Karen Horneffer-Ginter, Ph.D.: Life Through A Camera Lens: Making Moments Worthy Of A Photograph

Karen Horneffer-Ginter, Ph.D.: Life Through A Camera Lens: Making Moments Worthy Of A Photograph

The other week, while sitting with a middle-aged man named Paul, I found myself feeling particularly touched by our conversation. He had just returned from his first vacation in years and was describing the highlights. "I couldn't believe how beautiful the ocean was," he commented. "I've never seen an ocean before, and then to get to see palm trees in person, and to even touch them. It was just amazing."

He began thumbing through a series of photographs on his phone, each displaying an image of a palm tree. Some trees stood right by the beachfront, while others lined a roadside, each seeming to belong to the house just behind it. Some had multiple trunks, and others had one bending, elegant line. Several of his photos pictured the same tree, yet from different angles and perspectives.

While I've seen many palm trees in my life, I've never experienced someone truly appreciating a palm tree. This is what moved me. In all of my vacations to warm, sunny places, it never occurred to me to take such notice of these trees. They've always merely been part of the backdrop and something I've taken for granted.

I have, however, met my own version of Paul's palm tree. When I travelled to Indonesia several years ago, I found my mouth hanging open in awe of the terraced rice paddies that appeared around every bend and corner. I noticed the taxi driver's puzzlement at my repeated requests to have him pull over so that I could take more pictures of these gorgeous works of art. To him, they were as ordinary as a palm tree to a Floridian, or an oak tree to one of us Midwesterners.

When I got back home, I started to put my camera away in the drawer where it's safely kept until the next recital or birthday cake moment. But then I thought twice. It struck me that when I travel to new places, I always pull out my camera to capture novel and interesting images. I take time, even in my own amateurish way, to look at objects straight on and from the side, and I'm often surprised by the beauty and uniqueness revealed through the camera's lens.

I wondered, could this work in reverse?

What if I were to pull out my camera, or maybe even just imagine pulling out my camera, during ordinary and familiar moments in everyday life. Would such a gesture encourage me to start seeing common places and objects as being worthy of a photograph -- worthy in the way that the palm trees were to Paul, and that the Indonesian landscape was to my visiting eyes?

Often, when we're moving quickly from one thing to the next, we don't really see what's around us in the way that we do when we're traveling. It seems this quality of attention is one of the first things we lose when our days fill up with commitments and activities. Just think if we were to arrive at our kitchen each morning in the way we might arrive at a vacation destination, taking in and appreciating the distinctive features of the objects around us. If we were to adopt such an attitude in our everyday life, maybe we'd find ourselves taking photographs of the sunlight coming in through our kitchen window, or the egg yolk rising up in our pan.

It's worth experimenting with this camera-practice, whether we choose to have our lens be literal or metaphoric. When we think as a photographer might, we begin to look at things in a fresh way -- noticing unseen details within everyday objects and maybe even becoming re-enchanted with the familiar world around us.

This way of noticing is something we can do even in the midst of our busy days. It's one of few things we can do that doesn't require extra time... just a shift in how we're paying attention.

As you move through this day, notice what potential snapshots exist. How might you frame them, and what details would you highlight?

Pay attention to the most ordinary and the most extraordinary images your eyes and mind capture today.

Photo credit: Paul Watson

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Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

How To Prevent Snoring

How To Prevent Snoring

Prevention:

No woman likes the idea that she snores like a truck driver. But a lot of us do just that. In fact, it's been estimated that up to 50 percent of the U.S. population snores at one time or another. And snoring is more than just a nuisance -- it's been shown to disrupt the sleep of 90 million American adults and their partners. The good news is that lifestyle changes and medical advances can minimize the log sawing. Here's how.

Read the whole story: Prevention

Source: www.huffingtonpost.com

Childhood Cancer Survivors Face New Risks: Study

Childhood Cancer Survivors Face New Risks: Study

CHICAGO -- Women treated with chest radiation for cancer when they were girls have a higher risk of developing breast cancer than previously thought, doctors warn.

Even lower doses of radiation therapy posed a risk for survivors of a childhood cancer – something not known before, researchers found. That means more women might need to be screened beginning at age 25 for breast cancer.

"We find that by age 50, approximately 30 percent of women treated with radiation for Hodgkin lymphoma" as girls have developed breast cancer, said Chaya Moskowitz, a biostatistician at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York who led the study.

That is far higher than the 4 percent rate for the general population, and is comparable to the rate in women who have mutations in inherited BRCA genes that increase risk. Among women who had chest radiation for any type of childhood cancer, 24 percent developed breast cancer by age 50.

The study was to be presented Monday at an American Society of Clinical Oncology conference in Chicago.

Radiation treatment has saved countless children from lymphoma, leukemia, soft-tissue tumors and other cancer types, but it can damage the DNA of healthy cells, too, and lead to cancer decades later.

Children treated today get much lower doses and to much smaller areas of the body than kids did in 1970 to 1986 when the women in this study were girls.

A federally funded study has been tracking more than 1,200 of them, and researchers used a second study of relatives of women with breast cancer to compare the odds of developing breast cancer among various groups such as those with BRCA gene mutations.

Guidelines currently urge annual screening with mammograms and MRI scans starting at age 25 for women who had radiation therapy totaling 20 Grays – a measure of how much radiation is absorbed. About 50,000 U.S. women are in that category.

The new study finds higher risk even among women who received more moderate doses – 10 to 19 Grays – as girls.

That means another 7,000 to 9,000 women also may need screening now, said Dr. Paula Ryan, a breast cancer specialist at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia who had no role in the work.

"The important thing is, they've survived the cancer" that might have killed them as children, but they now should be closely followed to catch any second cancers early, when they are most treatable, she said. "They're a group that may be vulnerable."

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