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.

My fiber art Bird in Digital Shibori Landscape was published in the book “Innovative Fabric Imagery for Quilts.” Click the photo to go to my flickr page and see more photos.

(Argh! I’ve been a terrible blogger! Family & day job stuff has been filling the parts of my brain that apparently I use to blog… Please accept my apologies!)

I spent the weekend working on a new print, Flight Plan. It’s a bit of digital + gocco fusion. The background beige image (which is a photo of an old, slightly yellowed, linen sheet) and the spatulas and button were printed digitally. Then the cicada was screened in green with my gocco. And the whatever-they-are diagram lines were also gocco printed. I think it’s a little weird and I like it. I post some bigger images and photos of the process on flickr.

New digital collage. As you’ve probably surmised, it’s an orchid with green toy race cars and a button thrown in for good measure. I’m enjoying the formal arrangement in this work and the cosmic rabbit gocco print (in my previous blog post). For a simple arrangement, I spent a surprising amount of time working on this. I had the orchid and green car images included from almost the beginning with various other elements– spoons, spatulas, other buttons, a rooster… After deciding that the orchid and green cars were strong candidates for the work, I realized my existing photos weren’t cutting it. So I took new photographs of them and I’m glad I did. I just got the orchid this past weekend and even with my black thumb, I haven’t killed it yet. Lucky. (I say that in my best Napoleon Dynamite voice. Sweet.) The toy car belonged to me as a child. I have several very cool metal toy cars. This one is a Dinky. Orchid with Green Racer No. 6 is available as an 11″ x 17″ print in my etsy shop.

He had to be green. The spoons had be there. The dyer dial could not be replaced. Some things just must be…

birds & shibori #8Originally uploaded by triciamckellar

New digital collage! The Birds & Shibori series includes digitally altered photos of my hand-dyed shibori fabrics and photos of birds around my home in North Carolina.

This is the gocco printer. I’ve just flashed a screen.

Here’s my first print with the screen!

What fun! :)

This is my newest toy, err, totally necessary equipment. It’s a print gocco! It’s a system for making screen prints– it uses bulbs to flash screens, then ink is applied to the screen and mashed through it to paper or fabric. Here’s a movie of a print gocco in action.

So now I’ve got to go try it out! :)

bird in digital shibori landscape, 18″h x 36″w, fiber, 2006
digital prints on silk of altered shibori imagery, cardinal photograph, & other images, hand & machine quilted

I shipped this quilt off yesterday to the C&T Publishing special exhibition “Innovative Fabric Imagery: A Digital Exploration in Quilting” at the 2007 Fall International Quilt Market & Quilt Festival (Houston, Oct 27- Nov 4). This work is featured in the companion book “Innovative Fabric Imagery for Quilts.”

You can see more of my quilts here.

I’ve been working on a new digital collage series– well, actually, several ideas for new series are stewing in my head at various stages, but I’m thinking of one in particular now. Each collage in the Plans & Diagrams series uses a photo of a linen sheet as the background image. I’m planning to do something similiar with this new series. The background images will be from a 19th century engineering book– here’s a tiny preview:

Yippee! A three day weekend! I’ve been photographing shells and working on a new series… just a few images are ready. They’re on flickr now; when I get the series more fleshed out, I’ll start adding the prints to my etsy shop. Life is good!