Even More HDR

Before I was married, my next door neighbor was this wonderful man named Ted.  We still enjoy a fond friendship, even if much of it takes place over email. Today, after browsing through my entire Flickr photostream, he sent me this magnificent poem about my photography. Isn't it amazing when you
meet people who really get it?

Buildings and plants
and textures and tiles
and vines all twine
in my mind
along with city walls
bricked and mortared
with crumbled signage
of ages past
and cusps of
rusted locks and colored rocks
enmeshed in lichens
and mosses
and bursting plants and pods
thrust upwards and out to the light.

~ Edward Beardshear

More HDR

Hi friends, I started playing with a few other recent shots ... I'm a bit addicted to the rich colors you get with HDR. The first picture makes me think it should go with an article about train accidents. The truth is, the area around railroad tracks are littered with all sorts of spooky things, as though it's some post-apocalyptic landscape. While the top pictures were taken earlier this week, the bottom one was taken today. Yep, we went from Spring back to Winter.

HDR is Back

You know when you drive by a place several times that seems intriguing, each time vowing the next time you're going to stop? Well, that was my attitude to a new HDR function in PhotoShop CS5, and I finally stopped and played with it. It takes experimenting, but I'm a little excited that you can take an absolutely boring picture and turn it into something interesting. If you want to get into even more, try listening to a train song while you're working on it.

Suspended in Gaffa - Ra Ra Riot

If, like me, you were coming of age in the mid-eighties, Kate Bush was at the cutting edge of the alternative music scene when the term 'alternative' really meant something. As a young artist, I listened to her albums The Dreaming and Hounds of Love incessantly, filled with fantastic images of faraway places and curious people. Listening to Ra Ra Riot's cover of Suspended in Gaffa took me back to that other world. What a great homage!

Sorry for the poor sound quality; we can't have it all ...

Play

One of my favorite things about spring is those early signs of children at play. I remember when I was in elementary school, I couldn't get enough of playing outside. I graduated from hop-scotch fairly early. I had callouses on my hands from racing on the monkey bars. I was pretty fierce at jump rope, playing 'down in the valley' and peppers. I never mastered double-dutch, though. And when I got home, I would ride my bike for hours until it was dark. Even then, sometimes, we would play a neighborhood hide-n-seek. (Note: in the dark, skunks look a lot like cats.) I haven't been to a playground with children in it for years. Do they still race on the monkey bars and jump rope?

Nuances

I think when it becomes evident that Spring will indeed arrive, we begin to get greedy. Once we get a taste of those first little signs of Spring, we start looking for the lush fecundity of more flowers, more plants and more birds. I'm trying, instead, to focus on those early signs, and appreciate each little phase as Spring slowly reveals all her layers and colors. She follows her own schedule.

Anna Ternheim - What Have I Done

I just love Anna's voice, don't you?

Oh, and I'm over here tonight too.

Have a lovely weekend, folks!

Old Friends

My dear friends Shannon and Kenny were in town from Kentucky visiting family over the weekend, and took some time from the demands on their time to have dinner with my husband and me. It's amazing how, with true friends, the passage of time has no effect whatever on the bond you have with some people. It was good to laugh and catch up with them. And they brought the newest member of the family too, Sophia Marie. Have you ever seen a more perfect child?

Games

Spring advances, retreats, and avdances again. Is she toying with us? Perhaps. We'll wait.