Tag: play

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children Germany inspiration lockdown morning coffee talk parenting Photography Tuscany

Morning Coffee Talk~50/365

Lea playing on the swing in Tuscany~2012

Good Morning,

This image is one of my favourites that I have taken of my daughter and is both sentimental for me and expressive of her playful nature.

I was looking at it today and thinking of how important it is to remain lighthearted and free. We get that bashed out of us as we get older and what a a pity that is.

I tend to dedicate a part of my life to silliness and I don’t plan on giving that up any time soon. So cheers to the goofballs of this world, some of which are dear friends of mine. I miss you all and quarantine will end in a few days! Yay.

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Boracay inspiration lebanon morning coffee talk Photography street photography

Morning Coffee Talk~14/365

Leap of faith~ Boracay

Good Morning,

I remember as a child playing with friends on terraced hills above my village in Lebanon, and we did this crazy thing of jumping from one terrace to the next (and these were high terraces), screaming something ridiculous in Arabic like: ‘my mother threw me and the Virgin Mary caught me’. We were very devout children trained well by aunts and grandmothers to fear a god who punished bad children and saw pretty much everything were did. So we trusted that if god or any of his saints were watching, then leaping was 100% safe and we would not break any bones.

Two broken bones later, I started to doubt this theory.

That feeling of invincibility that we all have as young children is certainly something to reconnect to when needed later in life. That faith that somehow all would be well and that sometimes a blind leap is exactly what is needed despite our great fear of the unknown.

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CHINA contemplations friendship Guilin Photography street

Day 29~ December 29th~ Guilin

the card game
the card game

Where the seconds melt into minutes, and the minutes into hours, where conversations flow, where bonds are made, where friendships and money are made and lost… the village card game.

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art Photography Tuscany

Day 21~ September 21st~ Tuscany

Italia~where art lifts your soul

“art is life, life is art” R. Armin

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art Boracay inspiration life Photography

Day 29~ August 29th~ Boracay

blue dreams

I dream of a world where blue overwhelms the red. I dream of times when all will cease to compete for self gain. I dream of a place free of war, hate and anger. I dream in blue.

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life Photography story street xinjiang

Day 25~ June 25th~ Xinjiang

in the alley

For these children their alley will soon become a distant memory…

We often go back to the places where we grew up and most of us find ourselves surprised at how much smaller they look, how much our imagination added to them over the years, how developed they look or how abandoned. For the children of Kashgar, they will come back to find nothing of the old. The city is under demolition and their homes will soon be gone with no trace of them ever having existed. I feel so lucky to have been one of the photographers who captured a slice of this beautiful old culture before it gets forced to metamorphose completely into something else, somewhere else.

photo taken: children playing in an old Kashgar city alley~ Xinjiang

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inspiration life Photography street xinjiang

Day 15~ June 15th~ Xinjiang

where is your playground?

 

To play where only earth, air, water and fire are your toys, to be chased by the wind, to chase the butterflies, to be tickled by the rays of the sun, and to become best friends with the planet you live on…

There could be no playground more ideal, and there could be no life more connected.

Photo taken: Kyrgyz bedouin children playing at the shores of lake Karakol

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cambodia inspiration life Photography story

Day 7~ May 7th~ Cambodia

to each child their playground

There is a magical thing about children, which is the ability to use anything around them for creating a unique playground. I remember playing near our house in a Lebanese village jumping down a terraced field from one level to another hoping that no bones were broken, and making glue from tree sap and flower milk, and creating a small world from moss, stones and twigs. It is no different in Cambodia. I saw children creating games that fit their environment and adapting to make the most of what is available to them. The children I saw in the floating village had not heard of ipads or nintendo yet, and their fun appears to be just as great if not greater than our children’s in the west.

photo taken: boy running back on forth between the stilt raised structures in the Tonle Sap floating village

 

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congo inspiration life Photography story street

Day 10~ April 10th~ Congo

her 'Sunday Best'

It was a Sunday morning in Goma and we had spent the early morning in the medical center meeting and photographing refugee children. The children and their parents had nothing but rags on, some had bandages, very tired faces and exhausted smiles.

And then driving back on the black volcanic streets of the city I was startled to see this beautiful girl. She was immaculately styled as she crouched there playing with dry reeds on the ground and waiting for her parents to walk together to church.

The best moments in photography are the ones that just happen when everything comes together without much planning and I love this photograph for just that fact.

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life Photography

Day Three Hundred Fifty, January 7, 2012

the experiment

Flour, wax, sugar, salt, cotton, milk, talc and a few other unidentified items from around the house… these were the ingredients of Lea and her friend Emma’s experiment on the kitchen floor today. Part of the experiment I discovered later in the freezer and the other a couple of days later under Lea’s bed growing some little alien creatures!

Do you remember the days when you went around collecting things and mixing them up just to see what happens? I wonder if this is how recipes were first created? Take a child, a wild imagination, a keen curiosity and get ready for endless experiments, some very smelly and gross 🙂