It's Not Always About Location

"Springing of the Year" 

Magnolia

Royal Botanical Gardens, Arboretum, 2012

I'll never stop photographing the area around my home. Yes, partially because I don't have the type of coin right now to go to more exotic locations. And partially because I'm still technically a stay at home mom. But also because no matter how many times I think I've exhausted a local park, or city block for interesting or beautiful photo ops, I always find treasure after treasure on every return trip to a local location. Today's image was taken at a local garden/trail 20 minutes from my home, one I explore on a regular basis. This magnificent tree was only spotted on my 100th visit, or so it felt!

It's daunting to be a part of the photographic community. The web is flooded with images from Patagonia to Iceland. Exotic scenery. Sights you can't ever hope to see when you step out your front door, for most of us anyway. Well who's to say that the fine folks in Iceland ever get to see the scenes or subjects you're about to post! Perhaps you're exotic to them?

Keep photographing. Don't let the globe trotters get you down. You see things around you that no one else can. And you probably know those locales like the back of your hand, a huge advantage to be honest, with constant access to it. Those other countries and communities will be even more fun, and easier to photograph when you DO get there one day.

What's your favorite local scene to photograph? Would love to hear about it, and why it fascinates you! If you send me your favorite photo of it, I'll include it on the blog with your comments.
Thanks for the ramble gang! Have a good one!

Sometimes... ~ Telephoto Tuesday

"Sunset Grass"

Sometimes I like to head out with the family. We hit the trails, or explore a new park. Sometimes it's not my intention to pull out the Nikon at all.

But it's there just in case. Because sometimes something just delights you.

Sometimes the light dances through the marsh grass. Or sometimes it weaves it's way through the trees differently.

Sometimes there's no sunshine to be seen when you start. And sometimes it makes a surprise appearance. I always have my camera. For the "sometimes".

I talk a lot about being learning to be more intentional about what I photograph... but sometimes it's just nice to relax the "roving eye" we photographers never seem to turn off, and just take a photo for the sake of fun. For the sake of easy. For the sake of being care free even when you look through the lens. Sometimes we have to balance out striving for genius with striving for refueling our simple creativity.

Sometimes it means your photograph looks like the one above. And makes you happy. Or content. Or energized.

Sometimes all of the above.

Thanks for the ramble today gang! Have a good one!

Find A Quiet Spot ~ Telephoto Tuesdays

"The Sprites of Spring"

Too many grey days in a row always sends me scrambling for my gear. No more sitting in front of the computer screen at that point, or tidying my work space yet again. On the dull winter days I have to get out. One of my favorite places to haunt on just such an occasion is our very own

Royal Botanical Gardens.

It's quiet, it's bright, and it's beautiful. I instantly relax. I don't even pull out the Nikon right away. There are comfy benches along each pathway through the greenhouses that invite you to stay a while and let all the greens and colors and textures reveal themselves in their own time. My eye begins to notice tiny buds opening, tiny fruit ripening on gnarly branches, and these tiny tiny iris type flowers poking up out of the colorful mulch in the photograph for today. I can find spring here. It's refreshing. And I can photograph it and carry it home with me.

It's lovely. I leave feeling rejuvenated.

I can't stress enough how important it is to find a quiet spot, or a beautiful spot, (a goodly distance from your work place) and let it feed your creativity every once in a while. No deadlines, no emails, no pressures. For twenty minutes, for an hour, for a weekend. It builds YOU back up and gets you to a place where you can go back to all the other things with a better attitude and with purpose. Even just writing about it here makes me feel better!

So, find such a spot this week if you can. And take some time to breathe. Or to be inspired. I know you want to.

Thanks for the ramble gang. If you're ever in Ontario, please make time to visit the RBG too. No matter what time of the year!

You and What Army?

"The View From Here"

I've been thinking lately about influences. And more specifically, who photographers, or artists, or anyone following a calling, surround themselves with. Who has your back? Who can you learn from? Who reminds you that there's more? Who reminds you to risk it? And who reminds you to use your head? That's like... an army of peers if you think about it. And all very valuable to you as you develop in your craft.

