Since it looks like I won’t be getting out much for awhile I decided it was time to get a dog. Haven’t quite decided on his name yet.
From John O’Donohue:
When Beauty touches our lives, the moment becomes luminous.
Category: Fauna
Day 35 – Lady Bug on Lupine
I was photographing my neighbor’s Lupine and happened upon this lady bug so of course she had to become the star of the show.
I’ve moved on to John O’Donohue’s chapter on the Color of Beauty and today’s quote is very appropriate for today’s photograph:
In a world without color, it would be impossible to imagine beauty; for color and beauty are sisters.
Day 9 – Golden Crowned Sparrow
After a rough day with Turbo Tax I’m falling back on the archives again. This Golden Crowed sparrow was kind enough to pose in a tree. Most of them were on the ground. From North Mountain Park last week.
Another one from John O’Donohue:
Beauty is mysterious, a slow presence who waits for the ready, expectant heart.
Day 4 – White Breasted Nuthatch
Today’s quest for beauty took me to the bird feeders at North Mountain Park where I found the Nuthatches putting on quite a show.
From Rumi:
Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Day 62 – Thistle with Bee
I’m still putting the Velvet 56 through it’s paces so today I took it to growers market. I was just leaving the market when I spotted some thistles blooming. I went over and darned if there weren’t bees buzzing around. I probably could have gotten a little closer from a technical standpoint but I was a little worried about ticking the bees off. So this is a situation where the Velvet 85 might have been the better tool for the job as I really don’t like that dead thistle at the bottom. I cropped in quite a bit as it was. I suppose I could have gone a little further. One advantage to the R camera is it has a lot of pixels to play with. In any case I did brighten it a bit and added a high pass filter for detail. I also added a texture for just a slight painterly look on all that gorgeous blur in the background.
Day 34 – Le Chat
I took the Sweet50 for a walk yesterday in Carcasonne. I found lots of fun things to photograph in shop windows, not to mention the medieval towers and buildings of the town. But this cat charmed me. I might have liked the focus point to be just a little lower but the cat was on the move so I only had one shot at it. In post I added contrast and detail and a vignette to put the spotlight on the cat.
100 Days of Lensbaby
Yes, I should probably have my head examined. Maybe I’m just a masochist. But I had a brilliant idea for a new 100 days project and I couldn’t come up with any good excuses not to run with it. So, starting today and (if I did the math right) continuing through November 9, I will post one new image a day to this blog. The image must be captured with a Lensbaby lens, it does not have to be captured on that day but must be captured within the 100 day period.
Lensbaby, for the uninitiated, is a company based in our own Portland, Oregon which manufactures special effects lenses for photography. In a world that loves sharp focus, Lensbaby goes for maximum blur, distorted backgrounds and soft velvety looks. I currently own 5 Lensbaby lenses, I’ll tell you all about them as I get into the project. I’ve already picked out a sixth lens for my birthday present but that is over a month away. I have a feeling a couple more may come home to roost during the course of the project. Thanks Mom.
If you can’t wait to learn more about Lensbaby , here is a link to a blog post by a photographer I follow which may give more insight into the options available and includes photos showing the results she has gotten.
https://lensbaby.com/lensbaby-magic-flower-photography-jamie-davidson/
Today’s image was captured using the Trio 28 mounted on my new Canon M100 which I bought as a light weight walking around camera. The Trio 28 is unique in a couple of respects. First it is designed to be used with Mirrorless cameras so does not require an adaptor thus playing into my lightweight strategy. The Trio is so named because it offers three distinct Lensbaby effects. With a simple rotation of the front of the lens you can select Twist, which offers a swirly background; Velvet which offers a smooth glowing effect; or Sweet, which offers an area of sweet sharp focus that then fades off in blur. For this image I had the camera set on Velvet (I’m pretty sure). One of my issues with the Trio is it is not always obvious to me where I had the lens set. I’m trying to be more consistent about the order in which I shoot but in the case of this butterfly, it was such a game of chase I wasn’t paying too much attention. The other issue I have with the Trio is it is wide angle at 28mm which is not my favorite mode to work in. The Trio also has a fixed aperture at 3.5 so shallow depth of field is a given.
In any case, when I got this image into the computer, I decided to give it a vertical crop. I tried taking it into Topaz Studio2 for a more painterly look but didn’t see anything I liked. Then I remembered it was new texture day at the 2 Lil Owls texture club so I downloaded this month’s textures and tried one of the new ones which gave me the look I finally settled on.
I’ll try not to be so verbose in future posts but I wanted to be sure and give you some background on the project and I want to introduce each lens as I use it for the first time.
Yellow Bumblebee
I’m running late again with the image of the week. I’ve been thinking, as we enter July that we should have mid-year resolutions. One of mine is to get my image of the week out by Sunday. We’ll see how long that lasts.
I have to say I’d never seen an all yellow bumble bee until the last year or two. I’m not sure if that means they are new to our area or I am just seeing them now that I have been chasing pollinators around with my camera.
This one was shot at North Mountain Park hand held with the M3 and an 18-150 mm lens. I got a lot of out of focus bees but this one came out just right. At the last minute I thought why not add a texture. As usual I thought it looked a little better with than without.
Mushrooms
The Oregon Coast project is still alive thanks to a brief window of halfway decent weather this weekend. As I am currently teaching a class in Macro photography I felt compelled to put my pixels where my mouth is. Though I had a very successful day shooting tulips at Shore Acres, it was these mushrooms from a patch of forest near the Oregon Dunes that stole the day. I shot it handheld but it took six tries to get one that was properly framed and focused. Well worth all the contortions I had to go through to get down to their level.
Echinacea with Bee
You may have seen this one before if you followed my 100 days of flowers project. It is getting to be that time of year when there isn’t much new to photograph and it’s time to review what I have accomplished this year, put together a calendar and a year in review photo book. So, while I haven’t been through all the photos yet this one keeps coming up as a strong contender for image of the year for me. It did make the cover of my calendar for 2019 as well as the feature photo for August. I’ve also been working on a sign for a friends new pollinator garden. This one did not make the cut for that because you can’t see the front of the bee but as an art piece I still think it’s a winner.