Snow Day, Snow Day...

The tree again, with the bay providing the darker background as there is no ice and snow on it yet, but it's only January and there's a lot of winter yet to come. The wind is really roaring across the bay tonight, and it looks like an early morning to get out and clean up the driveway!

Snow Shoes After School

George and I went up into the woods behind his house after school tonight, taking advantage of the early arrival home from school (which seldom happens as we are usually arriving home well after dark) and took to the snowshoes. I did, however, get dark before we got back, and the following pictures are a result of using the flash on my camera to put some punch into the photos.

HDR... Hmmmmm... I Like the Side Effects!

Like with this photo I got of George in the hallway outside his room with a couple of other teachers. George seems pretty laid back, taking it all in, while the other two are energetically active, or at the least animated, over something in the discussion. The HDR automation in PhotoShop applied to a set of burst shots like this gives an effect that would otherwise be difficult to achieve. Pretty cool what it does to the colors, and the transparencies of the separate figures in the piece. More adjustments could be made, but I left it just as it was finished.

Choices... Anything is Possible

High Dynamic Range and such has been something I have been reading about quite a bit lately and I'm not sure... should the photographer use every tool available to obtain the image that seems the best? I understand the difficulty of shooting a picture that has darks and lights in conflict with one another, but to make something that gives us more information than the human eye can just doesn't seem natural, and of course, it isn't. So the difference is what I am looking at as I post these two identical (well, they are the same picture, I have just pulled more information out of the shadows and placed a little bit more in the highlights to give it an extended dynamic range. While one might see more information, it still doesn't seem natural to me. You judge. I took this shot in my studio while I was downloading 3 hours of video from last Friday's Senior Exhibition. It went great and I may post some things from it after I get my act together!

Knitting and Snowing

The All-Faculty Exhibit in the Wing Gallery at school is just about together. Dan has been working almost a month on putting this show together and it demonstrates the wide variety of artistic endeavors from the faculty of Mount Desert Island High School. I have included just one aspect in a crocheted piece for posting here. My Mom was a knitter and I have always loved the touch and feeling of a knit/crocheted piece of work.

I also took a flash shot of the snow coming down in front of the house. I never tire of taking photographs of that tree, it is an amazing thing of beauty! The various sizes of the snowflakes as the flash hit them at different depths gives an interesting sense of three dimensional space to this shot!

Clementine Peel Center

Pine Cones

More shots from the iPhone camera "macro".

Snowshoeing... First Hike

Dave and I saw a tree growing right out of the ledges. Amazing that it could find nourishment, but we as humans often find spiritual nourishment in the most meager places.

The muse is always with me. I feel like I got little accomplished for school during vacation, but I'm told that might be a good thing! Here's the tree... an establishing shot and the good one.

Song Again...

Here I've shot a few pictures of the Song of India plant with my Sony HX1 just to compare... hmmm... with low-res Interweb pictures it seems to me that the simple cell phone holds it own! Whadya think?

This one is very grainy as it was almost dark, and I would have problems to overcome with this (if I were concerned with improving it) concerning lighting and such, but I shot it in a dim room light after dark. The grain doesn't bother me for some reason, I think because it adds to the abstract nature of the shot.

This second one (there were several others, but these stand out to me) is a lot sharper, and the product was part of an experiment with the flash with back-lighting. It's amazing how one simple subject can lead to all sorts of experimentation and variety (to a degree) of images!

Song of India (Ryan's Plant)

Stumbling around the house looking for something to photograph, I came across the big Song of India plant in the bedroom and started shooting closeups of it. There is a sensuality to being so close to the subject and it becomes very intimate, even though these are not a great resolution and don't have the detail they might when taken with a "real" camera. It is about the "feeling" of the photo and I think that is why I keep coming back to O'Keeffe's abstractions and the sensual qualities they possessed. They still amaze me, as does the prolific amount of work she accomplished even into her later years. There is still hope for more to be done!

I'm feeling good with the green and I hope these last couple of days are a symbol of the kind of winter we might have, although it is always good for some reason.