Here are the type of friends, peers, and mentors I have decided are invaluable to me as I decide where to take my photography next. My hope is that you have found these people to add to your posse too. And if not, what are you waiting for? Here's the list, in no particular order;

The Critical Eye: not every one's favorite type of influence depending on your own personality but suck it up anyways, cause they are the person who sees past your obvious talents and asks you if you're still growing, and if you're pushing yourself enough. They're the ones who will tell you honestly that an idea will bomb, that a photograph isn't working for you, or that your attitude needs to change. Sometimes thought of as more blunt than anything, these people truly have your best interests at heart. In a word, they're your champions. They're seeing the big picture and want you to truly succeed, not just live in the little victories of today. They are the ones that become your mentors. I have several in my life, and you know who you are... *wink, wink*

The Beacon: these are the peers that are the shining examples of where you want to be one day, and how to get there. And no, they don't have to be doing the same type of photography as you, or even be apart of the same vocation as you, but they are without a doubt some one you look up to. And here's the key... these are the same people who are so jazzed about the creative journey, that they love to share it. They'll share the process, the mistakes, the approaches that always work, and the new discoveries they make in their field. They're totally approachable, and are not above taking the "eager to learn" under their wing. I'm supremely grateful for the beacons in my life while I figure out this whole photog gig.

The Cheerleader: these friends are instant encouragement. When you're having the worst day ever, when you've failed to complete a new project, when you're struggling with a new concept, these people seem to know when and how to build you back up. They remind you that it's a long journey, that not everything you accomplish will be easy, and that you have to keep working because they believe in you that much. They're the ones that will surprise you with coffee (or hot chocolate in my case) when you're sounding overwhelmed, or will be that ear you can vent to at the drop of a hat. And they don't just appreciate your skills, they totally appreciate you as a person. Hearing from them always jump-starts my day big time.

The Partner In Crime: this person is the one person who feeds your appetite for your hobby or craft like no one else. They hop in the car with you on photo adventures without a second thought for hours on end, regardless of the weather. They will eagerly discuss the hidden gem of a photo op they stumbled upon one day while out running errands. They constantly send you links to new things to photograph, seminars to check out, or blogs to start following. They'll go with you to art shows, they'll join online communities with you. And they'll always drool over new gear the same way you do. I can think of one such person in particular right now. If you have more than one of these, all the better. But that's rare. These are the people that know how you think, and how you operate. They aren't in competition with you, and they are totally comfortable in their own skills. They know when nothing needs to be said, and they know that their opinions are more than welcome. I can't stress enough how valuable this type of relationship is!

That's just four types of people you need in your life as a photographer, or creative, or entrepreneur. There's many more, but these are the ones that ultimately stand out in my mind. I couldn't do what I do without any of them! Who do you have in your corner? Take this week to think about it, and to find some way to thank them.

Thanks for the ramble. Have a groovy day gang!

Fish vs Flowers: A Total Surprise

"Water Nymph"

Today's image was a complete surprise. It all started with a trip to the Royal Botanical Gardens located here on Ontario. They had two different features within the main greenhouses. Glass Under Glass and Chocolate: The Exhibition. Both a wonderful way to spend a winter morning to be sure. It's a delightful place anytime of the year! But out of everything I photographed, it was the fish in the Mediterranean Greenhouse that held a challenge and got my creativity going.

I was totally not expecting that. I was there to photograph flowers.

I had to work around extreme reflections, low light, darting fish, and moving water. I kept my camera on continuous shutter mode and just kept taking photos whenever there was a slight possibility the fish would approach me. It wasn't until an employee arrived with fish food that they really began to take notice. The conditions meant I needed my fastest glass, the 50mm prime, the ISO up to 400 to allow the speed I needed at 1/500 of a sec, and in order to keep the noise at a minimum and get the exposure I wanted I also bumped my exposure compensation up another +2.7. The aperture was F/3.2. Any smaller and the shutter speed was an issue, and any bigger and I wasn't sure just how much would be in focus.

This was one of the surprising results. And I love it for the watery patterns and motion it contains. It seems a little fantastical to me, like if you were to look away and then look back, the elegant golden sprite might vanish altogether.

I went for tropical flowers. I wound up with fish.

Who knew so much fun was waiting!

I can't say it enough. Be prepared for the unexpected when you decide to photograph your city and surrounding areas. Surprises are always waiting.

Tulips to the Power of 10 ~ Floral Friday!

