Inspired by Now

Published: Sat, Jun 01, 2019

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Categories: Blog, Burnside 35, Double Glass, Flower Photography, Lensbaby, Lensbaby Blog Circle, Photo Technique, Photography, Sol 45, Velvet 56

Welcome to my June 1 Lensbaby Blog Circle post! For this post I used the dried up roses my daughter gave me for Mother’s Day. My goal was to experiment with them and see what I could create. I set a few limitations for myself:

I would only use Lensbaby lenses (since I was shooting for this post)
I would only use natural light and some light modifiers – light reflectors, light softeners and flags (these add shadow)
I would take all the photos from a tripod

Here is my setup, showing my wonderful assistant, Destiny as well:

Published: Fri, May 24, 2019

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Categories: Blog, Landscape, Photography, USA

I had it in my calendar weeks ago: low-tide coinciding with sunrise on Tuesday, May 21. I picked a location and arrived to Shaw’s Cove just before 5:30am. I felt very lucky, because there were a few clouds in the sky, and the barely waning Moon was also setting. (I had chosen this location because of the Moon; I used an app called TPE that helped me pinpoint a good spot.)

My goal was to take landscape pictures as well as hopefully find some neat low-tide animals. Here are some of the earlier landscapes:

Published: Thu, May 16, 2019

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Categories: Blog, Burnside 35, Inspirational, Lensbaby, Photo Technique, Photography, Sol 45, Sweet 50 or 35, Velvet 56

Whenever I talk to people about my current photography I tell them that Lensbaby lenses are perfect for me. The funny part is that many Lensbaby images are far from perfect if you are looking at them with your technical eyes only. I could even say that Lensbaby pictures are perfectly imperfect. What do I mean by this? Let me show you some of my creations and explain how the imperfection led me to create something that I felt stood out from the crowd.

Let’s start with this image, which I took with the Sweet 50 (my very first LB lens). Technically this image is not successful. I clearly wasn’t able to focus fast enough on any of the birds. Despite this, I really like the outcome. Thanks to the special effects created by the lens, I feel the movement of the birds, and I can almost hear the noise gulls make when a large flock of them fly away all at once.

Published: Tue, May 14, 2019

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Categories: Blog, Flower Photography, Photography, USA

Since early spring I have been posting lots of wildflower images in my blog. After my last hike, where I learned the names of many of the flowers I decided, that I would make one more post showcasing the beautiful wildflowers we are lucky to experience this spring. I really hope that our winters will be as wet in the future as the last one was, and we’ll enjoy the flowers again in coming years.

Some of the photos I’ve already posted, others are new. I will label all of them this time. Please be warned: there are a lot of flower pictures in this post. 🙂

Let’s start with the California Poppy. This was one of the first flowers to bloom, and I still saw a few today.

Published: Mon, May 13, 2019

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Categories: Blog, Flower Photography, Landscape, Photography, USA

On Saturday my husband and I enjoyed another wonderful hike. We only had to drive 5 minutes to the trail head, and after about an hour or so hike we reached a lookout point from where we were presented with the above view. This is called The Sink – I believe this one is the West Sink. We didn’t have time to hike another mile to see the East Sink, but we’ll try to do that next time. These are natural sandstone formations, which are sometimes referred to as Orange County’s miniature Grand Canyon. Here are a few images from our hike.