“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
~ Thomas Merton

This blog has been growing and changing as I’ve been growing and changing. Its focus will undoubtedly shift as my own focus shifts. I wasn’t sure for a while if I should make this blog personal, business, purely a portfolio, or an educational blog. In the end, it’s all of those, but from a personal slant. I’ve started a separate blog that I’ll be officially launching in the next week called Photo Artist Textures +. That site will be a magazine dedicated to post-processing techniques.

When I was at the University of Oregon, I had a wonderful photography community. My teachers and mentors were Ted Orland and (unofficially) David Bayles, authors of  Art & Fear: Observations On the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking. We would get together to work, discuss art, art-making and life. It was a rich time that is still the humus for my art-making today. It’s that same environment that I’d like to bring here. Let’s sit down, have a cup of coffee and discuss “The Whole Ball of Wax.”

Dedicated to Ted Orland, David Bayles and the whole photography gang at the University of Oregon back in 1983.

Still Life is entitled Early June. A still life of roses, mock orange blossoms, and ivy from my garden. Post-processed using textures and Topaz Labs Clean filter.

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I can’t believe it’s been over a month since my last post. Spring is a busy time for me. That’s the time when a lot of my flowers are blooming in the garden and some of them don’t stick around long. The Wisteria is only nice looking for less than 2 weeks, the Lilac is at its prime, the Iris last a few weeks, but are loveliest in the beginning. The tulips have all bloomed by the first week of May.

The still life above I’ve titled Late April. Except for the purple Lilac (which I’ll have next year!) all flowers are from my garden. I’ve photographed the still life in my studio, with a combination of natural light and strobe. Then I use Photoshop to work in several layer textures to create the old painting look. All of May, I’ve been busy photographing as the flowers came in. Iris, Roses, Poppies, Ranunculus and Clemetis. This week I have Mexican Orange blossoms and Peonies! Finally the Peonies. I wait for this every year. I have a back-log of images I’m working on right now.

I’ve also been working obsessively on high resolution textures which I’ll tell you more about in a future post. Plus, I’ll have free giveaways and tutorials! Be sure to sign up for news as things are about to start happening.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

~ Mikhail Baryshnikov

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy creating and keeping up my RedBubble presence, but I’ve taken time to let this site rest over winter. Like a seed dormant in the dark stillness of winter. With spring, my energies are once again unfurling out. I’m eager to get back to tending this garden.

The photograph today was taken with my Canon 40D. Actually I should say that both photographs were. The background is layered with a close-up photograph I took of a building here in France — land of textures!

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There is not one big cosmic meaning for all, there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Anais Nin

Photograph taken in my studio and layered texture treatments done in Photoshop.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic. ~ Anais Nin

Edge of Gold Dahlias in an antique vase photographed against vintage satin curtains.

This week, I dug up the Dahlias for winter. I have the last of them in a vase in the dining room. Winter is coming. There are glorious colors on the vines on the house. I’ll photograph them tomorrow.

I’ve been working hard on launching another of my sites on Blue Weimaraners so haven’t had time to post lately. When I’ve been working hard, I feel a need to post a flower and a quote. It instantly brings a lifting to my spirits. I do hope it does for you too.

I’ve read a number of posts online where photographers advocate only saving your best work. Now, I can understand where the sentiment comes from. By only saving our best images, we can easily find our best without wading through the rejects. It also makes us feel better about our work when we only see our finest. Besides, it also saves on storage space. This all makes sense, but I say: it depends on how you work.

I have several reasons for saving photographs that aren’t my best:

1. Memories: Some of my best snapshots for memories are not great, technically. The photo of my dog curled up in a funny position in an armchair, asleep, tongue hanging out — taken with a flash and a compact camera that I grabbed as I walked through the room.
2. Information: Sometimes, a photograph doesn’t have a lot going for it artistically but it fits the bill if someone needs it for information. I recently had a request from someone writing a paper comparing variations of a dog breed. I had some photographs in my library that fit his needs perfectly, but they weren’t images I would have considered “picks”.
3. Stock Parts: If you do any digital imaging, you just might find that you have a great supply of “stock parts” in your reject prints. Maybe a Landscape is rather boring, but it has a great sky.
4. Rediscovering potential: Finally, I often go back and look at a series of photographs and discover that an image that I initially dismissed is actually quite interesting. I was photographing my dogs running in a field a few months ago. In one frame, I only caught half of one of the dogs, so I dismissed it as a reject —but didn’t trash it. Recently, when reviewing the photographs, I realized that both dogs were caught in exactly the same stride, same angle. Almost like I had cloned one. Having one dog cut off out of the frame actually added interest and movement to the photograph.

