Photo a day

Photo a day - July

Published on 8th of August 2023

This monthly update is a bit different, usually I post 1-2 photos from every day, but this time there are 3 series of images along with individual ones. Two series were just too funny and too good, I could not stick with one. The other one is different and special for me, so I start with these photos.

I took them at the beginning of July and I keep coming back to them, there's something special here that touches me deeply. Summer evening in the garden, the girls were playing and just messing around. But, I remember it was a bad day and the evening in the garden was not planned, it was a bit of an escape from reality. We just left home, did not cook dinner and grabbed a pizza instead. Looking at these photos, I don't remember what was so bad about that day. It surely must've been something big to warrant running away for the evening. Maybe bad things at work, bad news from the war in Ukraine, or kids fighting with each other and pulling in 25 different directions with constant requests and questions and ideas, all of this together and more? Looking at these photos, I realise it does not matter what made the day bad.

What matters is that I was able to stop and look for beauty instead. Light filtered through the trees, tall grass, their smiles and giggles, them playing together. Beauty changed how I remember that day. This is what makes these photos so special, and it's big thing for me, this is the why I started taking photos in the first place. To find and capture beauty in life, those special moments, emotions and details that will help when the day is bad and you are feeling down. There's a lot of beauty in our life, even a simple weed bathed in golden evening light can be very powerful, if you just stop and look. Because the beauty can stop all the chaos and negativity of the day, it can make you feel better, more free, more happy, more yourself.

What else was happening in July? A lot of life indoors, a lot of time spent under the coffee table in case of Mara, her favourite toys can usually be found there so one can ask, are the toys there because she likes the spot, or she goes to the spot because that's where the toys are? I tried to do a pretty photo of her in the flowering bush, instead I got cheeky faces. Terrace remains our favourite spot in the evening, for baths and swimming with ducks, watering plants and the floor (and also my feet!), my cacti plants all have survived the heat wave of July, and we also spent a fair amount of time on the beach. We went to Ispica for a week, where we enjoyed sandy beaches, built lots of sandcastles and dug lots of holes and tunnels. I'm still working on the photos, some are included here and some will be in a separate post about the sea only.