The Colorado Springs Gazette final

Day by day, frame by frame

Colorado Springs photographer has captured life every day for 10 years

BY SETH BOSTER Special from The Gazette

The rain doesn’t stop Susie Sellers.

She grabs her jacket and Canon camera, and with Laney the dog she opens the door of her Colorado Springs home.

She calls to her husband before stepping out.

“Are you good, Duncan?”

He sits in his cozy chair, where he spends much of his days, struggling to walk anymore.

He waves. “Yep!” “OK,” his wife says. “We’ll be back.”

So the morning tradition goes.

This month, Susie marks 10 years of taking a picture every day. Many are from these morning strolls. Who knows what she’ll see outside her door?

“When I walk along,” she says now, “I try to take a deep breath and look for birds or some color that pops.”

Here are a neighbor’s pansies, purple and orange. Up ahead, Susie will slip into the woods, where there are more flowers beside the creek, and where she might spot a bear or deer. She keeps her eyes peeled for the red-tailed hawk that nests nearby.

The other day, she posted a photo of rain droplets glistening on blades of grass.

“Ephemeral beauty that I’m glad I got to see!” she wrote to her followers on blipfoto.com.

This is the virtual world she frequents. Blipfoto is a global community of photographers who call themselves “blippers,” heeding the call to capture everyday life every day. Instead of succumbing to the onslaught of nonsensical social media posts, here they are encouraged “to be more reflective.”

The website counts 5 million days chronicled by users from 170 countries. Susie joined them in 2011. She decided on “StillAndKnow” as her blipper name, a nod to Psalm 46:10.

“I’m in a new season some would call retirement,” she started in her introductory post. As a Christian, she wrote, “I want to ‘be still and know’ my Creator as He speaks to me through the lens of a camera.”

The next time she journaled was four years later, in 2015.

“Retirement is not a new season for me anymore,” she wrote, “but every day is a new day of learning to ‘be still’ and trust God to care for me, as I care for my hubby, who has Huntington’s disease.”

Huntington’s is a progressive and fatal genetic disorder. Duncan was diagnosed in 2010.

He was a successful cardiologist, and now he had to leave his career behind. He and Susie had to leave their six-bedroom, three-story home behind; better to live somewhere smaller and simpler, they decided, as Duncan’s body and mind betrayed him. He might have five years to live, the doctors said at the time.

Rather than sit and anguish, Duncan and Susie consulted their bucket list. They traveled to

places they never made time to see before. Back at their new home, the days would be peaceful, quiet but for the grandfather clock that chimed.

The lesson was harsh, “but we needed to slow down,” Susie says. “We were so busy doing things, we weren’t really living in the moment and spending enough time with each other.”

They married in 1977, her having been swept away by the sweet college boy who gave her flowers. They went on to parenthood — and went on to sleep at night with each of their own beepers. Duncan’s called him to the hospital in an emergency. Susie’s called her to help comfort the distressed, among her several volunteer duties.

“I had always had this mindset that if you’re gonna be alive, you should be productive,” she says. “But we’re human beings, not human doings.”

Life had a way of enforcing that. At their little home in 2011, they’d go on morning walks together — him holding the dog, her holding her new camera. Photography was her idea of a new, necessary hobby. Blipfoto would be her way of practicing and improving.

Then she discovered much more.

She discovered others taking life day by day, frame by frame: men and women from Connecticut, Maryland, Florida, South Carolina, Michigan, Scotland, Finland, Belgium, France and beyond, all photographing loved ones and strangers and animals and the nature around them. They befriended each other along the way. They learned each other’s stories.

“It turned into this worldwide pen pal thing,” Susie says.

Her fellow blippers were sad to read her post from last year.

Now in the late stages of the disease, Duncan was no longer able to tag along for walks.

“Nevertheless,” Susie wrote,

“I still look for a slice of beauty to commemorate the day and remind myself of God’s care. I have come to realize that the preciousness of the moment is not that I have captured it with a camera, but that I have experienced it.”

She concluded: “As always, I am still learning to ‘be still and know.’ ”

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

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2021-06-16T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-16T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://daily.gazette.com/article/281814286815470

The Gazette, Colorado Springs