Gratuitous Bug-and-Flower Time!

After shooting a portrait session for Joey at the Fort Worth Botanical Gardens, I did what I love to do-- ran around the place scouting for pretty flowers, lovely bugs, and all things tiny to capture with my fabulously wonderful macro lens.

Sweet like candy to my soul is the macro. There are literally tiny things EVERYWHERE that we never get a chance to see up close, and the macro lens allows me to find those things and share their beauty with you. I squeal inside with delight when I see a butterfly swirling around a bright flowery bush, because I know that with enough patience, that bug will land and I can get a picture of its fantastic wings. Dragonflies and bumblebees are worthy targets as well... or any other bug I happen upon that doesn't scare the daylights out of me.

Don't even get me started on flowers. I wish I had 900 frames, and could line my walls with macro floral shots... but alas, I don't live alone, and not everyone has the high bright-popping-color-tolerance I do...

So I keep on snapping away, and rotate the prints out now and then. One of these days... ONE OF THESE DAYS... I will have a room devoted to nothing but the insanely fascinating artistry of nature. God's hands at work.

My grandmother, Josephine, was born in a small farming town in Texas (in the Brazos Valley). When she was 2 years old, Houston was just getting its first air-conditioned building. When she was 3, Houston was opening the doors of the Fine Arts Museum. As she was celebrating her eleventh birthday, the very first Houston Fat Stock Show & Rodeo was being held.

She got married in 1941, and moved with my grandfather to the city of Houston, where city planners were designing major thoroughfares in what would become the "loop" system, and the population was a bustling 380,000. The Medical Center was established a couple of years later, and eventually she saw the construction of Texas' first freeway, I-45.

In her life, she has seen the world go from horses to cars... she has lived life without running water and plumbing and cars. She's picked cotton in the fields and worked as a cook/housekeeper for an army officer-- who even from the front lines wrote home that he missed "Josephine's Pancakes".

She's lived near Memorial Park for over 50 years now-- in one of the "little old houses" that still remains among the new and modern townhomes that have taken over. Her home is still a comfortable gathering place for her 8 children, 18 grandchildren, and 20 great-grandchildren... and she can often be found sitting out in the front porch swing on a nice day, enjoying the shade and the birds and the squirrels.

She is one of the sweetest, most giving women I know.

I've been trying for years to get her to sit for a portrait, but she always waves me off and tells me she doesn't need any portrait... well the medians along Westcott were brimming with bluebonnets this season, and she's a sucker for a pretty field of flowers. The fact that they were right out front of her neighborhood was just an added bonus! We planned a time, she got all gussied up for me, and I finally got her to let me do some portraits of her.

And then, in true Nana fashion, she went home and baked me a cake. Here she is, 87 years young.

Just After Sunset

I took the kids to the beach this afternoon and on the way home, I timed it perfectly so that we could stop at my favorite tree for some just-after-sunset pictures.

The first two are unprocessed except for the resizing, border, and removal of a few dust spots that showed up on my lens with the longer exposures. Those were the actual colors of the sky tonight.

Then I decided to have a little fun with color (same image, just color manipulation). I love color, especially bright and unreal color. I threw a black & white in there just for comparison (and my friend Michelle who loves black and white almost as much as I love color).

Salem, Lexington, and Maine

(See previous blog entry for part I)
We were staying outside of Boston in Chelmsford, which meant I had to do some exploring in the areas outside the city. I was determined to hit Salem and see all the witchy witchery sice it was so close to Halloween.

I visited Minuteman National Park on an crisp, unbelievably clear fall day. After walking Battle Road for a bit and reading all of the placards along the way and imagining what it must have been like for this half-trained militia of farmers and back-country people to defend themselves against the redcoats... and walking down the path and seeing the site where Paul Revere was captured by the British... I looked up at the flag flying over the visitor's center and I can honestly say I have never felt more patriotic in my entire life. It definitely made me feel a deeper sense of appreciation for our founding fathers and those who put their lives on the line, literally on a daily basis, with the odds stacked against them... all for the opportunity to live free and lay the foundation for America's future.

Next was Salem-- I made a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in New Hampshire before making my way over to Salem (thank Heaven for our patient Bostonian friend Rick, who guided me via cell-phone to Salem). Upon arrival, I was ecstatic to see the cobblestone streets and witch and pirate souvenir shops, because after all, kitschy is cool! I made my way over to the Salem Witch Trials Memorial which was a lot cooler than I had expected. I guess I had somehow always tucked that whole time period away in my mind as a work of fiction, after reading "The Crucible" and watching silly movies about witches. I had forgotten, or not made the connection, that these women and men were literally killed by their society because they didn't fit the norm.

The memorial is very understated-- words of the accused (from their trials) on a concrete slab that "faded" into the dirt of a reflecting garden with tall shade trees... and along the walls of the garden are 19 benches, each with the name of someone executed during the Salem Witch Trials. Some names, like Giles Cory and Sarah Goode were recognizable. It was a very odd expereince, made you wonder what on earth could make a community turn against its citizens with such hate and paranoia that they felt hanging them or pressing them to death was a good idea. Later I toured the home of one of the judges of the trials... to think that his wife and children sat home spinning, sweing, and cooking while he condemned their neighbors to death? Eery. Especially since it is surrounded by Salem's burying ground with the Halloween-ish slate headstones and some old wooden buildings.

The last picture is an old house in Maine... it's not a significant house or anything, I just loved the tree in front of it and the blue sky. To this southerner, it was typical New England!

Ooooooh, flowers!

So I was rooting around in Mercer Arboretum one day before a bridal portrait session, wielding my macro lens (it's great for capturing tiny details), hoping to catch some pretty bugs and blooming flowers up-close and personal. Mercer didn't let me down! It had rained pretty hard earlier in the day, and the sky was blessing me with that not-too-bright light (photographer's dream!) that really allowed the vibrant colors to come through. Some of these images actually made their way into frames and are displayed throughout my home-- really interesting macro photography is one of my favorite hobbies. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I do! For the entire Artistry of Nature collection, visit the gallery.

Traveling to Wine Country

On a recent trip to California, we stayed in the artsy little town of Sebastopol. It's near Petaluma, and is roughly 50-something miles north of San Francisco (should you ever happen to travel through, you should definitely stop in to Alice's Restaurant for a quaint, friendly, creatively delicious dinner). I didn't have much of an agenda, just did a lot of driving around to see that part of the country... and a LOT of enjoying the lovely cool weather. I was really looking to get some nice vineyard pics, maybe some nice mission pics (see Mission San Rafael below), and some nice Golden Gate Bridge pics.

So without further ado, here are some favorites!