I expect next two or even three weeks will be quiet on blog. Good thing is at least I have time to photograph. I started to work on something which might turn out into my first really photo project. I set to photograph my mom’s flower garden. I really can devote time to that, and already spent three evenings with tripod there. Hopefully, I am not stepping on anything important, when I take out my macro and need to get close . First I thought, I have a week or two to work on it, so maybe I will devote one evening for zoom lens, one for Lensbaby and so on. But a browse through first day (3 keepers out of about 100 images) made me re-think the idea. Hard to believe, but I missed the focus even on calm evening and on tripod. So next day, I reshoot missed flowers from previous evening, only to find out that the situation in the garden already changed! The new blooms showed up, and some I wanted to photograph were already fading. I think I need to speed up .
I usually go out to photograph in the evening. There is less heat, and the sun is partially hidden behind houses and trees in the woods. I was setting up to photograph those flowers, when I noticed the sun is shinning through the branches and thought of doing sun flare type of effect. I set-up the tripod, and on my first try, I got this effect instead of what I was looking for. Well, I liked it, so I pinpointed the exposure right where the flower was well lit.

By the way, I am not 100% sure this is the right flower name- I spend already half a day browsing through website with garden flowers, and cannot find exact match. So if you know the name- leave a comment below!

May is here, and lilies-of-the valley are my favorite May flowers. In my parent’s summer house, in the woods, they usually are blooming relatively late, but in other parts of the country they are already in full swing. I took this close-up of a bouquet of lilies on the deck last weekend, under natural soft box of cloudy sky.

Last sunny weekend, we went off to hike in one of large city parks in Iowa City. This tree drew us for a closer inspections, as it had… pink and white flowers at the same time! First, we thought it had pink buds and white flowers,
but up close it was obvious that there are flowers of two different colors. How is it possible? We followed the flowers down to bottom of the tree , and saw that there are two different plants, growing together in perfect symbiosis.

I prepared the image for blog, and then had second thoughts. Last week, I was preparing this high contrast black and white image. Can the difference in colors be accentuated on this images the same way? I am still not sure, which one, color or B&W tells a better story of the tree.

When was the last time I shared a photo taken spontaneously with my iPhone? Must have been a while. I was just checking if there is something interesting hiding in Camera Roll, and indeed there was this image. I took it on a walk to creamery last week. With all free time I have now, I am discovering that you can actually ride a bike or walk around our middle-of-nowhere Iowa town, so I can observe the season’s changes. And my iPhone is always with me, to document all the buds, spring flowers and emerging green leaves.

The spring officially started already the previous week, and on weekend, we went to look for it. But this is Iowa. Prairie. Or forests with lakes. I have no idea, where to look for flowers even. And so far, only the backyard lawns started to get green. All the wild grass is still grayish brownish. The only spring colors we found were… the moss.

Apparently, I should be going through my archive more often than I do. I am finding all those nice images by accident. Like this time. I was looking for some interesting black and white photo to post over at Epic Edits blog, when I found this shot from New York trip more then a year ago. I was walking around Met, upstairs, looking at the entrance hall when I spotted this vase. The post-processing here was not aimed at selective color, I just was desperate to have the column white, which I am sure they were.

One thing I realized taking all those pictures with my iPhone for last several months is that it performs awfully in low light situations. I follow thebestcamera.com feed, and it doesn’t seem to be a deal breaker for all those pictures, but it bothers me nevertheless. Anyway, I decided to post something far less grainy this time, I took this picture one of freezing days this winter, freshly after snow fall. I have been trying to picture the newly arrived winter, an that detail shot did it for me.

I took this image in my parents house. My Mom has all those plants around the place, inside and on the stairs. The heather, collected probably around the yard (the house is in the woods), looked like a good photograph. I used Camera Kit app and red post-processing filter to make the colors pop. I have so many different app, but when I start working on an image, I tend to start from basic .
Anyway, I love the feeling of texture in the image, and the resulting colors, and I feel that that grain is something coming out of every iPhone photo, and it just looks good on some images.

It is time to change colors on blog a bit. End of last week was rather orange. I got myself talked into flying for lunch to small town of Pella, Iowa, and not during annual Tulip Time. But the place is still nice, with windmills, colorful houses, neat and… well, in middle of Iowa farmland, if you know what I mean. And with bright fall day, HDR was in order.

I took this Orton-effect style image several weeks ago in Reiman Gardens. It is in fact a combination of two images, one sharp and the other blurred by defocusing the image. The photos were combined in Photoshop to create that dreamy, moody effect.