Finding Beauty, Connection, and Lessons in a Daily Walk

Nov 26

Photo Project: A time-lapse of 282 photos from one year.

This is the first picture I intentionally took in service of this project. University Lake Park, Anchorage Alaska. November 12, 2023. By Oona Martin.

In November 2023, Anchorage was surprised by a series of large, early season snowfalls. With the extra effort needed for snow removal and shoveling out cars that got stuck in the road in front of our house, I fell out of rhythm with my daily walk.

I needed motivation to walk more.

Combining the walk with the goal of a daily photo helped.

This was a way to re-commit to a long-enough walk. With a destination in mind, it gave me a landmark and inspired me to just do it; to glean whatever meager winter sunlight I could into my eyeballs while also moving my body.

The practice tuned my attention to something I thought I already knew well; I could build on the inherent value it offered me.

What might happen by adding some intention and structure to my daily walk? Can I observe ‘where am I’? How do you make time visible?

I am learning to manage my tendency towards all-or-nothing thinking.

Fact: I knew I wouldn’t be able to be there everyday, but I could try. Maybe this would be a way to practice a year-long commitment with baked-in imperfections and low stakes self-accountability.

I wanted to witness the seasonal shift of where I live.

There is a lot of winter here. Snow is on the ground for at least half the year.

The fullness of summery green waits patiently between a short brown, fast ascending chartreuse spring and a heavenly golden descent to a brown-gray autumn.

Can I see it all at once?

I’ve never made a time-lapse like this before. I didn’t know how to do it when I started and I thought I could figure it out using Youtube and my limited knowledge of Photoshop.

I thought, maybe it would be fun to share this practice to get others outside and to look around in a new way.

There were some unexpected moments made visible…

Dog Participation

This one is silly.

My dog learned to anticipate my photo-taking pause. He’d linger in the frame, waiting to see if I might continue up the hill or return the way we came. Remember, it was winter and somedays it was so cold, below 10F, (or my metric friends, -12C. I won’t even mention the windchill.)

The first time I called him out of the picture. The next day I took one photo with him in it and one without. It became fun for me.

Would he stop in the same place?

Would he would wait in the same dignified position, gazing across the lake?

This is Rex posing. I became disappointed if he didn’t. I think the pictures with him in them are more interesting with the one’s without him.

Friendship

I often share this walk with my dear friend and her doggo. We navigate our schedules by communicating almost daily about our walko plans and probably walk together 50% of the time. Her dog is 6 years old. Mine is 8. That means we have been doing this over 6 years.

Our long shadows at University Lake Park, Anchorage, Alaska, April 29, 2024, by Oona Martin;

A recent text exchange showing the explosion emoji short hand for I’m ready/Are you ready? which evolved over the last 6 months from an auto-correct.

As I write this, I truly recognize how grateful I am for her and how this walk supports our friendship through accountability and care.

Support

When I travelled or was unable to walk that day, sometimes the above-fore-mentioned friend, my husband or kids would take some pictures for me and text them to me.

I didn’t ask them to do this. I am touched that they recognized that this daily task was important to me.

Photos by Matt and Jack of Rex posing at University Lake Dog Park in Anchorage, Alaska, October 2024 while I was traveling. The framing of the photos is sweetly different. I can sense the care for me in the action of taking them.

Mountain Names

The Chugach mountain range borders the east side of Anchorage and is a focal point of this project. Some of the mountain shapes are easier to identify than others. Until I wrote this, I had not taken the time to learn all the names of the mountains.

Honestly, it took me a while to find a reliable resource. Comparing topographic maps to my point-of-view is challenging. I recognize that names can be problematic because who gets to name things anyway? Still, it’s interesting to find a shared point of reference.

Some of the names for the mountains in the Chugach range as seen from University Lake Dog Park in Anchorage, Alaska. When I created the time-lapse, I used the top of Kanchee peak as the center focus. Peakfinder accessed 11–26–2024.

What remains hidden and unseen?

Our lives contain multitudes and we can only see so much.

My artist-mother reminds me that art and life are all mixed up.

People, moose and ducks have babies and we can’t see them grow. Some trees are a ring-size rounder and a wind storm knocked some down.
I remember the dogs that died during the year and the human lives changed by this and more. I think of the other regular walkers I encounter here and their dogs, their
River otters displaced the beavers. There was a little flood. There was a chemical spill at the far end of the lake. There are global events unfolding.

Yesterday, as I approached the lake in the eerie, foggy almost darkness of 4:30pm after a day of freezing rain, I heard a long series of loud sirens from the busy nearby roadways, filling with rush hour traffic.

I paused in the open field to listen more attentively, trying ‘hear’ the direction and futilely identify the types of sirens.

I hope everyone was ok.

You can’t see everything in a picture.

I got so much more from this photo project than I asked for.

Who doesn’t love a time-lapse?

Here is your reward, dear reader. Thank you for making it to the end.

I think it’s pretty good for a first try.
Converting it into a GIF let me add it directly to Medium, where I cross post.

One year in 28 seconds at 10fps made with 285 photos. See how long winter is?!

For now, I’ll keep going.

More than a year later, I’m still walking the walk, taking the picture, loving this place and continuing to learn even more about it.

Sharing this experience is, I hope, might inspire you to shine and appreciate our ordinary lives.

Love, Oona

This is the picture that marked one year of time but not the last.
University Lake Park, Anchorage Alaska. November 13, 2023. By Oona Martin.

Some references:

Peakfinder.com A very cool link to a panoramic explorer that models the landscape as seen from your provided coordinates or location. This one goes to University Lake Park.

Until the snowfall in 2023 I was listening to these audiobooks on my walk: ‘How to Do Nothing’ and ‘Saving Time’ by Jenny Odell. Odell’s books examine with both pre-COVID and post-COVID considerations, some of the historical and contemporary attitudes towards community, place, language other frameworks of time and more. (Don’t get me started on our dissonance with the attention economy and the irony that I asked for your attention by writing this.)

Adobe tutorial on using still images to create a time-lapse.

How to create an animated GIF from a video by Dansky.

Adding a Video (really a GIF) to Medium is possible (the same as adding a photo).

Oona Martin