While I am busy with lots of other things – sewing, painting, learning 3-deck Canasta – I am also trying to move back into photography and just getting out. As well, editing photos I have taken, and adding mood to them which matches my mood but perhaps not what the original photo looked like! I guess that is cheating per some, but for me it is artistic license.
Before the day begins and I have read my snippets of depressing news, coffee in hand, I am reviewing past photos and editing them. This photo is one I took while at the Settling Ponds earlier this month.
With the weather shifting from awful to delightful, and wanting to get oot and aboot, photography is always the excuse. As well, I have not been doing much in that arena. When I saw the Lens Artists Challenge #381- minimalist, black and white, I figured one way to get me moving was to edit some of the photos I took when a friend and I went to the settling ponds at a local water treatment plant. It is a dog-free bird sanctuary, and we saw egrets, herons, grebes, and a lot of others. It’s not a well-known place and the only person we saw was a man leaving with a spotting scope. My kind of place.
Now, whether or not these can be considered “minimalist” is up to you, but converted them to black and white, cropped them, sometimes severely to get a closer look, and how they hold up may be a bit dicey. Additionally, I pushed contrast, black and white, as well as dropping some of the highlights for a bit more detail.
Sometimes I get obsessed with certain things I want to paint. Palm trees always fascinate me. I wonder why they evolved in the first place. To a midwest gal, palm trees are always going to be strange and mysterious and weird even though they have been part of my daily life since I was in my early teens. I expect anyone raised in a desert without any hardwood trees probably feels the same about oak trees.
The wind is whipping through Ventura and Los Angeles counties. Fear of fire is there. Today I have to drive about 30 miles into the east winds.
This morning I went out to check on my patio to see what has blown over, as well as to see the sunrise as there are clouds scudding along the windy river.
And then back indoors – the wind is a bit chilly at 6:30 a.m. But, since I had my camera in hand, I decided to look around and take some snaps of my basil and the little squash I grew this summer.
Kitchen herbs are always welcome! When I come back from my jaunt into the wind, I vowed to water the ones still outdoors – these winds dry everything up and I have lost more than one plant to my laziness and dislike of 40 mph winds .
In a rather E. Weston style, my little squash. I have eaten the others and have decided to see how well it will age. By this I mean I read how people would store pumpkins and squash through the winter months, so this is my experiment to see what it is like – will it be dry and tasteless, dry and tasty, or what? Hard squash is one of my favorite things to eat, but before eating my prey I plan to photograph it some more.
And now, on to breakfast and more coffee. I decided to get this up and out before the electric company shuts off the power in the hopes of preventing fires. These winds whip them up once started, and I sure hope we don’t get any. No rain for months makes us the perfect tinder box.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 