Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge – Smiles

Posted on June 4, 2019 by womanwifemotherchild

Posting a photo from my archives for Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge. Always fun to find an excuse to look through old photos!

A Rose Garden In July

Posted on August 13, 2018 by womanwifemotherchild

At the end of July, I had the unexpected opportunity to visit Beaverton, OR. I accompanied my mother to visit her ailing sister. What a surprise to find a beautiful rose garden just minutes from our hotel!

The International Rose Test Garden in Washington Park, a multi-level spread of color, captivated me (and my camera) despite the 90+ degree heat.

It was a bit too hot for my mother, but she found a nice bench!

You’d think that roses would be nothing much to look at in the heat of mid-summer, their best days behind them. But what a treat we found! I’m sure you’ll agree. And can you imagine the splendor of this place in the spring? It might be worth another visit, if it weren’t for the 6-hour plane ride. 🙂

Weekly Photo Challenge: Weathered…

Posted on January 16, 2018 by womanwifemotherchild

“Weathered” usually conjures up images of water-worn rocks or sun-bleached wood or time-worn skin. But the howling winds of a New England blizzard can carve the snow like desert sand…

In response to this week’s photo challenge: Weathered

Photo Project: Wrap-up…

Posted on February 16, 2016 by womanwifemotherchild

At the end of January 2015, I began this Photo Project. Now, I end with a few last photos and a bit of wisdom garnered from the experiment. Check out my first Photo Project post here. Or you can click on the Kitchen Window tab at the top of this page and scroll…all…the…way…to…the…bottom.

In my previous post, snow had arrived after higher than normal temperatures for Christmas Day. December’s snow almost disappeared by the second week in January.

Pardon the general fuzziness of these first photos…I’d been experimenting with new filters that I got for Christmas and must have left the camera on Manual Focus. Oops!

Then the snow came again…

and began to fade…again.

It snowed a few days later…but that was outside the scope of this project.

What I Learned…

My goal in all of this was to grow in my understanding of photography and to learn more about my camera in particular. And I did…(while learning a few things about myself along the way). For example, I discovered:

I could choose my subject more carefully next time.

The scene outside my window is peaceful. But that translated into boring when I was hoping for a measure of entertainment! The birds and other wildlife didn’t show up much. And facing northeast at sunrise misses a lot of light and color happening just a few degrees to the right. Oh, well!

There are a lot of settings on my camera!

I’m fairly certain that the settings I ended the project with are not the ones I started out using a year ago. I’d make setting adjustments for other photographic endeavors and then forget to adjust back. Or I’d forget what the previous setting even was! This was definitely not what you’d call a controlled experiment. 🙂 I did learn a bit about the different “white balance” effects this way!

Remotely triggering the shutter is possible and easy.

The last time I “remotely” triggered a shutter, I was using a cable release. The shutter release button on my D3200 isn’t an open hole lined with threads to screw in a cable release. I didn’t know what to do. But I took the easy steps necessary to find a handy little remote device made for my camera and voila! (I should mention that when I first received the remote, I couldn’t get it to work. I complained to the seller and then poked around inside it, digging out a small piece of plastic that had slipped between the battery and the contacts, fixing the problem instantly.)

Change is not as gradual as I thought.

I expected to capture all the subtle changes of the seasons. What I found instead, were long weeks of sameness and then (Bam!) a frenzied week of change! The melting snow at the end of spring suggested a gradual change, but then I went on vacation for a week in May and came back to a fully greened landscape. The autumn colors seemed subtle at first, but then, within a week or two, they were blazing. And within a couple of rainy, windy days, all the leaves came down! The mild temperatures in the fall kept the grass fairly green…until it was all white with snow. In the past, I would’ve chalked up the sudden changes to my not really paying attention. Now, I know…all I have to do is blink!

A year is a long time…and a short time.

I found myself resenting the self-imposed mandate towards the end of the year. As a result, I got lazy. I’d “forget” to stop in the middle of getting breakfast or I’d decide that my sleep was more important and I’d stay in bed past 7:30am. But now, I can’t believe I did it for a whole year already! I won’t be starting another yearlong project anytime soon. I think shorter photographic experiments are in order this year. So, it’s a wrap!

And that about sums it up. Thanks for checking in. 🙂

Weekly Photo Challenge: Circle…

Posted on January 7, 2016 by womanwifemotherchild

In response to the Daily Post’s weekly Photo Challenge for this week…

A Christmas gift from one of my daughters, who is quite the photographer, was a set of “macro” filters to fit my lens. I call them my “cheat macro lenses”. I’ve only begun to experiment with them. 🙂

This mug was a gift from another daughter. And the rooibos chai seen steeping within was a gift last year from this same daughter, who has taught me that THIS is not really tea!

And the circle of life is ever present…

Photo Project: Summer Into Fall…

Posted on November 13, 2015 by womanwifemotherchild

It’s been a while since my last installment of this Photo Project. Life got busy and the trees, well, they stayed green all summer!

The scene outside my window didn’t change much, but I think some of the settings on my camera may have been altered. (Oops!) I went on vacation, probably tweaked some settings and then couldn’t remember the original ones. As a result, the color differences in the August and September photos above may be technical and not physical. Oh, well! Live and learn.

In October, I dare say that the subtle foliage changes were a bit disappointing. The maple tree on the left side of this view usually explodes in a brilliant red every autumn. But I don’t think it ever fully recovered from that worm attack in the spring.

Its ragged leaves managed a rusty red, while the trees just to the right of my chosen view showed off their own magic!

But, back to the scene I chose to observe…

From mid-October until the last week of the month, the colors morphed. (Pardon my lens hood crowding the corners!)

Then, on October 29th, it happened: FALL!!!

As the calendar turned to November, the wind took more and more leaves down, stripping most of the trees bare.

The end of the year brings with it the promise of trees covered in snow and ice. I’ll keep shooting and wrap up this project in January 2016, bringing it full circle from the blizzard of January 27, 2015 seen in my first Photo Project entry.

In the meantime, I’ve got some leaves to rake…

Photo Project: Spring Is In Sight…

Posted on March 18, 2015 by womanwifemotherchild

Every morning, between 6:30 and 7:30 am, I’ve been photographing the same scene outside the window above my kitchen sink. I’ve dubbed the project Kitchen Window.

With the turning of the calendar page to March, the morning light has increased a bit each day and I actually took some of the following photos before 6 am. I know that was before my chosen time slot, but the light was waking me earlier each day. I also decided to switch my constant aperture from F16 to F22.

Then came Daylight Savings Time…the clocks sprang ahead an hour and so did the sunrise.

Evidently, ten minutes can make quite a difference in the amount of available light around sunrise. Should I shorten my chosen window of time? Maybe. Will I? We’ll see…

In the meantime, the snow is melting. The trees are thinking about budding and I look forward to capturing the transition into spring, one day at a time.

Winter Break…

Posted on March 10, 2015 by womanwifemotherchild

I flew south for a few days to escape the snow and the frigid temperatures and to visit with my Dad. Despite turning eighty last month and dealing with bouts of chemo-induced exhaustion, he insisted on scouting out some local venues for bird-watching during my visit. I do my best to try to identify the birds I see, but I need help with some of them…