Weekly Photo Challenge: Changing Seasons

Photo courtesy of Cheri Lucas

Changing Seasons. It’s the first week of December, and where I live, on the west coast of the US, the weather has cooled, the trees are bare, and the sky seems much more volatile and moody. Here, we’re saying goodbye to fall and hello to winter. In other parts of the world, it’s snowing. And for our neighbors down south, it’s almost summer.

I visited Istanbul at the start of 2012, and one day I strolled through a snowy park in the Sultanhamet district and took the photograph above. After I decided on this week’s theme, I immediately recalled this image — this snow, light and fresh, had recently fallen. That afternoon, I’d watched snow blanket the ground and benches and the tops of mosques throughout the city. It’s a lovely pastime to witness a place change right before your eyes.

In a new post created specifically for this challenge, share a picture that means CHANGING SEASONS to you.

We know our readers hail from all corners of the globe, so we’re excited to see different landscapes, as well as more creative, unexpected interpretations.

– Cheri

—-

New to The Daily Post? Whether you’re a beginner or a professional, you’re invited to get involved in our Weekly Photo Challenge to help you meet your blogging goals and give you another way to take part in Post a Day / Post a Week. Everyone is welcome to participate, even if your blog isn’t about photography.

Here’s how it works:

1. Each week, we’ll provide a theme for creative inspiration. You take photographs based on your interpretation of the theme, and post them on your blog (a new post!) anytime before the following Friday when the next photo theme will be announced.

2. To make it easy for others to check out your photos, title your blog post “Weekly Photo Challenge: (theme of the week)” and be sure to use the “postaday″ tag.

3. Subscribe to The Daily Post so that you don’t miss out on weekly challenge announcements. Sign up via the email subscription link in the sidebar or RSS.

Quick Tip: Take Up the Gauntlet

You’ve started a blog, you visit and comment on others’ sites, you hang around with those cool kids over at The Daily Post — all fantastic ways to find your readers and become a part of the WordPress.com community. If you want to try and speed up the process, though, you can jump-start your site by participating in blogging events.

Creative Blogging

Last year, I took a poetry workshop called “Hypnopoeia” with the poet Kristen Prevallet. In the workshop, we took a look at different states of mind when writing poetry, ranging from the ways in which rhythm and sound affect the reading of a poem to writing while in a deep meditation or hypnosis. Our sessions were interesting and exciting — there was always the potential of having some really interesting idea or breakthrough while being exposed to ideas that were very far outside of the box.

While hypnosis may not be your thing (and I can say, with experience, that it’s not really mine), there’s something to be said for writing outside of your comfort zone. Using different exercises and practicing different writing styles is an excellent way to bring a new perspective to your usual blogging practice.

Something I’ve done is set up a private “practice” blog where I can post anything I want. (You can sign up for as many WordPress.com blogs as you’d like here and mark them as private by changing your privacy settings.) On my practice blog, it doesn’t matter if what I write is good or not. In fact, I expect the things that I’m writing with experimentation in mind to be bad. Without expectations, I’m free to try anything — there is no self-censorship involved.

One way that I like to challenge myself is by writing in a style that’s completely different from my usual style. As someone who tends to be overly verbose, limiting the amount of words I can use — either to a certain set of words or a certain number of words — can be extremely challenging. Likewise, if you’re a food blogger or write a personal blog, picking a news story to cover may be a fun challenge for yourself.

In addition to writing exercises like the prompts here at the Daily Post, brainstorm some challenges that put you outside of your comfort zone. Like to write politically-minded posts? How about writing from the opposite perspective. Think you don’t have what it takes to be a photo blogger? Try answering one of the Daily Post questions with a picture.

What kind of writing exercises have you tried? Which helped and which were a total flop? Post some of your ideas in the comments — and your examples!