For those who haven’t been around long enough to remember the first time I posted about this, I’d like to remind everyone about Festive Lights. It’s a free Dashboard widget for Mac users that allows you to put, well, festive lights on your dashboard or desktop. I fire it up around this time every year, and it really does help lend holiday spirit to my day. Link

Seriously, how could anyone not love autumn?

Vibrance as the nights get longer.

Looking forward to the future.

The countdown to Christmas… I choose to start today.

One year ago today Emirhan and I arrived back to Turkey from Thailand and Malaysia. It was a fantastic trip with a lot of memories, and I learned so much from shooting in both places, as everything about both countries was so different from my usual subject matter.

For those who missed the photo story the first time around, the Thailand set is here and the Malaysia set is here.

Every year starting in late November, we begin to get these vivid pink sunsets that don’t look anything like the summer ones. They get more intense and aurora-like toward February, and then taper off again in March. This year we got lucky and had a pink aurora sunset a couple of days ago, and I was shocked at how vibrant it was. Believe it or not, this shot is SOOC, aside from the border I added, and the hair on the internal camera mirror that I had to clone out. I have not touched the colours. If this doesn’t make you want to come see Antalya for yourself, I give up!

Sometimes you just have a photo that’s a personal favourite, and this is one of mine.

Some days it still feels like late summer, but the cooler evenings are definitely here now.

I’m one of those people who doesn’t have much in the way of family. I was raised as an only child, and I only ever met one of my grandparents, on account of two of them being in Germany and one of them having died many decades before I was born. So genealogy always seemed to me to be a lost cause. I’ve made several attempts over the years at trying to find out who my ancestors were, but since I didn’t have much information to go on, I kept running into dead ends before I ever really got started.

Now comes the part where the internet enters the picture and saves the day. There are so many skilled amateur genealogists out there researching their families, but it never occurred to me that someone could be out there researching my family, or that indeed many people already had. Thanks to the network of family tree gardeners out there, I’ve finally made the breakthrough I’d been trying to make for twenty years: finding out who my grandfather was and getting a copy of his death certificate. That has opened up the floodgates, as it were, and just that little nugget of information has now led to me finding no fewer than 105 relatives over the past week. I feel overwhelmed and shocked and emotional and everything else you might expect.

I’m particularly surprised and delighted at the number of old photos one can find online. Above is the family of Thomas and Ardelia Glimp (seated), and the woman standing fifth from the left (behind the rocking chair) is my great-great-aunt, Ardelia Glimp Baker. I can’t believe how much I’ve learned about my history in such a short time. A week ago I had no idea any of these people ever existed.