Photo Challenge: Past

This week's photo challenge was more on the abstract side. I'm getting the sense that Keith really likes the concrete words, like "curve," and he gets a lot of solid ideas for them. Past? That's a bit harder to pin down.

Or rather, it's hard to convey to complete strangers, without using words. We were down in Kentucky over the weekend. Does he take a picture of something from his own past? Except it probably wouldn't mean anything to most people participating in the Photo Challenge, only resulting in a lot of shrugged shoulders, scratched heads, and quick clicks to the next photo.

But it's hard to find a picture of something clearly Past without being too over the top. I'm always drawn to the idea of triptychs, like 3 pictures of Eleanor, starting from the day she was born to today. But is that cheating? To convey past through multiple images?

In the end, Keith and Eleanor took a trip to an old schoolhouse in our city and snapped a few shots. It's a little more spelled out than some of the other photos, with the sign and all .... but how else to do it? It's a difficult concept to convey in a single image.

Before he added some effects in Photoshop, the light was very flat since it's another cloudy, drizzly night. (You know how I knew it would rain tonight? Because it's Tuesday, and our trash pick-up is on Wednesday. So it seems like it rains every Tuesday night!) He warmed up/deepened the colors and added a blurred effect. I guess technically he "de-colorized" because the whole photo is more brown in tone, but to me that made the color that's there more prominent.

Yes, the picture does make me think of the past. But looking at the sad, naked bush and patchy brown grass really makes me think, "Man, I'm ready for Spring!"