Postcard pastime

Here is my postcard collection. This is only a fraction of it. I get postcards from friends when they go on their vacations and I return the favor. Plus, when I travel I sent postcards to myself. It’s my little souvenir.

I also do this thing called Postcrossing where I would send a postcard to someone in the world and I would get a postcard back. I did this in my early 20s when the thought of travelling somewhere was just a dream. At the time, I was working an entry level job so I was not making a lot of money — just enough to pay for rent, food, gas, student loans, some fun, other debts, and some savings. Receiving postcards kept my dream of travelling somewhere alive — a reason to go on vacation. I guess I did a lot Postcrossing in my early 20s because I felt like I was in a funk.

A trip to the aquarium

This week’s photo challenge is so much fun. I have not processed photos in such a long time. I love how the black and white effect transformed my photos from my trip at the Long Beach Aquarium. I have to confess the original photos were not that great and I blame the barrier picking up the reflection of my phone and well…other phones. Thank you for hosting such a fun challenge, Anne!

Update: for reference, here are the original photos:

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Here are some black and white photos around the blogosphere:

• Bends Branches – a beautiful landscape of the hills dotted with buffalo.
• A New Day – The black and white effect on this house in the middle of nowhere looks incredibly clean!
• A Meditative Journey with Saldage – A wonderful collection of black and white photos. They transformed seemingly ordinary objects into something more abstract.
• Tish Farrell – The B&W effect on harvest machines almost looks like like a silhouettes.
• One Woman’s Quest II – Birds in B & W. Wonderful close-up shots.

The Great Wall of Los Angeles (PPAC #1)

Cee Neuner and Marsha Ingrao are co-hosting a Photographing Public Art Challenge which explores public art and how to define public art. This challenge totally excited me because I have taken A LOT of photos of public art around my hometown and around the world. I remembered many years ago after college, my friends and I started blogging as a medium to keep in touch. I guess we thought we were too cool for Facebook.

Anyways one of the things we shared on our blogs was public modern art found in business parks. It sounds random for a lot of people, but for us it was our inside joke. A lot of the sculptures just did not make any sense. We started working our first jobs at the time, so naturally we wrote a lot about work and the “quarter-life” crisis.

For these challenges, I would like to start sharing public art found around my hometown, Los Angeles. First up is the Great Wall of Los Angeles. This mural can be found in the Tujunga Wash. I posted this mural originally in May 2017 when I was doing the 52 hike challenge that year. I loved they made this neighborhood wash a trail.

Though the definition of public art is fuzzy, I believe one of the qualities for art to be public is that it recognizes a piece of a city or town’s history whether it is good or bad. The Great Wall of Los Angeles is one of the longest murals in the world illustrating the history of Los Angeles starting from pre-historic Los Angeles and La Brea tarpit to the Olympic champions in 1984. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the mural from the National Park Services site. I intend to return to take better close-up shots of each section. Maybe that will be my summer project. I’m still designing my summer.

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Some public art around the blogosphere:

– Our Other Blog: Two Sisters and Two Points of View: lovely roadside art in Tasmania.

– WoolyMuses: Portraits on a cement work site

– MV Obsessions: I love that mural on the side of the house.

– Nowathome: That pink giraffe looks so much fun!