Today’s image comes from the same session Tomasz mentioned several days ago. We were finishing off our evening in the studio, when I thought- how about paring a yellow gerbera with a yellow lemon? He was not very convinced at first, and when I set it up and took several images, I was not so sure myself. But it somehow transformed on the screen into quite an interesting still life.

Recently I find myself experimenting more and more with situations where you can shoot your subject by it’s reflection. Sometimes it’s just face in the mirror, sometimes it’s flower bouquet. Using mirror allows me to get some nice depth of field effects. This photo shows the car my brother went in to church for his wedding last week. It’s nice vintage British automobile with side mirrors mounted way ahead on the fenders. Today such thing probably wouldn’t pass pedestrian safety test, but back then nobody really cared.

Time again to show an iPhone photo. I have some stuff about apps and macro capabilities of this device coming, but so far- I am still reading and learning. So one straight of camera- well, almost. I found Lightroom very eager to get the photos out of iPhone .
Anyway, the huge advantage of iPhone as camera is having it with you all the time. I can take photos of things around when we go shopping, for example, which opens new subjects for me. This one was taken outside our local mall. The lamp above the pot with flowers looked just like  a full moon.

Revisiting my photos from California, I have an impression that I hardly shoot anything other then flowers. Maybe because my host had a real green thumb, and there was so many plants around her backyard. But also interesting plants were all over Davis… And they were not moving, so were easy to photograph. Or I just like photographing plant. No idea, really. In either case, what I particularly like about this image is the matching of flower and background colors.

I am not in the mood for anything much today. I just picked a photo, and played some with sliders in Lightroom. The flowers were far too bright, and I just wanted to tone them down a bit, and lost all the color in the wood in the process. Looks weird, but should go well with my mood.

Just a quickie today. Something fresh from the card. It is getting late, but since I am downloading photos from today’s trip to Southeastern Iowa, organizing and sitting in front of computer anyway, I might as well pick up something and post. I took it while exploring garden in reconstructed old fort in Fort Madison, Iowa.

I am currently spending 72 hours in California. It is a work related trip, but I am taking every chance I have to photograph. Which is not too hard, as I am staying in colleague house with her two labs. Lots of walking involved.
But also nice yard, and so much details at home, I wish I had my Lensbaby. I packed only one lens, one body, but on the weight basis it was still more then my clothing .
I live this backyard shot, because of the bokeh I managed to get out of my 18-200 mm f/3.5-5.6 lens, and the colors in the fence, adding interest to the simple photo of the flower.

I spend some time during AirVenture shooting with my Lensbaby. Most of the photos turned out to be out-of-focus disaster. Whatever stayed, was a compositional disaster. There are some which I still like, and it is one of them. It is an example of those surprising photos, which look like they have been taken in another, completely different place and time. There is nothing there to talk about planes or flying. There is still daylight on the flowers in front of the hut, and the warm lamp is lighting the inside of the place. I took it on the evening walk, when guys were busy photographing planes with their flashes and stuff.

I think I am going to introduce some more structure to my blog. I already have “Tomasz’s Saturday”, so today I am introducing “Gallery Monday”. Whenever I have a larger project, with more than one successful image, and I will want to put a gallery of images on the blog, I will do it within this series.
This particular gallery will link my photography with what Tomasz does, and how different our visions and techniques are. My subject is same as his- the bouquet of three different color roses. While he chose controlled background, flash and 30 mm lens, I decided on sunlight falling through the window (no reflector or diffuser) and Lensbaby (which is 50 mm), some with macro filters and some without it. On a side note, I love the fact that D300 allows to use lenses like Lensbaby, and just punch in the aperture I use, and enjoy the automatic exposure indicator.
I also used spray bottle, as Tomasz did,to improve interest in the images . Check the images for yourself here.

I am finally catching up with all my photo projects. I am very happy to find time to work on my small portfolio of photos I took last week in a park. I put it in a gallery, and I am thinking of printing a small book out of it as well. What is special about this project for me, is that it is one subject, photographed in one day in one location, using same lens. I had Sigma 30 mm f/1.4 lens, set up to… you got it, f/1.4.
It is quite interesting, how many photographers prefer wide-open to stepped down. And that hardly anybody likes anything about f/16. Which I am sure does not translate on many real-life situations- I can imagine that both shooting landscape and/people requires stepping down once in a while, at least?