Happy Belated Memorial Day

Hope everyone enjoyed their three day weekend, if you were lucky enough to have one. We spent most of our time in RI visiting friends, going to three different BBQs, and enjoying the summer weather. Well, the weather was a bit hot and humid, but we enjoyed it nonetheless, since we haven't had time to get sick of living in a sauna yet. I got to the beach twice (yay!) and I thanked my lucky stars that I was, born, raised, and college educated in the Ocean State, so I know of all the tiny little public shoreline access points no one else is aware of. The unofficial 1st weekend of summer tends to bring hordes of people to the beaches of Lil Rhody. During our walk on the rocks we lucky stiffs saw a grand total of 4 other people. :-)

I did take some photos while along the ocean, but unfortunately we were there at about noon on both days, so the lighting was incredibly harsh and nothing of great awesomeness really came out. Lately, I have been playing around with bringing the outside indoors to use the more controlled lighting available to me inside while keeping nature involved. There are two new photos in the black & white gallery that have resulted (one uploaded today and one last week). Hope you like them!

Playing With Peppers

I'm no Edward Weston (who has some famous photos of peppers), but I think I'm improving at converting my digital photos to black & white - it's tough to get anywhere near the tonal range film has. I've been using Bibble Lite, which is easy to use and pretty versatile. For some reason, I've also felt like playing around with digital solarization today too. Here's a couple of versions of a pepper photo I took this evening (the first is just converted to B&W, the second is solarized):

Happy Graduation!

We went to my friend Marilee's graduation party tonight and had a nice time. We've been slackers at keeping in touch, so it was good to see her again and meet her brandy new fiance! Anyway, she told me she might be interested in a sepia or jewel-toned photograph. So, that, combined with watching a DVD on the history of photography, made me want to play around with some of the photos I have (like I need an excuse) and try and come up with one that looked good in sepia. Anyway, here's the result of tonight's work:



I'd really like to spend some time this week indoors (unless of course we get lucky and it stops raining) taking "studio" shots and maybe getting my husband to pose for me. I really have little experience with portait photography, but I'd like to get better. I think the kinds of things you need to be careful with for portraits, like lighting and positioning of the person, etc., would be pretty applicable to taking more still life studio shots. Plus I'm planning to take pregnancy portraits for my sister and brother-in-law, so it would be good practice. We shall see!

Hope you all had a great weekend!

It's Raining, It's Pouring

And the Farmington River is definitely in flood stage. Very pretty though. And dark. Wish I had some more time today to shoot before it started pouring on my head. Oh well, I'll be back out tomorrow - it's supposed to be "mostly cloudy"...

Pears!

Whew, I'm tired tonight. I need to get to bed earlier!

I am sooo glad that this infernal rain has stopped. I don't think there was quite as much in these past few weeks as CT got last October, but it wasn't fun. The sun was out almost all day! My lawn has noticed the change as well, it must have shot up 4 inches just today! I'll have to get that mowed on Friday. Luckily we have a little postage stamp of a lawn, so it's small enough to use a little push mower instead of a big noisy, smelly thing. It's more environmentally friendly that way, too!

Obviously I got around to taking some photos today, hence the charming eye candy you're getting with this post. I wasn't satisfied with the number of shots I got in pre-dinner, so afterwards I pulled out the ol' tripod and played around with fruit! Nutrition isn't the only benefit to our new household "fresh fruit easily available" policy!

Did a new "sandwiched" image too, this time back to the black and white. It's pretty simple. I think I have to sleep on it to see if I actually like it.

I've been working pretty hard for the past few evenings on doing some marketing for this site and for my CafePress shop. It's a pretty big effort, especially since I don't have the money to do conventional advertising on Google or banner ads or something. But it's fun. I'm mostly just trying to network with other artists and start the message spreading by word of mouth. So I've gotten to meet, or at least chat with, some pretty cool people.

