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.