Photos are a great way of reflecting.

(slideshow at the end of the post)
If there is one thing I am learning in my life, it is accepting who I am now and not being stuck in who I used to be or who I think I used to be. Growing up, and aging with attitude, is about being honest and gracefully accepting the person I see in the mirror. Looking at photos helps me to place myself in a historic perspective, accepting who I have been, what I have gone through, my loves, my mistakes (including choice of eyewear!), happy and sad moments, and then moving forward to accept who I am today. It is pure honesty. Certainly, this applies to aging as well. As we get older, it is easy to be stuck in the memory of our self as 25 or 30 or whatever your age is in the memory picture of your mind, and photos help to bring us back to the reality and acceptance of who and where we are now. We’ve come a long way, baby! It also helps us to see where we have slacked up or need improvement, that’s the honesty part. Like accepting the fact that those 10 extra pounds we gained was because we stopped exercising and started eating too much, or realizing the decorator really screwed up the paint color we thought looked good!

In today’s post, I want to share some of my photographic images with you that are from my infamous 10-photo challenge “game” (this is a preview of some of my favorites, you can see the entire collection at the link). Sometimes I invite others to play the game with me publicly and to share their images online along with mine, sometimes I just play the game alone simply because I enjoy observing things and taking pictures. In fact, I love to take photos of everything, it’s like documenting life and time for me. In looking back over images of the past I feel delighted, surprised, saddened, joyful, recapturing the emotions from what those photos meant to me at the time I took them and what they mean to me now. It is interesting how our emotions change over time.  It is even more interesting to me at how random photos can evoke thought and introspection on our lives as I mentioned above.

I believe photography is one of the most beautiful art forms we have today and a wonderful outlet that we all have available to us with the explosion of smart phone and new camera technology. We are able to capture moments on the spot, in real time. I hope you will enjoy these images; I would love to have your feedback. Please stay tuned because the first 2014 10-photo challenge of 2014 is coming soon, more on that in an upcoming post.
Love and peace, Sandy
Enjoy the slideshow!