i won, i won!

After two rounds of judg­ing it’s now offi­cial. My image of a chalk dud­leya (Dud­leya pul­veru­lenta) is the win­ner in a con­test look­ing for an image to use to pro­mote the upcom­ing Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Week, which this year is April 17 to 23. The com­pe­ti­tion was held by the San Diego Chap­ter of the Cal­i­for­nia Native Plant Soci­ety, and the win­ning image will be used locally in pub­lic­ity and on t-shirts and who knows what else.

Woohoo! I’m jazzed!

To the right is the win­ning image, Chalk Dud­ley, Bud­ding Out.

Down below I detail the steps I took to turn a snap­shot into this final photo.
con­tinue reading »

March 20 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden • photography | Tags: • • • • | 35 Comments »

shadows and silhouettes

Here are a few pic­tures from yes­ter­day that felt like they belonged together. They’re made using dif­fer­ent tech­niques, but in the end they’re all about empha­siz­ing lines in a photograph.

The first are pho­tos of shad­ows of crape myr­tles, cast around noon onto a closely cropped lawn.

shadsilshad1

shadsilshad2

shadsilshad3

shadsilsil1The next is of branches against a white wall, shot with a wide lens aper­ture to limit the amount of the image that is in focus.

shadsilstemsAnd the last of dark branches in shade in front of light-colored ones in sun­light. I was using the dark branches to cre­ate lines that break the pic­ture into lit­tle pieces, like the dark seams that you find on stained glass.

Pho­tographs can be about show­ing you what some­thing looks like. It’s some­thing pho­tog­ra­phy can do bet­ter than images made with any other art.

But pho­tographs can also be about mak­ing an image that’s inter­est­ing to look at, even if you might have a hard time fig­ur­ing out what the thing in the photo is. Some­times the pho­tographs turn into fas­ci­nat­ing puz­zles. (Harry Calla­han and Fred­er­ick Som­mer did this brilliantly.)

I make no claims that the pho­tos rise to that chal­lenge, but that’s what I was think­ing of when I took them.

December 27 2008 | Categories: gardening • photography | Tags: • • | 3 Comments »