"Tulip Celebration"

(1/30 sec.@ F/11, 200mm fl, ISO 200, tripod, shade, 55-200mm tele zoom)

Tulips. Today's image is from my visit to the Royal Botanical Gardens for the annual Tulip Festival. And boy, the colors are fantastic. This week coming will be the week to visit, as they're just starting to open now. In fact, this past week, many of the shade varieties weren't even ready to pop. So this next week will be ideal.

The colors. Ever just take a photo because the scene seems to drip with color, and therefore almost becomes it's own subject. I spotted these variegated tulips across a small pond under the shade of a large pine tree. The bright sun was making it difficult to get many of the patches of flowers that weren't tucked away in some shade, so when I spotted these I pounced. And their sunny color really is the subject of this shot, along with the repetitive shapes, and contrasting reds and greens throughout.

Kept my telephoto on so as to get in tight and eliminate the surrounding trees on either side, and to compress the distance giving the effect of a sea of tulips. Filled the frame almost completely for impact. In fact the first few shots I took of these were taken vertically... then I realized they also worked on a horizontal crop. It has less space, filling more of the image. I could have cropped or composed so that I excluded the entire top of green in the background... but I liked how it echoes the greens in the immediate foreground so I left it.

With tulips, color is key. Hope you're out there injecting some bold color into your images once in a while. Something that makes you say "wow!"

In the meantime, thanks for the ramble, and for waiting for Blogger to come back online. Have a great weekend folks! Cheers!

Seas of Tulips! ~ Telephoto Tuesday!

"Kissed By the Sun"

It's that time of year! That time of year when I pack my kit bag and spend an entire day photographing tulips! Ah. Just thinking about it makes me so happy I could do back flips. But I won't, I'll save us all the embarrassment and the ride in the special truck with big flashing lights on it. Ahem.

That's right, it's time for the Royal Botanical Garden's Tulip Festival! Within the next two weeks, the rock gardens at the RBG will be filled with an amazing display of color and exotic species of tulip from around the world. And about the same time, give or take a week, the flowering trees will put on an equally brilliant display from the gardens to the magical arboretum. And then it's full tilt from there, I'll return to the RBG with my camera for the entire rest of the year, for the peonies, the iris festival, the roses, and the fall color. But the Tulip Celebration starts it all off. I really will be in my glory. I step into that glorious garden of color and announce "The Nikonator returns!"

Rain or shine I go... in the rain you get your shallowest lenses out and photograph those classic rain drop shots, and the colors are saturated nicely. Sunshine is fine too, the rock gardens have wandering paths totally shaded over and hidden from the harsh light... if you have never been, and you live in Ontario, you really need to visit the RBG, you'll be hooked.

Check out the link, they even have a special Mother's Day event in the

Rock Gardens!

Thanks for the community billboard type ramble today folks, and have a good one! Let's get out there and greet Spring!

Passion Flower ~ Floral Friday

"Lavender Passion Flower"

(1/30 sec.@ F/7.1, ISO 100, 10mm fl, diffused natural light, tripod)

Call me a traditional girl, but I thought I'd post a floral photo today that represents the fact that today is an important day for believers like myself around the world. In fact there are thousands and thousands of believers in other countries this very minute that are risking their very lives to observe the great act of the Cross on this Good Friday of the Easter weekend. Thought I'd post this beautiful flower that has great symbolism attached to it on this sacred day.

The Passion Flower, representing the great passion Christ showed on the cross has different meanings to it's different parts. Just a little botanical history for you all today;

~The pointed tips of the leaves were taken to represent the Holy Lance.

~The tendrils represent the whips used in the flagellation of Christ.

~The ten petals and sepals represent the ten faithful apostles (excluding St. Peter the denier and Judas Iscariot the betrayer).

~The flower's radial filaments, which can number more than a hundred and vary from flower to flower, represent the crown of thorns.

~The chalice-shaped ovary with its receptacle represents a hammer or the Holy Grail.

~The 3 stigmas represent the 3 nails and the 5 anthers below them the 5 wounds (four by the nails and one by the lance).

~The blue and white colors of many species' flowers represent

Heaven and Purity.

 

My hope is you all have a wonderful weekend, whether you celebrate this special holiday or not. Find something beautiful and touching to photograph over the next three days perhaps. And thanks for the ramble folks.

Sunshine ~ Floral Fridays!

