Late afternoon sun slanting through the trees to illuminate purple iris petals.
This is one of my favorite images.
For starters, iris are one of my favorite flowers. Especially purple ones. I also–since early childhood–have always loved sunbeams. This image combines colors I love (purple and green together), slanted light, blurry background, bokeh and the gorgeous tiger striping on the iris petals.
I shot SO many pictures of these flowers in this light before I wound up with something I was happy with. I just re-edited it today to bring up the saturation and make it warmer, which is what I feel it was missing all this time.
Edit: And I never even noticed the little rainbow at the bottom until I posted it just now!!
Slanting morning sun on my bowl of food and chopsticks.
I’m going (to try) to make this as uncomplicated as possible. I figure if I don’t impose too many rules on myself about this blog from the beginning, I am more likely to keep up with it and let it grow organically into whatever it is going to be.
In case you’ve been looking around but hadn’t noticed the dates of my posts, they are pretty varied and pretty far apart. Way back in 2014 I had set myself on a picture-a-day photo challenge and uploaded my images to a private blog that nobody could see but me. Last summer I thought I wanted to make it public, and even wrote a few new posts, but it turned out I wasn’t ready so I abandoned the project.
But now I’m ready.
(…well, I’m not really, but it seems that it’s time to do it anyway so I’m making myself ready)
So I’m starting the project for real this time. I’m taking off any expectations I may have about what I want it to be or what it could turn into (though I’ll keep dreaming about it making me rich!) and make it public so that I can’t back out of it this time.
deep breath
For now, I will just upload photos as individual posts and write what I feel like writing. I will do this where and how I feel like it in the beginning, just to get the ball rolling, and we’ll see where this goes.
The idea is to make my images available for people to see. To keep me accountable to creating my art so I can get better and eventually be able to make the kinds of images I really want to make.
So here it is; my first uploaded image of my (newly redesigned and remade) photoblog.
This is an image of my breakfast I took some months ago. I like capturing images like this because it was something completely everyday and ordinary, yet, when seen from a certain perspective (and with a certain amount of editing in Lightroom), it became something beautiful.
This is how I see life–I tend to find beauty in completely normal, mundane things–so it pleases me to be able to capture that feeling so I can show it to others.
And that’s my first (REAL, public) photoblog post. Phew!
I put into practice something I learned from watching some photography videos yesterday with Douglas Kirkland. He said “Get a different look, think differently” and “move your camera around. What is the strongest composition?” I picked some irises and put them in a bottle and did some pretty basic photos on the back porch. Then I started noticing the light and made some different angels. I realized I was being typical and only focusing on the flowers. Then I looked at the bottle and discovered some possibilities in that (one image is below). After awhile the sun started coming through the trees and making RAYS and I was able to make this beautiful image. This is the first time in awhile I have had images I didn’t have to do much processing of. I processed this image and the one of the bottle, but the other two are exactly what came out of my camera.
I caught the slanting afternoon light on my office floor and knew I had to do something with it. But what? I started by photographing a clump of dried hydrangea in various positions but wasn’t happy with what I was producing. Then I saw a flicker of a rainbow from a prism outside and remembered a large prism I have. I like the contrast between the angles of the prism and the texture of the wood (and, of course, the rainbows!).
I’ll admit it; I couldn’t think of anything to photograph so I grabbed what was in front of me (literally, on my desk directly in front of me) and set up something to photograph quickly before it got too late. A bit of a cop-out, I know, but It did wind up with an image I probably never would have created otherwise and I was forced to process it differently than most so I guess it worked out.
Key ring on my windowsill. It took an idiotic amount of time to make this image. First my angles were off and I had to re-shoot. Then the sun disappeared (leaving me contorted in a very uncomfortable position for a long time until it came back). When I finally got the shot I couldn’t come to a decision on how I wanted to process it! There are a lot of directions I could have gone with, but ultimately I am pleased with the final image.
Sometimes you just need to commit to a decision to get the project finished.
Large piece of mica in the corner caught in the slanting light of late morning (I seem to be starting with 2-day themes here; first hydrangea flowers and now slanting light…). Again, I thought the textures and shadows lent themselves better to black and white (and it makes my makeshift ant trap in the front less glaringly obvious).
