Tag Archives: flower

Random Reflections

2020 Hindsight

13 Comments

A year of flowers, clouds, raindrops…

I just finished going back through the posts from this year, a longer project than expected. I posted a lot this year, including two months where I posted at least once a day!

Going through the posts, I noticed a few trends: lots of flowers, mostly taken while walking the dogs around the neighborhood:

Pink peonies in full bloom.

Lots of sky photos with dramatic clouds, mostly taken locally (Puget Sound region), although New Zealand had some great clouds as well:

The Olympic Mountains just after sunset.

…And raindrops: a lot of pictures with close-ups of raindrops, perhaps a sign of spending most of my year in Seattle:

Rosa rugosa with raindrops.
Close-up of an aster covered with raindrops.

I’ve also been spending time learning about photo processing. I learned how to take things for a spin (and a lot about blending modes in the process):

…And spent quite a bit of time learning about black and white:

These experiments, and wanting to give myself some structure around keeping the experimentation up, led me to start a new monthly challenge on my other website:

The one-to-three photo processing challenge an opportunity to try out new techniques and share what you have created.

In conclusion

I was not in a great place as the year started, because of some turmoil in the family. Until I reread the first post from 2020 : Another year over…I’d forgotten how depressed I was! I even left my 2018 wrap up in the featured block because it wasn’t sad. Turns out my conclusion was almost foresight, although not in the way I would have predicted!

We were truly blessed to have been able to spend some time with our son over Chinese New Year, we met in the middle (more or less) in New Zealand, and the pandemic was rearing its ugly head as we parted.

Since parting we message daily and have a video talk once a week. We are so fortunate to have these connecting technologies. It was so much more difficult for families living apart during the 1918 flu…most people didn’t even have telephones in those days!

So ends 2020.

I am opposed to making New Year’s resolutions and too many things are up in the air right now to make predictions…maybe it has always been so and, until now, we just didn’t realize how fragile our norms were.

I wish you all happiness and health in the year ahead!

Flowers

Any way you look at it…

7 Comments

My rose is about done now after a windy, rainy week and last light the wind changed and it’s gotten fairly chilly. Still it was a nice little bloom. I’ve been playing with different ways to use the picture of it.

Here are a couple of different black and white treatments. One on the lighter side and one on the darker side.

  • Nik collection Antique plate II effect.
    Nik collection Antique plate II effect.
  • Nik collection pinhole effect.
    Nik collection pinhole effect.
My rainy day rose in black and white.
From the basic image to a partial sepia effect applied in the GIMP.

Since last February I’ve been experimenting a lot with different photo processing methods. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at different ways of creating and using monochrome…you’d think it would be simpler in black and white. But there are so many different ways to take the color out and adjust the light and dark that it seems harder than plain old color. Lately I’ve been rather liking applying the monochrome partially or overlaying the monochrome and color photos with different layer blend modes.

Posted as part of Friendly Friday: Two ways (Actually I used 4) and Brashley Photography’s Mid-week Monochrome.

If you take an interest in different photo processing methods you might like to take a look at the one-to-three photo processing challenge, on my other website.

Flowers

My rainy day rose

10 Comments

Sometimes I obsess on things. These past few days it has been this rose just outside my workroom window. Likely the last rose of the season. Something about how it started to bud as the weather turned cold and has that little bit of bruising charms me. Or maybe it is the delicate pink during this season of brilliant reds, oranges and golds in the autumn foliage.

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.