We Now Return to our Regularly Scheduled Programming

Halloween is over, so we can put aside the silliness for another year. No more Trick or Treating, haunted hayrides (or hayrides of any sort), wearing goofy costumes, or being forced to listen to "The Monster Mash". It's nice to have the brief respite every year where kids of all ages are allowed, and even encouraged, to act ........ well ....... silly, but it's time to get back to the business at hand.

There is a certain elegance to autumn. The air is clean and crisp, you have to wear an additional layer or two of clothing, and the smell of wood burning in fireplaces permeates the air. Life is winding down and preparing for the long New Hampshire winter. Root systems are recalling the life force from the vegetation to store it for next springs rebirth. Flowers and leaves dry out, shrivel up, and fall, finding their way back to the soil from whence the sprung.

I'm not real big on the leaf peeping foliage stuff, but I do enjoy a good shriveled up flower or leaf. You see so many spring and summer flower shots, and they are nice, but it's kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. "Ooooooooooooh, ahhhhhhhhhhhh, pretty flower". How can you go wrong? (I take that back, I see plenty of them go wrong.)

I challenge you to photograph something dead and make it into art. Stretch those artistic muscles. push the envelope on your creativity. Feel free to post your photographs of "Dead" in my blog comments. FAIR WARNING: Photographs of people will be removed.

"Trio"

By the way, does anyone have an extra Kit-Kat bar? I'm all out of the small ones and the big ones won't fit through the hole in my Halloween mask.

UPDATE: There have been a few people take me up on the challenge. Here is what they have come up with:

Beth Peardon
"Death is Coming"

from

House of Six Cats


"Light Luck"
Judi Fitzpatrick


"Dead"
by Ashlyn


Untitled
by Karen Casey Smith


"Broken Gate"
by CVH