Happy Spring!

Although this may look like a strange photo to celebrate the first day of spring, it really works for me.  A wonderful warm day with dinner for two outside and a nice fire to add ambience and fight any chill as we sit out, enjoy some good food and listen to some great music.  A perfect way to welcome spring!

Skyline at dusk

It was a beautiful spring night so we decided to head towards downtown for a patio, a drink or two and some dinner.  We stopped at Vivace and got this nice shot of the skyline as the sun started to set.

Rubber ducky

Tonight was our last photography class (digital darkroom).  It was an excellent class and I'm going to miss the creative challenge every week.  I always hope I can learn what I need from books, but having a great instructor to stimulate and accelerate my learning is so much better.  Anyway, one of my classmates brought in a wonderful photo of a Barbie Doll and when we printed it out, I loved the colors and whimsy of the image.  I've been thinking the past couple of days about taking a photo of the rubber ducky that I've had on my bathtub for about 20 years, so when I got back from class tonight I decided I needed some color and whimsy, so rubber ducky was just the thing!

Teapot with dragon

I'm working on a project for my last photography class tomorrow night.  Our assignment is to create some images using the techniques we've learned over the past 4 weeks.  I've really enjoyed using the textures I created, so I'm doing some images incorporating some of those.  My favorite texture (as a standalone image) is a closeup photo of a scrapbook we bought in Bhutan made of handmade paper with an embossed gold and bronze dragon on the front.  I've wanted to use it, but couldn't find an image it worked with, so I took this one today of a Japanese teapot.  I layered the texture in the background and then erased part of it so it wouldn't show in the teapot itself.  I'm posting three images....the texture, the teapot photo before adding the layer and the final product.  This isn't a very practical texture, but it was fun creating a way to use it and at least it works thematically with the image.

My adventures with pinhole

This weekend I built a cardboard pinhole camera and decided to play around with it.  There were many things that would cause this adventure to be a total bust.  First of all, the only film I had around the house was probably 6 years old; the first time I took a bunch, I forgot to advance the film; my winder on the camera was very imprecise and I didn't know exactly how much to wind it; I had only very general guidelines as to exposure; I didn't have any idea how wide/narrow the angle would be; and when I thought I had it rewound, I opened the camera and found out the hard way that my rewinder didn't work.  So, I was basically shooting in the dark (actually, it was daytime, but you know what I mean).  I took these on color film, but I liked them much better when I converted them to b&w.  There is a ton of grain in the images and I'm not sure if that's just the character of pinhole photography or whether it's the film or something I did.  My photography class instructor does pinhole photography (in fact that's what influenced me to try it - thanks, Sarah), so I'm sure she can tell me what's happening.  Anyway, it was fun to experiment with and I'll probably do some more of it with b&w film.  These are the best images.

White Camellia

This is my favorite camellia in our yard.  It's right by the driveway and I've been fighting it's overgrown nature all year, waiting for it to bloom out so I can prune it back.  It's hit me in the face almost every time I've walked to the car, so I've been anxiously awaiting the blooms.  I've never known it not to bloom in February, but I guess, with the winter so hard this year, it's just had the good sense to stay in the bud until the sun finally started to warm the earth.

The reason for this image (other than the fact that I love the white blossoms) is that I'm trying to learn about lighting.  I bought some lights at the hardware store this weekend to play around with, and some black paper to use as a background.  I tried several lighting set ups, but this was the one I liked best and I just used a little cloudy window light and a small LED "headlight".  Lighting is so important and I can tell it's going to take a lot of experimenting to learn this aspect of photography.

"F" is for Fountain

Today I've been playing with photography most of the day.  First of all, I built a pinhole camera and took a roll of film that I'll take to have processed tomorrow.  The only roll of film I had around the house was probably 5 years old, so who knows if it will even process.  It will be fun to see what, if anything, turns out.  If anything is decent I'll post one later this week.  While I was taking the pinhole images in the back yard, I noticed the top to one of our fountains leaning against this stone wall.  Soon it will be back on the fountain happily bubbling away, but for now it looks like it's as ready for spring as I am.  This continues the series...."F" is for Fountain.