Self portrait

Self portrait -
Looking into my soon-to-be studio from the outside

Beech nut

Empty Beech nut hull

deck

I don't know what it is about weathered wood the just gets to me, but it does. The color and the texture... all that it has endured just because we put it there, in this case, to walk on.


To be continued...

Impressions of a Daisy

All images were taken blurry intentionally, and various other treatments were applied using Picasa to give the images an impressionistic feel.

Daisy looking down

strawberries

I "stylized" these photos in 2 very different ways using Picasa... manipulating the saturation, shadows and highlights, tinting, etc. The first has a kind of "dirty around the edges" quality to me. The second one reminds me of something you would see in a magazine from the 70's or something with the tan/yellowish cast that I added to it.

Please let me know what you think makes these work... or not work!  Do you find the images appealing?

Face in a tree

Do you see it?

Vine

Virginia Creeper vine on abandoned shed

bike

I don't really do "urban" photography, mostly because we don't live in a very urban area, and rural photography is my preference anyway. I spied this bike sitting in front of the local Long John Silver's restaurant weeks ago, but was too shy trying to take a picture of it. The sign on the restaurant caught my eye, and that bike added something special to the whole thing. I pass this spot every Friday night when I go grocery shopping, and every time since I first noticed it weeks ago, the bike was either not there when I drove by, or there was a car parked in front of it, obstructing the shot.  Tonight it just happened to be there, so I thought I better take advantage of the situation. Several things could be better about this image, like the placement of the bike and the lighting, but sometimes you just have to work with what you have. It was a big deal for me just to stand there with my little point-and-shoot and take the picture, since I'm more of a "private" shooter, not really liking others to see me while I shoot (I imagine much the same as someone might feel self conscious being watched while they are painting).

Overall, the shot is not as awesome as I had hoped it would be, but I'm still glad I took it anyway.

dandelion collage

I've taken so many dandelion photos recently that I thought it might be nice to make a collage of them. I put this one together with the aid of Picasa (i.e. choose pictures and click a button), but it's not quite what I had imagined. I might have to try a different one that I put together myself.

look up

Itty-bitty baby oak leaves
Southeast Ohio, April 25, 2010

dandelion sunset

Transformation

Remember this?


Now... it looks like this

Taking chances

Sometimes I let my camera do the seeing for me, especially when my subject is close to the ground and turning my head upside down doesn't seem like the best idea. I never know what's going to happen when I take pictures in this way, but there are always some pleasant surprises, like the sunlight streaming through these Wild Phlox flowers. Taking chances is one of the best things you can do with your camera. Get out there and play!

bottle

collage

"What are those?!" you might be wondering. They are catkins. A catkin is "a dense, elongated, and drooping cluster of flowers without petals. Most commonly, the flowers found on a catkin are of one sex. In some trees, such as the poplar, both male and female flowers are present. Catkins are typically found on trees which are wind pollinated, such as oak, birch, willow, and hickory." [source]  I believe these catkins came from one of our Aspen trees (aspens are a member of the willow family).  I left them inside the house for a few days after I took these pictures, and when I picked them up, they dumped yellow pollen all over my hands and the table.  I didn't realize the important role these fuzzy little clusters played until the evidence was in-hand (get it?).

Awakening

Today's Picture Spring prompt is "Awakening," where Tracey encourages us to "Capture something that is just waking up with the welcoming warmth of the season and honor it, I see you little one."
This is some Lily of the Valley that is coming up in my garden. I really doctored this one in Picasa, boosting the saturation multiple times, plus a few other modifications. I like the glowing effect that I ended up with.

Look inside

Flower power

Solitary

No "Picture Spring" prompt today. The prompts from the last few days have just done nothing for me - brought me no inspiration. So I decided to strike out on my own for today's photo. I couldn't choose just one to share, though...

There's a freeze warning in effect for tonight, so it's very possible that I'll lose all the lovely daffodils that have been blooming in our front yard.  Such a shame!

Pastel palette

Today's Picture Spring prompt is the pastel pallet. Even though we are naturally drawn to bold, bright colors after months of blah colors, Tracey wanted to remind us that muted pastel hues can help to "soothe our senses and calm our souls."

Look in the mirror

Look, it's me again! Today's Picture Spring prompt was "A fresh face," meaning it's self-portrait time. I almost wanted to skip this one since I put up two self-portraits on the first day of the project, but I decided to just go with it. I really prefer, as you may have noticed, to convert my portraits into black and white or sepia - somehow that's much more flattering to skin tone and all that. Maybe I should have stepped outside of my comfort zone and posted in color instead!

Getting grounded

Today's Picture Spring prompt is "Getting grounded."  That's right, take that camera, put it on the ground and press the shutter and see what happens.  (This is our dog Emmett, by the way.  I think he's sticking his tongue out at me.)

Look around

Well, I didn't follow today's Picture Spring prompt, which was "The Sky is the Limit." We were supposed to take a photo of the sky, but it was pretty bland up there today, and I was already taking wildflower photos anyway, so.... here are a few of my favorite photos from today of my favorite "weed," the Dandelion.

Stepping out

Today's Picture Spring prompt involves 30 steps. As in, take 30 steps in any direction from where your camera is sitting and take a picture of what you find.  The idea is that you don't have to travel great distances to get a great image.

My 30 steps landed me in our driveway, where I saw lots of things, but I ended up honing in on our birdbath and the little artful chickadee that sits there 365 days a year, hoping for a friend to join him from time to time. This is cropped from the original size and the saturation was greatly increased to give it a more surreal quality.

Morning ritual

Here's my image to go with yesterday's Picture Spring prompt to photograph a morning ritual. These are items that are part of my morning ritual on the weekends when I count birds for Project Feederwatch during the winter months: binoculars, paper and pen, and DSLR camera.

What items would be in your morning ritual image?

Through a window

The Picture Spring prompt for today was about photographing a morning ritual, but by the time I received the email with the prompt, I was already at work, and I didn't want to show work as a morning ritual, so I'll have to try that one tomorrow.

I did, however, want to post a photo today, so I tried taking shots of something that I had previously framed in my mind earlier in the week.

This is a house across the street from my office building. Interestingly, this is the only shot I took cropped in this close (and I even cropped it a little further with Picasa). All of the other shots included much more of the window and the outside view. I really like this image because it has a much more intimate feel than the other 16 shots I took, and because it's the most unconventional of them all.  Just a note that the frame around the subject is not something I created - it's naturally part of the window frame.  Also, the waviness of the old glass in this window gives a certain quirkiness to the image.

New projects, new beginnings

The face behind the camera.
This is a month of new beginnings for me! I'm participating in a photo-a-day project called Picture Spring hosted at Big Picture Scrapbooking.  As a result, I'll be posting a new photo per day for the entire month of April!

I'm also writing a poem a day for National Poetry Writing Month over on my new writing blog.

I look forward to meeting my creativity head on!

Booked

Forget the Kindle or the iPad... I'll take a book that I can flip the pages of any day.

stuck on flowers

Sorry, I'll move on from these flower photos eventually. I decided to play with this one in Corel Painter Essentials, using a watercolor option, and this was the result. It's always fun to play around with images, to turn them into something new.

More manufactured sunshine

I have to admit to using the "I'm feeling lucky" function in Picasa on all of these pictures. That's what makes these really pop by bringing out the contrast and making the white really white (among other things). Perhaps some day I will figure out how to make such vibrant photos in-camera.

Manufactured sunshine

Last weekend was cloudy and snowy. I hadn't seen the sun for days. So I decided to buy some flowers and make my own sunshine.