, and of course basil (which I wind up basing nearly all summer meals around. I cannot get enough basil. I would make a pillow of basil if I could keep my skin pink; imagine the smell of sleeping in basil.)

For now the basil sits, potted, in a mossy clay pot on the windowsill behind my computer. It will take away from the cats perch for a few days until the nights are warm enough to let it be delicate out of doors. I'm sure the cats will forgive me when they see the looks on our faces while consuming insalata caprese.

A vee in the sky

And empty windows on the ground.

And beneath the tips and tops, things happen

Below, undoubtedly, were people drinking espresso and swaying with an accordion.

Something like an early morning

It's nearly time for me to get from rooftops to blurry. Today, a dark teaser. It reminds me of not being able to wake in the morning, but being aware that you're dreaming. That grey area between consciousness where it's only once you're awake and stretching and the light stops offending your eyes that you can put together the pieces of what was real and what was not.

The tops of things

I'm making it quite obvious that I have a hankering for the tops of things, aren't I. I didn't have to pull up the colours reflected in the dozens of glass windows. They were there, muddied and soft and ever so obviously perfect.

Oh crumbling walls

Could there be anything better than naturally exposed stone. I'm pretty sure there is, but right now, looking at this, it's hard to put down exactly what that might be.

Giveaway...upcoming...oh my.

GIVEAWAY: upcoming Monday, April 26th

Dear readers,

Beginning this month, WHP will be gifting one reader with one 8 x 8 print each and every month. This giveaway will shift and evolve with my mood and your feedback. This months' featured prints for the giveaway are turquoise, shot in Canmore, and found below. I've also just updated my shop with the full triptych. Please check back on the morning of the 26th for details of how to enter.

The rules, so far:

* The contest will be open for three days, from 7AM April 26th to 12PM April 29th. (edit: oops, that's four days)
* The winner will have their choice of one of the three featured prints.
* I will mail to the winner their choice of print with a large smile on my face.
* To win the contest, there will be a short and delicious contest.
* The contest may or may not include writing. Okay, it may.
* The 8 x 8 inch print will be giclee printed (yummy) on textured canvas (extra yummy) with a 1/2 inch white border.
* The canvas looks decadent framed. But I don't tell winners what to do.



... See you on the 26th?

Sincerely,
WHP

Rooftops of Rijeka

This photo encompasses many elements I tried to capture again and again: laundry hanging on a line, dissolving walls, imbalanced shutters, cracked rooftops, sky, calm, and detail upon detail of low and burnt shades.

What was once by the sea, no longer

At the base of our hill, at the edge of the water was once a rectangular building that was torn down to build something shinier. Presently, the space is filled with dirt and a cross-section of a ship. I miss the empty, metal bones of that old factory. By the time I moved to the area, the sagging outside of the building had already been removed and the beams exposed were erect and proud and so very straight. And then they were gone completely and I wonder where they might now be; exposed, singular.

A bird, centre

Large umbrellas crowded the alleys of Zagreb. Each restaurant stretched out into the roads with table upon table; the umbrellas shielded the drinkers from the sun, and, most likely, the birds. A lot of my photos aren't directed to the umbrellas, but they appear in the edges, framing the base of the shot (as below), or sitting idle in a corner. I've never thought much about umbrellas; but here, it was hard not to. Strange little makeshift shelters.

Windows, along with rooftops, make a home

I photographed dozens of windows while walking the main roads and cobbled hills and marbled alleys in Croatia. We don't do windows like this in Canada. We keep them plain and nondescript. We keep a window's contents as far away from stranger's eyes (mine, peering; always innocently) as we can. We keep them clean, wipe them down, spray them off, blind them with curtains.

In Croatia, the windows were part of the road, at arms length from the sidewalk, sometimes as low as kneecaps, but rarely higher than an adult's sight-line. The windows were almost always open -- cracked at the very least -- and frequently wafted a heightened conversation, a tinny radio, smells of cooking, the splattering of oil in pans. Their windows let the sun fall in and the lives inside fall out.

Skyline at the edge of the water in Rijeka, Croatia

In case the photo wasn't placement enough, the title will assist. I will be returning to Croatia often in the next while in photos. It rains here in Vancouver; tulips and tree flowers battered against soil and trunk and sidewalk.

I waited in a small working harbour in Rijeka a block away from the bus depot. I was celebrating with a long slice of bread my ability to get to and from places by the local transit. There were black fish in a pale sea. The bottoms of the boats, which were tethered to the pier by frayed and barnacle-laden ropes, were coated in tendrils of seaweed. I could not see the bottom of the sea, but from the clearness of the water, I felt as though I should be able to. So then, the bottom of the sea here in a small working harbour behind a fence that I pulled aside to sit where I sat, under the shade of a dry-docked ship, was evident and just very cloudy.

Water and concrete

Narrow paths rise along the water's edge throughout Rijeka. I walked this edge from one small town to the next and finally turned back when it seemed I could continue indefinitely.

The paths were cobblestone in places and dirt in others. Some areas had low metal fences when there were rocks in the water below and other sections had nary a barrier between the brink of the walkway and the cliff leading to the waves below.

As much as I love water, I spent much of my time looking away from it. Along the walkway were small cafes and restaurants; their chairs lined to the very edge looking over the water. Passersby were forced to walk directly through a dinner conversation; around legs, over sleeping dogs, and gently past many a table filled with empty wine glasses waiting to be cleared.

Between the cafes were retaining walls and these walls were often painted. And the paintings were beautiful.

View from above, Dubrovnik

There are, of course, many buildings with wounds still standing untouched within the walls of Dubrovnik. I can't say if these particular walls are scarred from bullets and bombs, or if it was nature. I imagine it would not be as spectacular -- architectural bones and no roof, puddles serving as baths, birds making home, moss as carpet -- if it were intact.

And that floor. Who danced there, I wonder.

Threes

I've updated my shop with triptychs. I like pairs -- thinking in parallels and photographing with a set in mind -- but more than two, I like three. But for today, here's two.

A man died here this day

Plitvička Jezera. The mist never lifted. The boardwalks stayed wet. And the water was debilitating in its appeal.

And the man? He was very old and crumpled softly and died with his wife by his side and nature everywhere around him. And a day goes on.