I learned that blackberries are pretty hard to take good photos of…so most of them were bad. However, I did get this one really awesome photo, so I thought I would post it.

This photo has not been adjusted, edited, photoshopped or tinkered with at all. It is straight from the camera.

I love macro photography.

This is the first painting I’ve done in 2010 that is larger than 5×7.  This one is 12×16 oil on canvas. I am mostly done, but I do have one more session planned for the kind of tweaking that can’t be achieved wet on wet.

I am happy to be getting faster these days. I used to spend a lot longer working out details. Partly I think the figure drawing class I took helped, and partly just experience.

The inspiration flower came from my back yard. Not sure what it is so if you recognize it let me know. I enjoy over saturating and adjusting colors in my paintings as you can see. It’s fun.

I feel kind of cliche painting so many flowers…but they are fun and more importantly they are easy models to find, especially this time of year. Plus, flowers are pretty.

I actually had a lot of trouble that evening because I initially picked a difficult angle, and then I moved probably 15mns in and had to move a lot of the lines…so it really cut down my time. You can tell that my focus area was on the legs, and in particular the lower bent leg. The upper body looks strange because I didn’t place the fabric she was laying on which covered some of her skin. Without seeing what is covering some of the skin, the shape looks kind of odd and too narrow. Anyway…some days things click, and some days they don’t.

Week seven I was mainly experimenting with different kinds of lines. I don’t think either experiments were particularly successful, but they were interesting all the same.

I am in the middle of a painting I will try to finish and post in the not too distant future. It’s of some more pink blossoms and a glass. These days, all I am interested in painting is flowers and glass. But I think it’s just that time of year.

There are some really great buds on a bush at the back of my house right now. I am trying to decide which one of these I will paint. I’m leaning towards the second one. I really love the drama of the lighting…not that I couldn’t add some to the first…we’ll see.

Before I move on to the sketches, here are some daffodils from my back yard the other day. They seem to come up around my birthday every year, which is a nice treat. However they always seem to get a cold shock and  whither quickly. I like the focus in this photo on just one flower thanks to my amazing 50mm prime lens I got for xmas.

Now on to the figure drawing sketches. Sorry about the really heavy shadows. That’s what you get for taking photos in the evening while standing on a chair. I couldn’t be bothered to re-do them though.

Session three

15mn with a focus on the knee

30mn with a focus on the midsection

Session four

15mn cropped to focus

30mn focus on shadows

It was fun all the same and I got a few other neat photos.

In case you are wondering, the answer is yes, the saturation and color has been boosted on this lot. It added some neat blues to the tree bark among other things : )

My only regret on this trip is that I noticed that there was an “endangered amphibians” exhibit at the zoo right before it closed which I wish I had seen. I love painting frogs. Ah well…there is plenty of other great reference photos for painting from this trip…including a couple neat frogs who lived in the reptile exhibit.

In the Quarter

Street Musicians

Interesting Looking Pigeon

Buggy Tour

Street Sign

Street People Dancing to "Thriller"

Evening

Interesting Colors

Audubon Park

Duck

Another Duck, Preening

Pokey Birds (Don't know what they are.)

Squirrel on Trash Can

Audubon Zoo

Flamingos

Straw-Necked Ibis

Radjah Shelduck

Masked Lapwing

Nicobar Pigeon

Don't know this one's name.

Not sure what this one is called.

Bengal Tiger

Cleaning...

Pacing...

Elephant

Flowers

Cormorants

More Cormorants

Pelican

Requisite Aligator

Black Bear

Rhino

Giant Leaf Frog

Panamian Golden Frog

This one is extinct in the wild. : . (

Kori Bustard

Indian Roller

The reason I like this photo so much is because of the colors and the sunset. It doesn’t have quite as spectacular of a landscape as many I saw, but I was just excited about this one because I had been reading about long exposures on my trip, and I managed to use that new knowledge to catch a pretty neat photo! Aperature 3.8 200iso and a shutter speed of over 1 second.

Without leaving the shutter open for a looong time, the photo would look like the next photo. This wasn’t even a fast shutter, for the dark photo, it was 1/25 second with my max aperture of 3.8 and 200iso.

