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.

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 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.