Now, I’m not suggesting you keep everything you shoot. Obviously that shot of your foot that was fired accidentally is due for the trash. (Although who knows? Conceptual art?) Also frames that are way too under or over exposed. When photographing still lifes, I’ll often take 5 or more frames of the same set up with different exposures / focus. I’ll go through and select a couple of the best to keep.

The above example of my Poppy Botanical image is a good case where I’ve used a reject photograph to good advantage. The digital composition on the left is what I started with. An OK image, but it felt like it was missing something. In an ideal world, I would have noticed this right away and shot another version immediately. As it was, I was working on the digital image in October and the original was taken in May. I went back to my library in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom and browsed the folder where the original was located. I had nothing usable in the studio shots, but just before I gathered that poppy to photograph indoors I had taken some quick snapshots, hand-held in the garden. I found a photograph of a similar poppy that by all rights I should have trashed. It’s boring, not sharp and not even a very good composition. (What was I thinking?)

"Reject" Image

I saw it’s possibilities for my uses and did a quick mask using the wand tool in Photoshop.

Poppy selected from background with Wand tool

I then placed this image into my main composition. I’ll admit I had to do some acrobatics to get it to work. I had to clean up the edges where it still had some of the dark background showing. I color corrected it to make it look as warm as the main flower. I had to carefully erase part of it to make it look as if it’s sitting behind the main flower. I subtly blended the edges and then I applied a slight Paint Daubs Artistic filter in Photoshop. The filter actually gave it a nice effect that both faded it and applied contrast where it needed it.

Detail of placed / enhanced poppy

In the end, I’m pretty happy with the improvement to the original composition. Please feel free to leave a comment below.

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I feel an indescribable ecstasy and delirium in melting, as it were, into the system of beings, in identifying myself with the whole of nature. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Photograph taken in my studio with a single on-camera flash bounced into a white card. This image captures the spirit of this delicate-colored yet exuberant Dahlia better than photographs I took of the whole flower.

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy, And the dimpling stream runs laughing by; When the air does laugh with our merry wit, And the green hill laughs with the noise of it. ~ Lord Byron

Photograph taken today. I’m rather thrilled with a new approach I’m taking. I’m just getting back into photography, so I don’t have much equipment. I’ve been photographing with natural light in my Veranda, but the space is tight, and the light seems to either be too dull or too strong and it’s hard to see the LCD view. So today, I brought up this pot of Fuchsia to my studio, set it near the skylight, put an on-camera flash on the camera and then holding the shutter release in one hand, I held up layered translucent curtain fabric in front of the flash for a home-made soft-box effect. I’m pretty happy with the results. I got nice detail in the flower and nice highlights. Next step will be to put the flash off-camera and set up another off-camera flash for the background.

For the background, I took one of Michel’s blue T-shirts and pinned it to the wall! It looked a little too much like a T-shirt tacked to a wall though, so I softened the wrinkles and then “burned” in some color around the edges using overlay layers in Photoshop.

May flowers always line your path and sunshine light your day. May songbirds serenade you every step along the way. May a rainbow run beside you in a sky that’s always blue. And may happiness fill your heart each day your whole life through. — Irish Blessing

Shirley Poppy in the garden taken late spring.

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation …
Henry David Thoreau

I took this photo of a pair of Morning Glories this week. I normally prefer photographing flowers under a slight overcast sky, but Morning Glories seem to light up from within when the sun back-lights the delicate trumpets.

I’ve been deeply delving into studying about back-end functionality and Internet marketing, so haven’t posted in nearly a week. Learning great stuff, but after a day of reading and taking notes, I felt a great need to finish the day with a flower. It’s nearly mid-night, but I’ll end the day with a Morning—Glory that is.