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May 22, 2011

52 Saturdays 2011- Spring Flowers

My Saturday photo from this weekend is the last shot of the beta PX680 polaroid film I have from The Impossible Project  .  Time to load up on more of this colorful film.






































As always, you can see more of the fun Saturdays of 2011 flickr groups' photos here.  If you need a kick in the pants to take more of your own photos, it's a great group to join.

Cheers,
Andrea

May 17, 2011

Garden Flowers

I was reading a blog the other day that mentioned you could scan flowers right on the glass of a scanning bed in lieu of photographing them.  (I'm sorry I can't find the blog article now to give proper credit!)  The guy's flower photos were really incredible and I wanted to try it myself.  These are from my first attempt.




















































Here are the simple instructions in case you care to try it yourself:

Put the scanner on the document setting.
Find a box that will fit over the glass and line the inside of it with some background paper.  (I used one of the really short soda boxes that holds 4 6-packs and some black paper board)
Put your flowers face down on the glass. (Some of the petals on my flowers wouldn't late flat so I sat small pencil erasers on the back of them to weight them down)
Put the box upside down over the flowers and hit scan.
No need to close the cover on the scanner- your box will provide the necessary background for the scanner to operate.

I don't actually like the black background, I simply followed the blogger's example, but I think they would be nice on a lighter background as well.

If you try this, I'd love it if you post a link to your photos so I can see them.

Cheers,
Andrea

May 16, 2011

Half Frame Fun

I picked up an old Olympus Penn camera a while back for my vintage shop but the test shots came back today and I'm not sure I'll be able to part with it now...  The pictures came out pretty well in my opinion- especially considering that I was just randomly snapping without much focus, as time permitted and when I remembered to throw the camera in my bag.

This little camera shoots half frames on 35mm film so for every normal sized frame, you get two pictures.  Which is one reason it took me so long to finish the test shots.  72 photos is a lot.  The color & clarity from this camera is incredible for such a small, hand-held camera.  I didn't use a tri-pod for any of these and no post-processing was done other than cropping into single frames.

It's a somewhat rare camera, but a fun one if you can get your hands on one...
































Happy Monday!
Andrea

May 14, 2011

52 Saturdays 2011- Wax Trax

We went wandering around downtown Denver today visiting a couple of museums, drinking coffee and searching for books & records to add to our collections.  I picked up a Nat King Cole record and some Smiths.

I'm doing the Saturdays of 2011 weekly photos posting with the group on Flickr .  It's a great way to get out and take photos each and every week (you should join the group!).  This first photo was my contribution for this week as well as some other photos I took today.




May 13, 2011

TtV Photo Traipsing...

Today I went photo traipsing with my friend Amy through the Denver Botanic Gardens.  We were both shooting TtV and explored every nook & cranny of the gardens.

I've been shooting TtV with a Kodak Duaflex II but I've been wanting to shoot with my Argus Seventy-Five for a while now so I finally built a contraption to fit it last night and these photos were all taken with the Argus.  The lenses give softer edges to the photos and I'm generally a lot more pleased with it.  An unexpected bonus was that the contraption for the Argus only took about a 1/10 of the time to build that it took to build one for the Duaflex.

Bye bye Duaflex!  There's a new TtV favorite it town.  I'm heading to Spain later this month and definitely taking the Argus now.





















May 11, 2011

18 Years and Some Hiccups

My blog has been quiet lately because I've been busy working to complete a goal that I should have completed 18 years ago.  I've finally graduated from college.  No one is happier about this than my parents, but I'm pretty happy about it too.

I went to college out of high school just like everyone else but a car wreck near the end of my first semester proved to be a long challenge that left school out in the cold for many years.  Then life came along and I started traveling and working and eventually had a successful career in Human Resources.

Along the way I took a lot of classes and came within several classes of completing my degree in HR, but 4 years ago I tired of doing workplace investigations, constantly seeing the darker sides of people, and decided I couldn't spend any more of my life doing work that kept me awake at night.  So I decided to go back to school to study plants and finally finish my degree.

And with Peter's amazing support all along the way, 1 short week ago, I did finish!





















Photo by Peter Rejcek

Of course the big question now is- what next?  I'm really torn between finding a way to live a creative life where my time and pursuits are my own (as well as make me a living) and pursuing a PhD to do research, which is a time intensive commitment that will require limiting my creative pursuits.  It's a tough decision, and one I can't make today.

For now, I'm looking forward to a long trip to Spain to celebrate my graduation, spending time taking photographs and working on the myriad of half-finished art projects that have pile up of the last couple of years as I had less & less time to work on them.  Oh, and I'll be back to blogging on a more regular basis.

Andrea