Capes and Gold Lame

The Midsummer's party is now in it's 9th year.  It would be it's 1oth anniversary, but my sister took a year off the year she was remodeling her kitchen (foolishness, I know.)

The party agenda is as follows:
1. show up
2. get dressed up in a selection of the craziest hat, pants, shawl, dress, scarf, and bling you can lay your hands on.
3. eat amazing, exotic food (I still don't know the name of the Puerto Rican fruit I tried)
4. compliment others on their eclectic outfits.
5. settle in on a section of persian carpet.
6. pick a role from "Midsummer Night's Dream" out of a hat
7. participate in a read-through of "Midsummer's Night Dream" by the light of japanese lanterns.
8. Help clean up a little. (this year it involved throwing pillows up through a second story window.)
9. Regretfully take off your finery (or not so regretfully if you decided on the 3-inch brocade heels or the wool tweed hunting jacket)
10. Head home, sated with good food, good company, and good humour.

*I intended to edit these photos for simple color corrections, and grouping them to better advantage.  However, this week has been insanely busy, and I thought it would be better to publish the pictures as is, rather than publish them a week later.  So some are too cool, some need a bit of cropping, and many of the night pictures need serious exposure and color adjustment.
Pardon Gentles, all.

 

strawberries and sun

 Are wild strawberries really wild?
Will they scratch an adult, will they snap at a child?
Should you pet them, or let them run free where they roam?
Could they ever relax in a steam-heated home?
Can they be trained to not growl at the guests?
Will a litterbox work or would they make a mess?
Can we make them a Cowberry, herding the cows,
or maybe a Muleberry pulling the plows,
or maybe a Huntberry chasing the grouse,
or maybe a Watchberry guarding the house,
and though they may curl up at your feet oh so sweetly
can you ever feel that you trust them completely?
Or should we make a pet out of something less scary,
like the Domestic Prune or the Imported Cherry,
Anyhow, you've been warned and I will not be blamed
if your Wild Strawberries cannot be tamed.

                   Shel Silverstien, "Where the Sidewalk Ends"

Some friends and family and I went strawberry picking the other week, during that hot spell when May tried to act like July.  We got up in time to catch the dawn, filled water bottles and gathered buckets, and set out.  We were out picking before the sun had time to burn the coolness off of the fields.

Hand picked strawberries are different from store-bought berries from California or Florida.  They tend to have more taste and character, because they are picked exactly when they are ripe rather than before.  They also are generally smaller, and come in more quirky shapes.  Store berries have been bread for size and shelf appeal.  These berries were bred for taste and the Ohio climate.
The local berries also directly reflect the kind of growing season that we have.  A wetter spring results in more strawberries that are generally larger and more juicy, but with less flavor. This year, the berries were reasonably flavorful, and very, very sweet with plenty of juice. The most delicious strawberries I have ever had came from a year when we had a spring drought.  It took forever to fill a bucket, but each strawberry was a flavorful bite of heaven. The tasted the way you always have known a strawberry should taste, but it never quite does.

We took our bountiful buckets home and processed them for cooking and freezing.  While I was washing them by the sinkful, there were a few berries that just... looked like a photograph waiting to happen.  So I took them out into the searingly clear sunlight, and photographed them.

The photographs have such a different character than than my previous pictures of strawberries.
Small wonder, as these are a wilder kind of strawberry.

  

of course, in the end, the strawberries were tamed, and turned into this:

La Belle Dame

Our hearts are drunk with a beauty our eyes could never see.

- George W. Russel

Last weekend, I did a photoshoot for Ann, my sister and best friend.  She needed photos for an online dating profile.  She has lots of photos that show her great personality, but few that show how cute she really is.  So, at the golden hour of the evening, we drove to Wegerzyn Gardens and had some fun.

Ann is one of the most beautiful people that I have ever met, especially on the inside.  She is a treasure trove of generosity and good character.
She is also one of the most humble people I know, especially physically.
She is not one of those people who knows what makes them look good in a photo, and then does it.  She has a voluptuous body, but never acts sexy. Instead she laughs, all the time.  When I raise my camera, she tends to either act silly, or closes up like a flower at dusk, or a dropped book.

Photographing her has been a journey of discovery.  At first, I tried to get her picture when she wasn't paying attention to me.   However, that was virtually impossible, as she reacts well when looking at me, but not when my face is hidden by a large camera.  We tried going on a photo journey. I had her walk through fields of gently flowing wildflowers. I thought the wildflowers would reflect her natural beauty and quirky delight.  Somehow it was completely wrong. Ann is not the type of girl to meander through wildflowers. Wildflowers are for girls who want to look sylph-like and romantic.  Ann's too busy staring at strange bugs, and making interesting comments and melodramatically hugging trees.

