Wow! My insects are cute! Thanks so much to the blog of all things cute and desireable cuteable.com for featuring a print from my Plans & Diagrams series!

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!]

Thanks so much to Jenn Wallace at Indie Fixx for including my Plans & Diagrams #4 in her collection of Black & White lovelies!

Lovely.  :)

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.

I’m very pleased to be paired to exhibit with a widely-praised local painter, Jason Craighead, through Raleigh’s municipal arts program. The exhibition, Macrocosm/Macrocosm, opens this Friday. Reception: Fri, Feb 1, 5-7pm with a poetry reading. One of my images was chosen for the postcard, above. (Click the thumbnail for a bigger image.)

Microcosm/Macrocosm
Art by Jason Craighead & Tricia McKellar
February 1 - March 13, 2008
Municipal Building Art Exhibitions
Miriam Preston Block Gallery
222 West Hargett St, Raleigh, NC
www.raleighnc.gov/arts

Thanks so much to Sonja Engdahl for her kind words about my art on her blog Nervous Motion! :)

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.

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… :)

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.