Tomorrow is the Camera Club's annual banquet, which should be a good time. I have to go prepare my prints for the print judging they're going to have, so I should get to that.

Hope all is well with everyone out there. Have a fantastic night.

Long Day

Had a long but good weekend out on Cape Cod. I did get to take a few pictures inbetween torrential downpours, which was nice. My soils class is now finished, except for the take home final exam that I really should be working on right now. But, I'd rather do this.

The photo opportunity I had this weekend was at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History, a really nice museum, especially for its size. We went there with my family for Mother's Day. Of course, the photos themselves were mostly taken outside on the network of trails behind the museum that lead through the salt marsh and to a beach. It was windy and damp and cold, but still beautiful. There were some neat patterns made by the waves on the sand, like this one:

Yeah, pretty abstract. I like the simple, clean look. I took some others too, but I'm still sorting through them all, of course. I'd like to go back to a beach (probably not this particular one) sometime and take a bunch of shots of these patterns left by the waves. I think it would look really neat as a set of smallish images, maybe 4 or 5, arranged horizontally. What do you think?

Today I was pretty tuckered out, after the long weekend, lots of driving, and being stressed out all last week due to class deadlines. The weather is still pretty awful, which probably contributed as well! I still managed to be fairly productive at work today, but I was really wishing I could make photography my full time job. No matter how tired I am, it's always fairly easy to get myself in the mood to work on photo stuff.

Obviously, it's harder for me to get myself in the mood to work on my take home exam! Right now I am avoiding it on multiple fronts - website updating and Yahoo! Literati (such a weakness of mine). I'd better finish up and get to work. Goodnight, all.

Our New Nephew

Here he is, folks, in all his angelic napping glory!




Didn't want to create a whole new post, but I wanted to show you this one. Had some fun playing around with it tonight.

Homework

I've been going crazy the past few days getting my paper and presentation ready for my Saturday soils class! Today I'm just about done and I figured I deserved some R&R. On the bus ride home I started thinking about what kinds of photo things I could get done tonight. It's raining, so not great conditions to take new photos, but maybe I can take some inside. Anyway, back to the bus. Daydreaming about photo stuff I decided what my ideal situation would be: I'd be able to do art photography full time, and when we bought a house I'd set up a small building, kind of a large, insulated shed, in the back yard with a nice garden path leading to it and inside would be a small gallery and an office setup for my actual work. Yeah, that would be pretty sweet. Maybe someday!

Not much other photo news, I got my business cards in the mail yesterday, which is exciting. I might bring a few into work to hang up on the notice boards. And I also cleaned up the galleries a bit. The experimental section was taking on a life of it's own, so I winnowed it down to only the photos I particularly liked. So I guess I've accomplished some small things, at least.

Our trip to D.C. to visit our new nephew was really fun. I have some photos of my sister-in-law's garden and of course of the baby - they're still on the camera. Think I'll download them!

Hope you all have a peaceful night.

Rainy Day

The rain paused just long enough while it was just light enough out this evening. I was able to get out in my little garden and take a few photos. Didn't have much time out there, but got some nice ones, I think. This one on the left is one of my favorites from tonight. It's currently available as a set of postcards in the CafePress Shop. Still learning about that whole thing, it's pretty neat though. Amazing the variety of things, both cheesy and cool, that I have the option of slapping my artwork on.

Busy, busy week and weekend ahead. Gotta finish up a draft paper for the soils class I'm taking and pack for the trip to Washington DC to visit the new nephew! Wish me luck!

Oh, and if anyone has suggestions or requests for specific images on the items available through CafePress, just let me know either by leaving a comment here or using the contact form on the main site.

Just a Quick Update

It's getting late, so I'll keep this short! Just wanted to let you all know (in case you don't read it elsewhere on the website) that I've just started a new CafePress Shop to sell some other photographic items besides prints. Check it out! I'll be adding more options soon, but not tonight. And I think I'm gonna buy that tote bag for myself! (I know, I know, shameless self-promotion)

Night all!