Day 6 – Flicker

Flicker2

I took the big lens down to the greenway this morning in hopes of catching some birds before the trees leaf out (please let the trees be healthy enough to leaf out). I wasn’t having much luck. In fact while scanning the trees for birds I missed my step and fell scraping both knees and most of the knuckles on my right hand. Fortunately, the camera landed on its sun shield and seems no worse for the hard landing. I was limping back to my car when this Flicker happened by. In my haste I forgot to zoom the lens all the way in but still got a reasonable shot. I did have to prune a few distracting branches in Photoshop. I’m thinking now maybe I should have gotten rid of a few more.

I’m back to Matthew Fox in my search for Creativity quotes. Still on page 2 of his book and I found this:

When we consider creativity, we are considering the most elemental and innermost and deeply spiritual aspects of our beings.

 

 

 

Day 5 – Sunflower

Sunflowerw

I decided recently that given all the money I am saving by not traveling it would be OK to buy myself flowers once in awhile. One of my photography gurus put me on to a website called Farm Girl Flowers which is out of California and overnights the flowers right to your doorstep. So this month’s bouquet was sunflowers which, unfortunately I did not get around to photographing until it was almost too late. On this one I went for a dark and moody look using a preset that took it in the right direction and then added a texture to darken the edges even more. Shot with the R mirrorless and one of the lensbabies, maybe Velvet 56. I keep forgetting to photograph the lens before I swap it in so I know what I was using as the lensbabies do not show up in the meta data.

Today’s quote is from Julia Cameron from her day book called The Artist’s Way Every Day: A Year of Creative Living. I have taken the liberty to substitute the word art for her original word writing but you can swap it back if you prefer writing.

What if [art] were approached like white-water rafting? Something to try just for the fact of having tried it, for the spills and chills of having gone through the rapids of the creative process. What if we allowed ourselves to be amateurs (from the Latin verb amare, “to love”).

Day 4 – Lesser Goldfinch

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Well, I don’t think we need to worry about the birds starving to death. At least this Lesser Goldfinch seems pretty well fed. There were plenty of Goldfinches out in the neighborhood this morning but the other birds seemed to have been driven off by the Starlings and Red Winged Blackbirds. This was a job for the big girl camera, Canon 7D Mark II with the Tamron 150-600 telephoto lens. Just a few minor adjustments in photoshop to bring out the colors and sharpen it up a tad.

Today’s quote is from photographer Freeman Patterson as published in The Tao of Photography by Phillipe L. Gross and S.I. Shapiro. 

Seeing, in the finest and broadest sense, means using your senses, your intellect, and your emotions. It means encountering your subject matter with your whole being. It means looking beyond the labels of things and discovering the remarkable world around you.

Day 3 – Birdhouse

BirdHousew

It’s been a busy day. I had in mind to take the big lens out and see who was at the neighbors’ bird feeders when I got a call telling me that there was extra vaccine at the Asante clinic if I wanted to be vaccinated. So, I dropped everything and hurried over so I could be back in time for my 11:00 zoom call. Then I barely had time to walk the dog and eat lunch before my 1:30 zoom call. So, it was a good thing I had something from yesterday to work with. This plastic birdhouse hangs from a neighbor’s tree. My goal was to try and disguise its plasticness. It took two trips through Topaz and two textures to get there but I like the result. Shot with the M3 and Sweet 50 combo again.

Today’s quote is from a little book called Art as a Way of Life edited by Roderick MacIver.  The quote is from Anne Lamott:

…if you’ve got that creative voice inside of you, that has something to communicate, that just longs to tell its version of things or to entertain or to inspire or to try to be part of the solution or just to be heard – you know, to stop being a person who is silenced – then I think you have to honor that or you are just doomed.

Day 2 – Quality Used Books

Qualityw

I’m embarrassed to admit that I have lived 3 blocks from Quality Used Books for 6 1/2 years and have never been inside. It’s that darned Highway you have to cross to get there adding another two blocks to the trip to get to a traffic light. I know, very lame. But now that it is an official survivor of the Alameda Fire I plan to become a regular, assuming it survives the pandemic as well.

So, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking that Quality Used Books would make a great subject. This is how I want to wake up in the middle of the night, not thinking about all the stuff I have to do or worrying about when I’m going to get vaccinated. So, I took the M3 out with the Lensbaby Sweet 50 (sans dog, I felt so free) and got a great photo with blurry edges to start with. Then I took it into Topaz Texture Effects for a slightly painterly look and finally added a texture. The fact that it snowed overnight in the mountains just added as certain je ne sais quoi.

