The Best of 2010: April

Gosh, I had TONS of project going on in April!  A lot of "self-improvement" work, which produced a lot of faves for the month....more than usual.  So, here we go:


My son started playing baseball again this month.  I shot this during his first practice of the season, when he beat the ball to 3rd base.

I tried carrying my camera with me for one whole day. Photographing anything interesting I saw along the way. These cows were laying in a field off the side of the road on my way to the grocery store. I had to pull over on our way home and get this.

This could be my favorite image of the month.  I love the look in his eyes.  The excitement as he watches that ball fly overhead.

You can walk along the shore.  You can beach comb.  You can jump in and out of the waves, and listen to them crash against the sand, but until you really stand and look, just watch them roll in one after the other, feel their power....that's when you really see the ocean.

My kids were a little nervous that the Easter Bunny wouldn't find them at the beach.  They didn't have anything to worry about....

Not the official 8-year portrait, but way coolio none-the less.  I have to say, he was slightly underwhelmed at this.  Didn't quite get it.  He actually thinks 'Top Gun' is about the planes.

I try to get up to the tulip festival in Skagit Valley every year...and usually not on a weekend.  This year was going to be tough, though, so I whined and pouted and threw guilt fits all around the house one Sunday morning, and they agreed to go with me.  We didn't make it to any of the major farms that I like to visit, but we did find this lovely little field on the side of the road.  I normally can't stand red flowers, but these just took my lens away.

These next two are from the same project.  I went on a field trip with my son's class to the zoo one day.  I was supposed to be photographing the kids in the class, but the animals were too cool to pass up....and P.S. ~ I was told by a very....ummm....devoted...woman on Flickr that this is not a monkey, as one of my tags had indicated.  It is a gorilla.  And please don't ever mix them up.....

I love this. The girls on my son's baseball team really almost outplay the boys.  They try so hard.  You can really see them listening and learning and trying to do better.  This particular girl is just teeny, but she really doesn't know it.  And when she struck out...well, it just sucked!  But, it also made me want to say, "There's no crying in baseball!"

These next few are from my major project this month.  In an effort to improve my eye, my selective focus, and my composition, I spent one whole week photographing the daily events of my life.  Not necessarily everything, but the major activities that made up my day.  It gave me a chance to do some stuff with my lens that I'd been wanting to try.  Get some shots that I've always wanted to, but never had the time or opportunity to....including these self-portraits.

I don't use my Lensbaby as often as I'd like to.  It takes a lot of time to set up the focus on it and get it just right.  I really only use it when I have the time...and Sunday morning was the perfect occasion.

From Day 5 of my week long series.  I shot this tulip walking home from school.  I thought the lines of color in the bloom were really interesting, so I tried playing them up with some selective focus and blurring.

I've often wanted to photograph these, but they always just looked like weeds, until I shifted my focus one afternoon and they became beautiful.

On the very last day of the month I attended my very first Clam Digging Festival.  We went out to the beach about an hour before low tide to dig for razor clams.  We didn't have much luck and decided to try going up the shore a bit.  Still not really anything.  Just as we were about to give up, my husband talked to some people who had obviously had A LOT of success.  He asked them where to go.  They directed us even farther up the beach to this spot where we struck the clam digger's equivalent of gold....we limited out in one hour.

A Week In The Life ~ In Review

I spent the last week photographing my life.  The details.  The experiences.  The people that make up my daily existence.  It was an interesting project, and, at times, I wasn't sure if it fell into that dreaded artisan category of "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should".  In fact, someone asked me why I was doing this?  Why was I putting this kind of personal information about myself out there for other people to see?  What's the point?  I guess I would say that it was an exercise in the craft more than anything.  The more pictures you take, the more you connect with your lens, the better you become at creating your image.  I was also interested to see if a group of pictures of regular old, everyday activities of middle class America could become a collection of artistic images?  Could it be done?  Did I have the skills to do it?  Would it make a difference to me?  I think it could be.  I think I do.  And it definitely did.....It surprised me, though, because I learned a lot more than photography along the way:



1.)  It took between 100 and 130 images each day to put a decent collection together
And photographing everything you do makes it take about 5 times as long.....




2.)  Self-Portraits Are Not About Looking Like A Supermodel:
Pictures of yourself are about capturing who you are and what you do, so that 50 years from now, when  we're gone, our children can look at these images and see the parents they remember loving when they were  little.  And they love you now, no matter how you look... (although slight airbrushing is allowed when necessary.)

3.) Beauty Is Everywhere
Keep your eyes and your mind open.  Sometimes the most incredible surprises are hiding in the most unexpected places.

4.)  Capture The Moment:
Don't be so concerned with composition and focus and camera settings that you forget why you're taking the picture in the first place.  Connect with what's in front of you.  When you pull these pictures out to remember the moments that made up your life, you won't care that it's slightly out of focus or that the light wasn't quite right.

And P.S.  Let the camera do the work for you.  Flip it to auto and go.  Save the fiddling around for when your subject isn't moving all over the place.

5.)  And yes, even the mundane can be artistic.
Opportunities to take great images are everywhere.  Look around you.  Just from where you stand there are 10 great pictures waiting to be captured.  You just have to do it.

Do it without being afraid that someone will tell you not to.

Do it without being afraid that you won't get it right.

Do it.  Trust me....it's a lot of fun.

Baseball Boy

Two years ago we signed our son up to play Little League Baseball.....and he HATED it!  Or maybe, I just hated watching him out there, bored out of his mind, picking flowers and rolling around on the the ground while he waited for some kind of action to find its way into his glove.  Seriously, it was painful to watch.  So, last year I asked him if he had any interest in playing again.  And it wasn't just a quick, "Hey, baseball this year?" kind of thing.  We had several conversations about it.  Do you want to?  Are you interested?  What do you think about it?  I would have happily signed him up (all the while secretly hoping that he would change his mind, or that maturity would take a firm grip on his little body and keep him in the game instead of in the dirt), but to my surprise, he said no.  No interest in playing ball....and like a fool, I believed him.  Three weeks later he was a sobbing, hysterical puddle on the floor, begging us to talk to the coach, any coach, and get him on a team.  "But, I love baseball!  It's my favorite sport!!!"  When sign-ups came around this year, I just wrote his name down, paid the money, upgraded the uniform, and started takin' pics....We {heart} baseball!

Rule #1

I read this article not long ago about taking your camera with you wherever you go.   The theory was that by constantly giving yourself the opportunity to photograph, the more practice you'll have with the actual exercise of photography.  It was the whole "Practice Makes Perfect" thing.  The guy called it Rule #1, and what he said made a lot of sense.  Stop reading about taking pictures, and actually start taking them.  I'm not really one of those photographers who carries their machine around with them everywhere, though.  I'm obsessed, but not necessarily that way.  I just see the world through that little imaginary view-finder.  I put an edge burn around everything I look at.  I can see the final image while I'm looking at it raw in front of me, and then I curse myself for never carrying my camera with me.  But, you know, I am far from fabulous, and a truly fabulous photographer once told me that the keys to great images are studying and experience (along with a multitude of top notch equipment......).  And since studying and experience are basically free, I thought I'd focus my energy on those.  So, I decided to implement this new "Take It With You" attitude into my schedule today.  It gave me a chance to get some images I'd been wanting to get, although my daughter was a little irritated that I kept pulling over and hopping out of the car.  But I wanted to give it a try, just to see what would happen.  Just to see what I could see.  Turns out.....it was quite a bit.