Combining two art forms to make something beautiful

Okay I don't think of myself as all that good at either poetry or photography, but when I combine the two I have some lovely pieces.

I only just discovered these way of displaying my words and images together this summer. Firstly I have of course been taking photos of flowers and nature since I was a child. I know I have a good eye,but I was never sure what I could do to display them.

Well I decided that I would play around with some of the shorter poetry forms and while these are the the worlds deepest poems, they are pleasant and soothing in many cases. Crossing them with some of my better images was just a logical step.

I started with the acrostic and cinquian poems I wrote. You can look up what those styles are and you will see that they make a perfect set of words for a photo poem.  Here are the three cinquain that I wrote and then played with:

As you can see, a simple form that easily rests on top of the images I have. The form is one, two, three, four, one...simple form but surprisingly difficult to write something touching.

Next we have the four Acrostic poems I wrote:

Again a fun project. Acrostic poems spell out a word on the vertical. And can be as little as two lines all the way up to whatever, I guess. I found went i was cropping and resizing the images that I had that lovely close up of a bee.

Finally I have just today been playing with some of my haiku. I have a lot more of those poems, so I will be putting them up in the following weeks but here is a brief example:

All of the photos you see were taken with a simple and cheap digital camera. No fancy phone camera, no high end expensive equipment. Just my eye and the built in zoom on the camera. I don't spend a lot of time in framing my images, I just see something I want to photograph and I frame it up. Simple images, a good eye and a little patience...oh yes..and an open and willing heart.

Another thing I have started on is doing poems for old photographs. You know those wonderful black and white (or sepia) photos that we all have stashed away someplace. I decided to us for my first stab at this a beautiful photo of my mother when she was sixteen. That would make the photo from 1956. My mom was still a sweet and innocent girl here. Life had yet to defeat dreams (I think)

I know this is harder to read but it is delicate, like my mom. I only have this one done so far but I hope to do many more, if I can get the old photos from my mother.

And finally I have one free verse poem I did:

Not as good as the others but I will work these out. My nature free verses I think will work that best with my photos. Only time will tell.

Playing with photographs and poetry

As both a photographer and a writer I do a lot of different things. Yes, most of my photography is of the same basic subject, flowers. Be they cultivated or wild weeds, I take photos of them and then post them for people to enjoy over on my photo blog, Window to my mind.

But as a writer most of what I do is a bit different.  Writing short stories, novellas and novels doesn't always blend well with the photos I take, but now my poetry, that is a different story. Over the past few months I have been playing with some of the shorter forms of poetry. Just to see if I can pull them off.  Not sure how good they are but they do work well placed into some of the photographs I have taken.

In today's blog here I thought I would post up the cinquain poems i have written placed over some of my photos...for your viewing pleasure of course.  Hope you like.  Over the next year I plan on doing more before I collect them all into one volume and put them out.

These are what is known as a didactic cinquain. Basically you do it as follows, line a one word, line b two words, line c three, line d four and line five one. Simple but not as easy as it looks. Using photoshop I simply edited the photo that I wished to use to the correct size and then typed in the poem.

Trying to catch the moon on film

Just the other night the moon was a thin little sliver in the sky.  As my hubby and I looked out our kitchen window we saw a perfect image.  The fingernail moon with Venus a bright light to the right of it, all framed nicely by the trees across the way.  This was an image I could see painted in dark blues, black and glow in the dark paints.  Why glow in the dark?  Because it would glow in the dim lighting like the moon does.  It is something I would love to try and paint in the future but for now I tried to catch it on memory card with my camera.

As you can see the images came out a bit fuzzy.  I could not get them to come clear with my camera but I thought i would share them with you all.

Making book covers on your own

As a independent writer I have to do a lot of what publishers used to do.  Years ago a writer got to just do the writing.  Editing, marketing and things like book covers and even book trailers was done by your publisher.  People who have read my posts in other places know that the two small press publishers I have did none of that for me.

The editing and marketing parts bothered me quite a bit as I can only do so much editing on my own and well marketing is a skill, a well paid one.  I have little to no idea how to market my work and I am very glad to those who have taken the plug to read my work.

Even more I have a huge thanks for those who have beta read some of my work and have pointed out where I need to fix something.  When you are a starting writer with no money you have to hope to have wonderful friends who can help you.

But one thing I have enjoyed is making covers for my work.  Many of the covers have come out of my photography hobby.  When you have a few thousand nature shots it is easy to find something that will work.  I keep searching the web for fun fonts and play around in photoshop to make them better.  While most of my covers don't have half naked images I think they are okay.

Now that I have started trying to do painting I thought I would try doing one of my short story covers as a painting.  I wrote a short called The Pest House, which is a Death Walks Through short story.  It is based out of a story I read on the Nashua, NH facebook group.  Pest houses were the places that people with contagious diseases were taken to back in the 1830s.  Most of them were places for them to go and die.  So it fit perfectly in my series.

Going through my little paintings (yes I do small paintings) I decided this painting just might work well for the cover for this tale of a ghost

So should I use this or not?  Any suggestions?