" Sunny Bougainvillea"

(1/30 sec @ F/7.1, ISO 100, 100mm fl, 55-200mm Nikkor Telezoom, tripod, diffused afternoon light)

Happy Floral Friday one and all! This will be a quick post for me today, the sun is out and the temp has risen above 0 degrees here in Ontario. Naturally, this means I'm heading out with the Nikon!

Today's image was taken at the Tropical Greenhouse at the Royal Botanical Gardens. The ceiling and displays have these trailing bits of sunshine climbing everywhere inside. Like the greenhouse was sun kissed everywhere you look. Bathed in light. Ahhhh. It lifts the spirits and assures that spring is wanting to arrive soon! Just the color yellow will do that, no matter where it is. It energizes and inspires.

A quick tip. Be careful when photographing at the local greenhouse. If the sun is out, all that glass will make it difficult at time to get killer shots. Everything starts to get washed out, and metering for a more even exposure can drive you mad, highlights either go off the grid, of the shadows from underexposing swallow up select areas. I know for this image, even though it was overcast, all the light coming into the greenhouse was messing with an overall metering of the composition I had decided on. So I made the decision to use a more selective type of metering in my dial/menu options, so that my meter actually metered more from my subject which was essential for the shot than the rest of the area in the frame. When I checked my histogram (the graph feature on your camera for where your lights and darks are balanced in the exposure) I realized the overexposed highlights were allowable this time since they were essentially the backdrop, and not the flowers themselves. Instead of this looking like a poorly made decision, it now looked high key and so I kept the reading and made the shot.

Also, this meant I had to take into consideration the lens I was using. It was my telephoto, which compresses the shot from foreground to background, so even at F/7.1 it had a considerably shallow depth of field where the light and plants in the background blurred out nicely. If I had stopped down to much more narrow aperture of F/11, and adjusted my shutter speed, the blown highlights would have then been a problem again since you'd be seeing a very definitive overexposure problem.

All this was of course shot manually. Auto modes can be handy for shooting quickly in certain situations, but in a semi-auto mode the camera would have tried to correct everything, giving me a very mundane, dull image. In manual mode, I chose every setting myself, and could manipulate which things were more important for me, and get creative with the rest. This is key. Take the plunge all you DSLR owners with your settings on auto. Start learning how to expose. It opens the floodgates of creativity... and allows the sun to shine in.

Have a fab Friday all, and thanks for letting me ramble on! See you all Monday!

Red Red Rose ~ Floral Friday

"Red Red Rose" Royal Botanical Gardens

It's Friday! Floral is our theme again, and today I've posted one of my absolute favorite images from the past summer. Maybe because Valentine's Day is a week away (guys...tryin' to help you out here) and more likely because here in Hammertown we're still swamped with snow, but the deep dramatic color and velvet shape of the petals just seemed to be my next logical image choice for you all to enjoy.

Not entirely sure where my exposure data went to on this file but I had to dig way back into original RAW files before I could see how I shot this one. For all you photogers out there that crave info here we go: 1/200sec @ F/5, ISO 125, 50mm fl, 50mm Nikkor Prime lens, overcast morning light, tripod, remote shutter release, reflector, pattern metering. I find red a difficult flower color to capture sometimes, it's extremely saturated on it's own. Detail in the petals can disappear if you're not careful with deep reds, but on overcast days I can underexpose slightly to get an accurate color, then change the levels slightly in Corel later to ensure the image isn't actually too dark overall.

One of the best places to practice photographing deep or bold color in flower beds is over at the Royal Botanical Gardens. Indoors or out, it's a nature photographer's paradise. It's the largest garden of it's kind in all of Canada, situated between Hamilton and Burlington, Ontario. And the most eclectic of it's kind, from the world's largest natural lilac dell, or tens of thousands of tulips in the rock gardens, to it's wide naturalized areas with marshland and wildlife, not to mention the trails you can walk. And the greenhouses are always displaying the unusual. It's also a National Historic Site. What's not to love? And it's full of intense color. I've spent many a day wandering the grounds in all seasons.

In particular, this image was taken out in the Hendrie Park gardens, where they have thousands of roses through the summer months along with live jazz music and various events. So.... how many months till the warm weather returns? Think I'll go over to the flower shop at the top of the street and get a handful of roses for my studio/dining room and immerse myself in a bit of summer in February. With the camera. Of course.

Thanks for letting me ramble on a Friday! As always take a moment to leave me a comment here or on my Facebook Page, and have a fabulous weekend. (oh, and "go Green Bay!")