Yellowstone Peonies

When I saw that my daughter had a bouquet of peonies on her dining room table, I couldn’t resist carrying them over to the window for a quick still life shot. The house Caitlin and family live in is over 100 years old and is part of what used to be Fort Yellowstone.  I love the old windows!

20150625-MMA_7848_melinda_anderson-EditI used one of Kim Klassen’s presets (darklight) for the edit in Lightroom and then added textures in Photoshop. The peonies were actually hot pink, but I wanted more of a vintage look to go with the window.

I have recently been introduced to canva.com through Kim’s Studio group. What a fun and easy way to make collages!  This was a quick layout done totally online (nothing to buy) of Henry smelling peonies outside his house.

Even little boys love(1)

 

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Backroad WIldflowers

My wonderful son-in-law drove me and my sweet and very patient family through a section of Yellowstone to see some beautiful country- and mostly so I could take some photographs. Although it was midday and therefore not the best light, the sky full of white puffy clouds made a beautiful backdrop- and there were wildflowers everywhere!

These were all taken on Blacktail Road. The Gallatins were behind us; the predominant mountain is Electric Peak.

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Debbie’s Find

My Friday Find is borrowed from my friend, Debbie, who graciously allowed me to photograph it this week. You may see it again, because I have some other ideas before I return it. And my goodness, there’s that straw hat again!

This is a Lensbaby shot with added textures. I like the look that some of my textures give my walls- wish they really looked like that!

20150611-MMA_7085_melinda_anderson-EditAnd here is the same photo (in the original proportions- I “stretched the canvas” of the top one in Photoshop) with a black and white preset I adapted from one I had gotten from somewhere.  I wanted a light-ish black and white conversion, which I sometimes do by adjusting tones etc.  This time I decided to save it as a preset, hoping it will work on other photos as well.

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Kim Klassen dot com

Melinda5 Comments

Golden Spotlight

The other evening, I glanced over at my entry hall as beautiful light from the setting sun cast a golden glow over my forgotten ranunculus arrangement on the cabinet. I am always complaining about the lack of good light in our house, so I felt compelled to run and get my camera and snap photo after photo until the light faded. My lensbaby Sweet 35 was on the camera- and of course I don’t remember what the aperture was set at- maybe f/4, which produced a lot of blur on the sides (more than I usually like).  The second shot shows my adjustment- pushing the bottles together to put more of the flowers in focus.  Closing down the aperture would have forced me to raise the ISO more than I wanted to in the excitement of the moment, so that was my speedy solution.

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Denouement

My peonies have bit the dust, but here are a couple more images from their glory days.

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Tomorrow or sometime later in the week I will post a couple images of their last days.

My lensbaby class officially begins today, plus I have FOUR meetings this week- so, over the next week or two, you will be seeing some photos from the (mostly recent) archives.

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A Lensbaby Still

Next week I start an online Lensbaby class through Clickin Moms with Caroline Jensen! I’m beyond excited to learn from this Lensbaby guru (and also from some of the amazing photographers taking the class- Holy Cow!).  I’m taking it “study-along”, meaning I won’t get any feedback except from my classmates, but I will have access to all the class materials and can read the feedback Caroline gives the other students.  We’ve already been given “pre-assignments” well in advance of the class starting, so I already have started learning.

Because I’ll be so involved with the class, it is possible that I’ll be pretty behind in my still life assignments, unless I combine the two (which I may in fact).  But since I often use a lensbaby for my stills, I’m going to try to step outside of my comfort zone and practice outside and with people.

So here is a lensbaby still life of PEONIES (surprise, surprise!) and my chair.

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