New Pictures

I've been taking a lot of pictures lately, taking advantage of the recent spate of overcast, rainy days. An overcast day is excellent picture-taking weather if you're doing close-ups of, say, flowers, or portraits of people. Bright sun casts harsh shadows on faces and objects, so whenever it gets overcast, I head outdoors with my camera. I took the picture on the left, looking up through one of the Alder trees in the pasture.

This is a close-up of leaves in the apple tree. I love the veins that are so prominent in apple leaves.

I guess this is going to be a "green" post, since apparently all my recent pictures are of green things. The below picture is a close-up of bracken ferns. I'll be back in a few days with more pictures.

Leaves as Art

Yesterday at the monthly meeting of the South Sound Adobe Users Group I demonstrated how to make a light box, and then we raffled off three light boxes I'd made as give-aways. We had lots of fun, and several members had brought items to place inside the light boxes to practice photographing.

One of them, Larry Weakly, brought a most unique item: a skeletonized holly leaf that was utterly gorgeous. Being able to photograph it in a light box allowed for a nonintrusive background which highlighted the beauty of the leaf. In fact, I'm going to tromp down to the pasture later today to see if I can find any alder leaves that have been skeletonized over the past winter.










For those of you who aren't into photography, a light box is simply a box that has had the sides and top cut out, then covered with white, translucent fabric or paper (so as to allow light through). The inside is lined with white paper. Objects placed inside the box can be photographed without shadows and have a seamless background. Commercial photographers use this method to photograph jewelry, toys, etc., for advertisements.

I may be weird, but I think the skeletonized holly leaf is beautiful.