Finally, I got a great portrait of her almost by accident.  We were on the way back from San Antonio, and we had breakfast in our hotel's restaurant.  The booths had wooden backs that were hand carved and brightly painted in the Mexican style.  All through breakfast, Ann's face was framed by cheerful large sunflowers. She looked wonderful. and perfectly like herself.
So I ran back to our hotel room, grabbed my camera, and snapped her smiling, laughing, looking away.

I discovered something: Ann looks best in the colors and spaces she enjoys.  She has a lust for adventure and a love of bright colors that contrasts with her delicate coloring and her sweet personality.  The brighter and quirkier something is, the better.

 

Oh, for a muse of Fire!

...that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention.
                     -Henry V, Act I, Scene I

I finally succeeded in capturing fire on camera.  Did you know, that in order to freeze flame in motion, the exposure has to be 1/500th of a second or higher?  That means that fire flickers more than 500 times a second to create that glorious, glowing motion.

My mom wants to create a screen saver out of the images and display them in a digital frame at night, so she can feel as if she's watching an actual fire.  I am warmed by the compliment.

 These pictures were taken at a friend's. She has a large back yard out in the country, and loves to host bonfires.  We were burning old boxes, plus a couple horrendous romance novels that weren't worth donating to goodwill.  As they burned, the corrugated insides of the cardboard and the spines of the book began to look like glowing spines and bits of bone amongst the logs and ash. 
I found them rather thrilling.

We made light conversation and gazed at the fire as it burned down.  Then we went home and tucked ourselves into bed.

Making faces.

So, Mother's day happened.

I started it by getting up super early (for me) and making strawberry shortcake.  My mother requested I make her a special dessert, rather than buying her flowers or making her a card.

My family rose as late as they could, like recalcitrant souls rising at the sound of the Last Trumpet.  We got ready, packed up inordinate amounts of food, and went to the house of my sister, a brand-spanking-new mother herself.

We talk a good, adult, refined sort of talk for the first half hour or so.  I distinctly remember having a conversation about the sub-dynamics of the Bolshevik revolution.  However, as always, it quickly degenerated into general silliness.

So, we laughed until we spasmed.

Annie, in particular, kept making silly faces.

 

Catherine's however, won.

 

The child shows promise, no?

PS. The first photo is one I took on the drive home.

An Evening Arrangement

The peonies are blooming, sweet and heady.

So I made up an arrangement, and quick photographed it while the light turned from golden to blue. I think I finally got the draping right on an asymmetrical arrangement, so that it looks like a romantic fall, rather than like it has odd bits sticking out at unfortunate angles.

The arrangement reminds me a lot of my grandmother.  These peonies are close cousins to the ones  that formed lush masses in her garden bed.  Then there's the bishopsweed blooms, that are descendants of her bishopsweed plants, which formed a border along one edge of her garden.  The green money plant is also a descendant of her plants, which she grew, harvested and dried.  They form translucent flat seed pods, that she would cluster together and form into wreaths.  Dried bunches of them were always hanging in my grandparent's garage, the door of which was always left open.  I would pick the pods while they were forming on the plant, and carefully pull out the center, leaving a thin oval, with a stem attached.  I would pretend they were monocles, and they would promptly get crushed.

I've been mulling over, again, what is the next step towards achieving my career goals.  I'm a private welter of doubt and turmoil. I wonder, in this world full of talent, rife with beautiful images, if anything I do will ever make a difference.  I have to shake it off and remind myself again, that my work has meaning.  It does make a difference.  It already has.

A New Camera for Moi

I think "moi" is the weirdest looking word ever.  It does sound lovely when said aloud though.

Sooo, anyway, I finally got a camera upgrade.  I have a pact with myself to only buy new equipment when I've truly reached the limits of my old equipment.  I have loved my Canon Rebel these past three years, and know it like I know my favorite t-shirt.  We are that familiar with each other.  However, I got to the point where I knew there were some things that I really wanted in a camera that I just didn't have with my Rebel, like more ISO settings, a flip-out view screen for unusual angles or self portraits, and a larger battery pack.  I also just wanted...more. More value range, more options, more sophistication, more pixels.
So I am now the proud owner of a Canon D60.
I'm so enamored I may just name it.

I've been out shooting something virtually every day since it arrived Saturday.  Here's a few of the images I've captured.

The camera has a setting where I can shoot in black and white.  It's actually capturing a color RAW file, but the image displays in black and white, so that I can see the values it's capturing and how they will look in gray scale.  It's changing how I shoot.  

I never knew how much I like shooting low contrast images.