Today’s quote I found in a book called Photography and the Creative Life by one of my all time favorite photographers, Nancy Rotenberg. We lost Nancy to breast cancer, all too soon, about 10 years ago. I cherish her book and try to read it again at least once a year.

The quote, however is from Anna Freud:

Creative minds have always been known to survive any kind of bad training.

 

 

100 Days of Creativity – Day 1- Daffodils

Daffodilsw

Yep, it’s been too long. I’ve been toying with the idea of doing another 100 days project for a couple of weeks now. I’ve also been resisting the idea for a couple of weeks now. But, the truth is I’ve been really depressed since I learned that being eligible to be vaccinated does not mean I will be getting vaccinated any time soon. So, I decided I needed something to focus on besides taking the dog for six walks a day and combing through thousands of ancestors searching for the immigrants.

I first thought of doing 100 days of Spring but it was almost exactly a year ago that I started my 100 days of Beauty project and that sounded too much the same plus I got depressed all over again thinking of all the gardens and blossoming trees I photographed last year that were lost to the Almeda Fire. I got a little excited about the idea of reprising my 100 days of Lensbaby  project from a few years ago but that would mean I can’t photograph the birds at my neighbors’ feeders or along the greenway. So, I finally hit on 100 days of creativity which leaves the door wide open for all of the above and then some, including still life. And  it focuses my attention on jump starting my creativity which is what I’m really after here.

Daffodils have been popping up all over the neighborhood. I went out with the EOS R and Lensbaby Spark to see what I could come up with. I immediately realized that I needed extension tubes and I don’t have any that fit the R. However I liked this wider shot of a cluster of flowers and the bokah from the Spark is  great. I added one texture to give it some depth and warmth and, well yeah, texture.

I pulled about seven books off my shelf that have a creativity theme and the expectation of some good quotes to go with the photos…or digital art. Today’s quote is from Matthew Fox in his book Creativity:  

Creativity constitutes the very meaning of being human, and our powers of creativity distinguish us from other species.

Elegant

Elegant

Continuing in the still life theme, this image came from the prompt of “elegant surroundings.” I think the black book is a little obtrusive but otherwise not bad. Perhaps the most important lesson I’ve learned in this workshop is that I can send flowers to myself when I need something to photograph.

Image of the Year – Dandelion Seed

DandilionSeed

Sorry I have been absent for awhile. 2020 was wearing on me but it’s time to get back to putting more beauty in the world. It has become my tradition for the first image of the week each year to be my favorite from the previous year. I had less than half as many images to choose from this year but this one came to mind as a favorite and though it could have been taken anywhere, it has the added significance of having been shot in front of a house on Suncrest in the Autumn Ridge neighborhood that did not survive the fire. Gives a whole new meaning to the dandelions in our yards doesn’t it.

Phoenix

Pucks

I realized the other day that I have given short shrift to Phoenix. So, I made a point going there intentionally to take pictures and not just driving through today. I think most of us in the Rogue Valley have seen the iconic photos of Puck’s donuts and the Phoenix Motel. The stark contrast of the colorful sign in front of Puck’s and the burned-out building and the umbrella by the swimming pool at the motel are quite striking.

PhoenixMotel

In fact, the damage in the downtown area where these businesses were located was quite spotty. A building here and there burned but once again I was surprised to see how many were left standing. It was the north side of town that bore the brunt of the devastation, along with the Bear Lake Estates east of town which was a high-end 55+ mobile home village. Nearly 150 homes were lost in that development alone.

I could not get a good angle on the Phoenix Plaza, a shopping mall of sorts which always seemed to have a few vacancies. But here is what’s left of my favorite Thai restaurant, just across the highway from there. EssanThe Jack-in-the-Box in front of it was spared but the two square blocks of townhouse apartments behind are gone. Going north on 99 several mobile home

RoyalOaks

parks on both sides of the highway were wiped out along with the Umpqua Bank (whose vault is notably intact), the Harley Davidson dealership, some storage units and my State Farm Insurance agent’s office. I’m just so grateful they were able to save the Genealogy Library, not much further up the road.

Chain link fences are being built around many of the damaged or destroyed properties. Signs are also popping up all over offering to buy lots, perform

signs

excavation and rebuild homes. But so too are signs just saying Hope, saying Phoenix strong, and we will rise from the ashes. The toxic waste cleanup is set to begin next week. The thing I hear mentioned most often to be removed are propane tanks. Looks like they will have easy pickin’s here at the Dun-Rov-N RV park.

Propane