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.

Kiva (www.kiva.org) is a non-profit that allows you to lend as little as $25 to a specific low-income entrepreneur in the developing world. I just loaned a small amount of money to baker in Lebanon to update his oven. (I was born in Beirut; my dad worked for Tapline and Aramco.) I think this is an excellent way for individuals to make a positive difference and help folks find their way out of poverty. Check out the site. :)

Yesterday at the arboretum. Spring is on its way!

I love the immediacy and simplicity of polaroids.

I just bought this stunning scarf from etsy seller entropyrains.etsy.com . (Click on the photo to go to her flickr photos.) If you love shibori like I do, you will love her stuff! I can’t wait for it to get here!

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!]

We took a family trip to Sarasota, Florida last weekend to visit my Dad. Fred & I got up early one morning to shoot the beach at sunrise.

It’s New Year’s Eve already! What are you doing? I’m taking some time to think about the coming year and how I’d like to focus my art. The studio is getting a much needed sorting, organizing, thinning… the fiber stuff is getting thinned and packed away for another time. In 2008, I want to focus on my photography, digital work, and encaustic painting/collage.

Several months back, I tried photographing arrangements of things. I used a lamp shade as a light box and shone my home-improvement-store reflector lamps on the lamp shade sitting on a table with the camera pointing straight down through the top of the shade. It worked okay for single small objects, but I was never able to get the results I wanted with larger arrangements.

Thanks to my wonderful family, I have new studio lights! It’s a pair of Interfit lights, each with softbox and reflector. Each light head has 5 sockets for daylight flourescent bulbs. The bulbs can be turned on in any combination. (Click on the thumbnail for a larger image.)

These lights will be very handy for photographing my art. I had the darnedest time getting full, even, matching light with so many different light sources in my dining room for shots like this:

And, of course, the lights are perfect for shooting arrangements of things… I could (and probably have) spend hours arranging the tiny objects I’ve collected and photographing them.

So now, I’m off to organize my studio… :)

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! :)

love the clouds…

After a long summer of hot, sunny days, a cool, misty, overcast morning was a welcome relief. It was a perfect morning to get some photos of the birds that frequent the telephone line over the cow pasture along my way to work. I love these kinds of bird images; I’ve used them in several of my digital collages.

I stopped at the pasture on my way to work this morning. A cow walked toward me, over to the fence next to my parked car as I was getting my camera from the trunk and started doing some crazy number with her tongue.

So I got a couple of shots of her and then took several photos of birds and telephone lines. As I was heading back to my car, she looked up at me again.

Was she glad to see me leave?

I’ve been working feverishly in the studio this weekend on my super secret collaboration– I can’t wait to fill you in on the details… But, for now, here are the latest mail goodies. I bought these used letterpress type blocks from the type junkie. I may stamp with them– I’ve been thinking of ways to get more hand worked imagery in my collages.

I’m spending the evening in the studio working on new images and sorting through photographs. Since I’m not ready to share the new work… or tell you about the super exciting, top secret collaboration in which I’ve been invited to participate, I’m hoping a bunny photo will suffice for a blog post. This rabbit was in the NC State Fair a couple of years back. Aren’t those the craziest markings?

More goodies in the mail! Another old book I bought off ebay. This one is the Patent Office Report of 1868, Volume III. Hundreds of pages of gadgets, contraptions, dreams, plans, schemes, machines…