Other cameras, that are not SLRs will brag about their iso speed, but boosting iso is not the most graceful way to catch a scene like this. I did take a test shot with an iso speed of 1600 and a shutter of 1/13 and when compared to my long exposure at 200 iso this is the difference in color and noise. (ie unwanted graininess)

Since it is labor day, I have been moderately unproductive, and so I have been messing around with this photo, and the result is kinda neat. Now I can’t remember exactly what I did, but I’ve been playing a lot with filters and a little bit with channels in photoshop. What I was able to come up with is a less noisy and more colorful background combined with a sharper and almost surreal looking textured frog. Click the photo to see a little more of the detail. It also really brings him forward in the photo. I titled it ribbit!, for fun and maybe a little bit for irony. Unfortunately, everything I did was at a pretty small size. So if I wanted to use it for anything else I would need to try and reproduce it. Ah well…it was fun. : )

Alaska can at times be a very rainy and foggy place. This made a lot of the days difficult to catch clear photos of the incredible mountains without a lot of noise. But I did my best.

I took a lot of the photos in both .jpg and raw format because I didn’t bring my computer and my dad’s laptop can’t open or preview raw photos, so I took the .jpgs just because I didn’t want to wait until I got home to see everything. I was reading the book: Digital Photography Masterclass on the plane over. It talked about how the camera is programmed to automatically sharpen all the images in order to please the most consumers. The evidence of that was strong in these pictures in comparing the raw and .jpgs side by side.

The two lenses I used while I was there were my new Tamron 70-300mm and my kit lens which is a Nikon 18-55mm. I am glad I got the Tamron before I went, the 100mm did make a difference in catching the animals at all…but more on that in a later post.

On to the photos…

Homer, Alaska

view from the lands end resort, homer ak

wide angle shot of the view from my balcony

the weather and colors can change fast in homer, ak

harbor on the homer spit

mini created-scape: dead crab, sea plant and tiny pine cone

mini created-scape, beach stones

drift wood that looks like a whale

Okay, so some of the homer pics aren’t strict landscapes. They are just neat and I feel like including them in this post because they probably won’t fall into the other Alaska photo posts I’m planning of: plants, animals and vacationy stuff (i.e. pics of me, food, etc).

Kachemak State Park

I didn’t get any worthy landscape photos on my kayak trip on the second day. But on the third day we did a hiking trip to Kachemak State Part. We hiked the Glacier Lake Trail. You will see shortly, Glacier Lake might be one of the most magical places on the planet. It is also the largest lake at the bottom of a glacier in the world. The trail was around 5 miles from what I heard. It was a great trip, the weather was perfect.

the drop off point to the glacier lake trail

terrain at the beginning of the trail

terrain getting closer to glacier lake

getting closer to glacier lake

glacier lake, one of the most serene places I've been

the only flower by glacier lake

wide angle of glacier lake

left glacier lake, on the way to the other side

going up the mountain, or giant hill, not sure which

coming down the other side, it's pretty steep

the view is great up here

the end of the trail

getting picked up by the water taxi

On the way to Seldovia

I tried to get bird photos in this weather on the way to Seldovia. They will be in a different post. They are not amazing. But still glad I have them.

boat ride on the way to Seldovia

neat rock formations

seldovia harbor, no car access to get here

In Seldovia

I didn’t get a ton of landscapes in Seldovia. A lot of them were on a wavy boat and the horizon lines were tough throughout the trip because of it. Here are some of them. I am actually saving my best landscape of the trip for another post because I learned something taking it.

These three photos were taking on a skiff ride…which from what I can observe is a really old falling apart boat. Our guide was named Kirby, and he brought his dog Murphy who got in the way a lot. : )

ravens who joined us for lunch

There were quite a few Ravens and Magpies in Seldovia. My dad and I had an ongoing argument because he thinks they’re crows…but they aren’t, they are Ravens.

Wildlife Center

On our last day we went for a hike at the wildlife center. Yes, pretty tame, I know. Most of the photos are of plants the guide was telling us about, and I got a few neat landscapes but they are very similar, so I am just going to post one.

I can’t remember the name of this one. But it is in Homer and overlooks the mountains from a distance.

beautiful views at the wildlife center

Coming Up

As I said in the beginning, I am planning three more posts, plus one post on my favorite landscape shot. So stay tuned.

And if you are thinking about visiting Alaska, I highly recommend it. It’s worth the zillion hours of travel to get there.