Getting Inspiration!

"When I Think of You..."

I needed to start my week inspired. It's as simple as that. Where do you find your inspiration or motivation to jump into that vocation you love, no holds barred as they say? Books? Galleries? Your neighborhood?

I gain inspiration all those places too of course. But when I need an instant boost to the creative juices, I turn to some of my favorite bloggers and photographers. And I thought, why not share them with you! These go beyond just photography for photography's sake. These never cease to make me sit up and say to myself, "Self... when was the last time YOU shot with that kind of obvious passion?"

So here are the go-to sites I choose specifically when I need to be inspired:

* Dream Tomorrow, Live Today, Cherish Yesterday

* Cranial Aperture

* Naturally Beautiful Photography

* Confessions of a Pioneer Woman

* PixelatedImage

* Dan Jurak's Alberta Landscape Photo Blog

* Daniel Casares Roman (Color Humano)

I poked through all of them today, and what do you know? I feel fired up and ready to photograph and explore in a way only I know how! That's how inspiration works. Find the one thing that will get you excited about your tasks today, and let's all get crackin'....

Happy Monday gang!

B&W Beauty ~ Floral Friday!

"Simple Grace"

Well, I did promise Floral Friday here at the blog and deviated from the Doors Open theme. But thought I'd stay with my theme of B&W that I kept with also through the week. I'll be curious to see what your thoughts on this are. When I thought about the perfect flower to convert into mono tones, orchids came to mind... unique shapes, great veins of texture, and a bit of a compositional challenge when you lack a macro lens to fill the frame with.

The Platinum fx filter in Corel is lovely to work with, or at least, it's become one of my personal faves. When you take it into the curves function in PSPx3, you can fine tune every tone, every shadow, every highlight with a nice depth that is a little less stark than a classic B&W option. Perfect for floral shots. But that's just me. Every artist has their own approach. In a separate layer I added a bit of subtle texture, and with an eraser tool erased most of the clean background revealing the canvas effect underneath, leaving the flowers for sharpness. I merged the layers when I decided I had achieved the right opacity. Otherwise, the background was too bright for the image.

I shot this in my kitchen actually. I was playing with window light, a cheap white sheet stretched across the window acting as a diffuser, and my telephoto to get in close to the orchid in the foreground, blowing out the backdrop slightly and using a larger aperture so that I could get a much shallower depth of field artistically.

Enjoy today's image folks, and thanks for the ramble! Have a fabulous weekend and please remember to click on the Circle of Moms badge on the right hand side of my blog page if you've been enjoying my photographs! Thanks everyone who has already voted!