My Navigating Early photo adventures… Couldn't quite decide what I liked best :)
This week I had the pleasure of reading, or rather hearing, Navigating Early by Claire Vanderpool. My husband and I were en route to Jacksonville, Florida since I was shooting a dear friend’s wedding there and this novel turned out to be quite a life-saver and time-passer. I was able to download the audio book for free from the Overdrive library app, which is something I plan to make lots of use of in the future J Navigating Early turned out to be the perfect choice for our travels with its easy narrative and quest themes. I love the way Vanderpool weaves the story of Pi into the story of Early and Jackie. Just brilliant. In the audio version, the narrator for the Pi story had a much deeper, older voice and it really contributed to the tone of the story and my response to it. It gave the story a mythic, ancient feel, which was apropos.
Though I finished reading this book a week before the response was due, I had a hard time deciding how to express my feelings and thoughts about the book. I finally settled on the mind of Early as my inspiration. I love the way Early saw numbers as a story and how he felt so confident in his quest. Jackie often belittled him in his mind or treated him like a small child because his ideas seemed so outlandish or off color. However, Early turned about to be shockingly right about most everything and despite his childlike confidence and optimism, he was actually quite shrewd and overall knowledgeable, about nature and people. I wanted to capture that “out of the box,” non-traditional, yet beautiful mind of his and the way his mind was different but still wonderful. So, I ran around my house grabbing colorful objects and any quirky thing that either reminded me of Early or of something in my own life journey. In the photography you see the empty box with all of the things outside of it. These things are made up of postcards, markers, colors, words, numbers (only 3’s, 4’s, and 1’s of course), letters, and other abstract things. I also included the card with the word “peace” on it because I felt like at the end of the novel all of the characters have found some measure or peace.
While brainstorming, I ended up shooting multiple different styles of this set up, one with Early’s name in the center, which I also really liked. But in the end, I decided that I wanted to include text and the image in my response, so the box turned out to be the best option, symbolically and aesthetically. In light of this upcoming week’s focus on technology and literacy, I decided to use my phone to create this image. I used my iphone camera and two editing apps: Afterlight and Typesetter. I am absolutely blown away by both of these apps and I love the simplicity of both. They are so user friendly and encourage me to truly play with images and text. I think they would be perfect for a BYOD classroom where students could created their own responses to the novel they are reading.
