Raining

Today has been a rainy day which lead me to shoot photos from inside the house and as the sky was dark and overcast, the photos looked best in B&W:

It was a fruitful morning!

Orchids

Finally, it appears that i have connected with my current blog while in my photo machine; hence, i should be able to post photos much easier as i won't have to use Drop Box or something that makes it a two-step process.

Yesterday, we went to the NC Arboretum which was opening their annual orchid show and we attended a day early on members only day - which was good as it was quite crowded then and i'm guessing it'll be very crowded today and tomorrow when it is open to the public.

The amount of orchids was amazing and i wasn't able to take it all in and became jaded or overwhelmed rather quickly. The photo taking was interesting as there were so many people there and on most orchids were spot-lights. I had brought a flash defuser with me (Graslong Spark) so i could use flash but not have it too harsh.

Here are some of those efforts —

Three different orchids

I don't know anything about orchids other then liking what i see. They don't seem to have a strong aroma but the colors and designs are amazing. We went into the room where they were selling the plants but the ones we liked were in the seventy dollar range and we let them stay there.

Honey drops

Am a bit obsessed with photographing the honey drops. The top photo didn't convert (to jpeg) very well and i don't know how to fix that. 

Three images, but the color seems really off

The image below was shot using the sun as a light source: 10 sec @ f16, single image

And the set-up i'm using looks like this:

The honey drops are on that place setting and slowly losing their round shapes as they sink or are absorbed into the material.

I am learning that it'd be best if i make a schematic of the connections and how they work. Each time i set this up, it is a bit of a task getting it all synced and working. So far, i've been able to always figure it out but its never easy nor straight forward. Still, it is an exceptionally good macro set-up and i'm very fortunate to have it.

I have a couple of insects i want to photograph but the spider is so yucky, i'm not sure i want such a close shot of her. It is a dead Black Widow that was accidentally killed some weeks ago and i have kept her as i wanted to do some close-up work but now i wonder.

And this man, David,  writes this wonderful photographic blog: https://shoottokyo.com which i highly recommend if you like reading what professional photographers spend their time doing.

Ahh, its Spring, its Spring ...

This morning, by a fortuitous accident, i dropped a string of honey across the place mat i was sitting at for breakfast. Upon closer inspection i found them to be small balls of honey strung across the mat and, of course, i thought of making photographs of these tiny gold ball. And i did:

Somewhere here -in my photographs' HD- i have a longer view of these golden balls - they are really small.

Letsee . . . 

Well, turns out i haven't rendered them into jpegs ... when this site will handle tiffs just not as large as the ones i've created.

For those techie photographers reading this ... this is stacked focus and both of the images are from an 80 image stack. The top one is full frame and the bottom is a cropped of the middle two drops.

Using a combination of CanRanger, iPad, 100mm macro with 52mm of extension tubes and Canon's twin flash for macro work ... it came out fairly well.

Also: Happy First Day of Spring —

Enjoy your day!

Snow, 2018

After waking and reading for a bit in bed this morning i got up and opened the curtains and behold:

I have not lived where it snowed since i lived at Tassajara in the '80s - i love snow and was delighted to see the white world laid out before me.

I made hot chocolate and stood at the open door enjoying the warmth of the sweet drink and the brisk cold of the morning - ahh paradise!

Bee

Love taking photos of bees - they never seem to mind and are so beautiful ... this one has 'nectar bags' (my words, don't know what they are called) on its legs which are not so clear but that is the gold look 'tween its hind and middle legs.

Wolf's teachings and Biltmore Estate

I spent about six hours with Art Wolf, http://artwolfe.com/blog/, on Creative Live website yesterday. If you are not familiar with Creative Live, it is an amazing teaching site and i highly recommend it. I just clicked on the site, https://www.creativelive.com/courses/photography-as-art-art-wolfe?autoplay=true&via=student-snapshot_2 and discovered that they are playing Art's class today - so if you are interested in learning about his photography and learn something of his skills, go over there now.

So, spending a day with Art, his works and teachings is amazing and i'm hoping to apply what i learned to more of my images.

And, the day before that we visited Biltmore Estates to which some friends had given us tickets. Visiting there is expensive and i'm thankful for our friends generosity as i doubt we'd pay so much to visit. The grounds, gardens, lakes, etc., all of which have walking/biking paths, are beautiful and we very much enjoyed walking among the trees and lakes.

In a lot of rooms they had costumes set-up from a film and the film's identity on a large board as you see above. After seeing half a dozen of these set ups and not understanding what they had to do with the Biltmore House, i finally asked a guide what was the connection. And she said something like this:

"All these costumes are from movies and those movies came from books. Those books are in the library here in the house. That is the connection"

While i found that a most strange reason to create scenes of clothing from films, clearly most of the views were enjoying the clothes. 

It was a most interesting afternoon - glad i went and doubt i'll ever go again. This is the off-season for tourist and still there were hundreds of people there ... must be a bit overwhelming during the summer.

Beginning Anew

I see that i began this particular blog upon returning from Asheville in June of last year, 2016. I'm glad to learn that it was started with the possibility of moving in mind and then that happened: we moved. There was a visit in Oct-Nov of last year to be sure we really wanted to live here and then we learned that the house next to our friends, who have been waving us on in this direction, became available for rent and so we are here.

I have this idea, sorta a project, that i can work on scanning into digital format many of the negatives i have from the shooting i was doing before digital came along. I have a decade old but good scanner that i'll give a try and see what comes up and how much work they will take to get into a usable state. This is sorta exciting as i had a lot of photos from that era that i liked but haven't really had access to - we shall see.

Moved

I have recently moved from the west coast -the SF bay area- to the east coast, the Appalachian mountain area, Asheville, NC to be more accurate. As of this writing i have been here for a bit over 7 weeks and haven't really been doing much photography. This house, the first time i (actually we as it is my wife and i who moved and are living here) i've lived in a house not an apartment in decades. The consequence of which is that there is space for a total photographic set-up: shooting, process via a computer and matting and framing. The whole nine yards. Now there is no excuse for not doing whatever photographic work i want.

Still, i've not settled in and am usually feeling a bit lost although i understand that will change as i get to know the surrounding area better and learn where is available.

This area, our back porch faces east and the rising sun creates amazing and beautiful sun rises almost daily. Even when it is overcast and it often is as this is the winter season, the sun beams flit thru the space tween the horizon far out east and the local cloud coverage long enough to create some breath taking mornings.

Such as:

Early morning sun

I want to use this new time, new place to work on a different kind of photographic presentations ... more abstract, more questioning: is this really a photograph?

As these are photographs in process i wonder about not showing them until they are finished but my current thinking is that maybe seeing the 'in-process' work will offer a larger range of possibilities as i see pieces of the work.