Painting at Dancing Oaks

This past Wednesday, our plein air group headed to Dancing Oaks Nursery, out in the boonies north of town. It is one of my favorite places to visit, and is always a visual paradise! This was where my youngest daughter chose to have her high school senior photo shoot (can it really be 3 years ago?!). I painted a small 12x12 piece which I'm still working on and trying to decide if it is worth keeping at this point. While there I took numerous photos of other flowers for future painting references. These photos are straight out of the camera - no photoshop or iphoto enhancements. Here are some of my favorites. Be sure you scroll all the way to the bottom of this post - the last flower, the iris photo, made me gasp! Which photo is your favorite?






The cluster of flowers at the top of this foxglove look like little pouty, talking mouths...!









Love this one:

Real TTV photography

Well, it finally happened. I've gone from doing fake photoshopped layered TTV photos to the real thing. TTV photography is a technique where you use an old box style camera, and take photos though that camera with another camera - usually a digital SLR camera, but you could do this with a little point & shoot, or film camera too. The box cameras are those old Brownies & other brands that had a mirror system and you would look down from the top of the camera, held about waist high, to see what you'd like to photograph. Over Memorial Day weekend, a friend and I figured out how to slap together a contraption made up of cardboard, black paper, white tape (what was on hand) & a tripod, then spent a couple days experimenting with exposure, discovering everything was mirrored when viewed which made for a lot of awkward adjustments as we would swing right to compose our photo, discovering we'd loose our chosen image, since it was actually swinging left! Not a very fast photography method, but with patience, we managed to capture some fun photos! Some of these were enhanced to play up color, or remove & change color. All were cropped since the image is rather small initially. Some are straight out of the camera (aside from cropping). Here are some of my favorites from our first weekend playing, and then again, yesterday on another photo adventure.

Lesson in Patience

This past weekend we escaped to our friend's land on the east side of Mt. Hood. While sitting out on their deck I decided to try and capture some of the local wildlife - with my camera lens. Here are some of my favorite photos from that lesson in patience: