From the Bain Water Works, an abandoned, decaying industrial site… The Flickr Raleigh Social Group organized a shoot there today. More photographs.

Yesterday I took a little bit of a long lunch from the day job and went to the arboretum. It was a lovely day–about 80° and breezy, the sky blue with fluffy clouds…. I suppose noon isn’t the best time for photography– the light and shadows are a bit harsh… but it was really more about enjoying the day than getting the best shots. This lovely climbing rose is a Lady Banks’ Rose.

New works in my etsy shop. The Flora series is a bit of a departure for me. My art often works with themes of order and arrangement. In the Flora series, I’ve tried to capture and appreciate the beauty of the moment. I hope you enjoy these photographs as much as I do.

New series. Eight collages. On flickr. In my etsy shop.

The 10th International Collage Exchange is now online at http://virtual.tart.co.nz/. Dale Copeland, the organizer and collage evangelist, puts and amazing amount of work into these exchanges. 159 artists, each sending in 13 collages, and somehow Dale keeps it all straight.

Yesterday at the arboretum. Spring is on its way!

It’s been a beautiful weekend. Yesterday I took a borrowed canon 70-200/2.8L lens (sweeeeet indeed) to the arboretum for the afternoon.  Life is good. :)

Lost & Found #5, found silk, mulberry paper, digital print and hand stitching.

Remember those fabulous lights my family bought me for Christmas? I was able to photograph my Lost & Found series without taking the plexiglass out of each frame before shooting! I’m totally thrilled– framing and re-framing to get a glare-free shot is really time consuming. The right tools make life so nice! :) Photos of the Lost & Found series are on my flickr photostream.

There are a few spring flowers beginning to show themselves at the arboretum. I visit almost weekly with camera in hand. This weekend is a bit grey and damp (but the kind of grey and damp that tells you the colorless days of winter will be soon past and heightens anticipation of spring), so I’m enjoying a quiet weekend in the studio. This photo is one of the fruits of this weekend’s efforts.

I love the immediacy and simplicity of polaroids.

Bokeh (from the Japanese boke ぼけ, “blur”) is a photographic term referring to the appearance of out-of-focus areas in an image produced by a camera lens. Different lens bokeh produces different aesthetic qualities in out-of-focus backgrounds, which are often used to reduce distractions and emphasize the primary subject. [wikipedia]

[Rooster shot taken with my new lensbaby.]

I never shot film. When I bought my husband a digital camera for Christmas about 7 years ago, the world of photography laid itself out in front of me. It took no time at all for everyone, Fred & I included, to forget that that I had bought him the camera; it always seemed to be my camera and I fell in love with it.

A couple of years later, Fred bought me a Canon DSLR (the original Digital Rebel) and some very nice lenses. The camera has several automatic modes– portrait, landscape, macro, sports,… You choose your situation and set the dial and the smart camera figures out the f-stop and exposure.

[Disclaimer: I can be a dork! This info is to the best of my knowledge at this time. I’m not drinking.] The landscape mode chooses a small aperture; that’s a big f-stop number. Think of an f-stop number as a denominator of a fraction of the lenses open to light. The effect of a small aperture is a deep field of focus. (If you’re a photographer reading this and wailing and gashing your teeth at my ineffective or, heaven forbid, flat out wrong information, please leave a comment.) Ansel Adams was known for his f-stops of 64 — that’s very deep field of focus, things close and far away are all in focus.

Portraits are sort of the opposite of landscape on the smart camera’s dial. The portrait setting is designed to create a shallow depth of field. The subject’s eyes should be in the sharpest focus (well, that’s a rule and meant to be broken) and their surroundings are blurred. I hadn’t really noticed the blurred backgrounds of professional portraits for the first 30-something years of my life.

Even when I did start to understand the effect of a shallow depth of field and begin to recognize intentional blurriness, I still didn’t quite get it. My photos were busy! Wasn’t everything in the photo important? Weren’t all the details of the environment just more to love in a photo? Why wouldn’t people want all they could get in a photo, in the photo?

[Orchid petals shot with canon mp-e 65mm macro lens.]

Fred bought me a very nice macro lens, the Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5X Macro Lens a few years ago. (Here’s a review of the lens on photo.net.) I’m sure you’re beginning to see that Fred’s a great guy. This is a unique lens; it can magnify things up to 5 times. They say you can fill your photo with a grain of rice– I haven’t tried it. The photo above of the orchid petals was taken with this lens. It has a very shallow depth of field…. maybe only a few millimeters of depth are in focus at one time. I had ideas about what kinds of photos of flowers I wanted, but the photos taken with the lens didn’t match the images in my brain. I was frustrated.

I was a bit stressed in general. Plans for my new art weren’t working out like I thought they should. Other parts of my life weren’t fitting my idea how things ought to be. Nothing terrible, just lots of little stresses taking over my life.

[Weeping apricot shot with canon mp-e 65mm macro lens.]

And then something happened… I had an ephipany. I would be open to the moment. I would make a concerted effort to let go of stress. Be here now. Enjoy this moment. Now.

I started taking more photos with the particular macro lens. And now I love the blurriness. I had to step out of my thinking patterns to open myself up to the beauty of the blur. And somehow I think bokeh is a bit like a mantra for life: reduce distractions and emphasize the beauty.

[More on polaroids, lisa call, and finding joy in another post. Thanks for hanging on this long!]

Lovely.  :)

I bought an old argus argoflex seventy-five camera off ebay and have begun to try some “through the viewfinder” photography. This photo was taken with my canon dslr through the viewfinder of the argoflex. It’s a way of imparting some vintage romance (dust, scratches, cheesy optics) to a modern digital photograph. Check out the Ttv flickr group.