Don’t you always wonder what they are talking about out there?
We had a great time at a pre-season Giants-Royals game (courtesy of our daughter!) a couple weeks ago. I didn’t come out with any stellar photos, but had a great time just being there enjoying seeing the players and watching the game. This photo as been taken into Topaz Impression (Urban Street Art) and Simplify for fun.
I’m back among the land of the living again! I haven’t quite returned to photography as yet, so today’s photo is a reworking of one I took last summer in Tucson. I played with it in Photoshop and added some textures to create a painterly look.
A nasty bug has knocked me flat! I’ve been in bed for almost a week and will probably stay there for the rest of this week too. I have lots of meds, am following doctor’s orders, drinking fluids, listening to podcasts, and playing lots of Words with Friends. Could be worse!
I’ll be back!
Well, our next photo club theme is self portrait. Cringe! I’m working on an idea for a composite for the next month’s assignment after that (which, in my case, also involves a selfie), so I took photos for both this week. Here are a couple versions.
I’m not sure someone my age should really pose next to flowers, but I was trying for an environmental portrait. How do I spend a lot of my time? Shooting flowers, of course! How did I take a photo with my camera if I was holding my camera? I got my broken one out of the closet. . .
I think I might get a negative comment for cutting the top of my head off in the above portrait. I happen to like that look, but I might reshoot it- which would probably mean buying more flowers. Maybe not.
Below is my personal favorite, which involved Topaz Impression and some textures. It is also an environmental portrait, because this is how I spend much of my time. If I’m not editing photos, I’m researching ancestors.
I may post some other versions in the future- we’ll see. . .
Happy April!
As I looked out my office window yesterday at gray skies and snow flurries (!), I was remembering the lovely grounds of the vintage hotel where we stayed in Palm Springs, Here are a couple detail shots:
Another flower- this time an orchid.
Edited with Topaz Impression- with added texture.
Happy Tuesday! Just a couple more flower abstracts. . .
I never get tired of flower abstracts!
One of my most treasured possessions is a quilt presented to me by my mother on the occasion of our marriage in 1971.
The quilt was made by my great-grandmother, Mary Amanda Peaslee, who was born in Postville, Iowa in 1859. Her parents, Augustus and Elizabeth Mary Crawford Peaslee, were recent immigrants from Ontario, Canada, along with her maternal grandparents, William and Charlotte Crawford (both born in Ireland). Mary Amanda, along with her four siblings, grew up in Iowa, and she moved to Chicago at some point in the 1870’s with some of her family. In 1882, she married my great-grandfather, Charles Harper Bean, and gave birth to my grandmother in 1888. By age thirty-five, she was already a widow with a seven year old daughter. She never re-married, but lived with her sister and then my grandmother until her death in 1949 at age eighty-nine.
Mary Amanda was an accomplished seamstress all her life and was listed as such in a Chicago City directory before her marriage. My mother remembered sitting sewing and ripping out stitch after stitch as a young girl- never quite measuring up to the exacting standards of her grandmother. In later years, my mother returned to sewing and made beautiful outfits with her Elna sewing machine- always using Vogue designer patterns.
In one corner of the quilt is the inscription embroidered by my grandmother (Mary Amanda’s daughter): “Pieced by Mother at 12 years of age.” It was made in 1871- one hundred years before our wedding- and now it is 145 years old!
Perfect orchids!
Not mine, fortunately (orchids shrivel up and die when I get too close)- they were at Sunnylands. 🙂
My little AAUW photo group had the assignment last week of photographing a subject in different ways, from different angles, and/or edited different ways. I had a busy week so allowed about a half hour for shooting and a half hour for editing- I almost made it. I used my 35 mm for 3 shots and switched to my 85mm macro for the other 2. I quickly edited all in Lightroom and then added textures to two in Photoshop- all on schedule. But I was in such a hurry and so out of patience that I kept messing up the collage in the Lightroom Print Module. I threw up my hands and sent them all to my phone where I made a quick layout in Pic Collage, which added only about 5 minutes to my allotted time. When I picked up my print at Costco, I realized that I had sent the wrong photo to my phone for the middle one on the left- it was unedited! And so it was. . .
I added a bit of contrast, clarity, and sharpening to that unedited part of the collage before uploading to my blog- so it looks a little better (no, I did not re-make the whole collage!).
I’m returning one more time to some shots I took at Sunnylands.
Here are the grounds.
And here are some shots I took of a bench presented to President Obama by the president of China in 2013.
Here’s another blossom image for today- with a little Topaz Impression for a painterly look:
Here’s yet another view of Sunnylands- I just can’t get enough of the palo verde trees! During the editing process of this photo, I discovered something that I didn’t realize I had captured when I snapped the shutter. Can you find it?
No, it’s not the people in the background- it’s in the foreground, and may be pretty pixelated in this online version. It’s in the orange flowers, and it starts with H!
Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I looked through my recent photos and decided to break with tradition and go with pink instead of green for today. I took these shots of the blossoms on our plum tree before we left for Palm Springs. I guess this was a smart move, because, now that we are back, the blossoms are all gone.
melinda anderson photography 