A life well lived... portrait of a great lady!

Since I'm not real sure I should be posting full names here... I will just tell you that this image is a candid photo of a friend's mother, whom I met this past week. She is here visiting her son who hosted us and some other friends to a pre-Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday. She is an amazing woman at 99 years young... friends in her home town of Memphis have told her that they didn't celebrate her 99th birthday because they plan a big party for her 100th! There is an article available if you would like to read more about her.

In the meantime, I don't normally post images of people and almost never take "posed" pictures... but this struck me because her dress almost perfectly matches the chair and I love the attentive look on her face as she is paying close attention to the lively conversation and chiming in often!

Balloon Flower Stigma... floating above rain water... Summer, 2010

This is for Ginnie... along with a bit of a story. Earlier this month, I posted an image that shows an entire Balloon Flower blossom. And Ginnie left a comment about knowing who to come to if she needed help learning how to use her macro lens... so this is for her.

When the flowers turn their faces up, their "bells" catch water when it rains. I snapped this image after heavy overnight rains using extension tubes along with my macro lens. I think I used the 36mm Kenko extension tube with my Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 lens on a Nikon D90 body for this shot. ((I really MUST start taking notes... the other possibility would have been with the 12mm AND 20mm Kenko extension tubes together instead of the 36mm tube.) Using extension tubes allows for really tight focus on a very little bit of the field of view... leaving the rest as a dreamy wash of color. The stigma is about 1 cm (3/8 inch) in diameter.

Oh... before I forget... Ginnie is someone I'm getting to know through her marvelous blog... you should check it out!

Yarrow blossoms... shallow depth of field... Summer, 2010

I think I've mentioned before that I've been experimenting with extension tubes when shooting some of my flower images. One thing about using extension tubes is that there is less light coming in to the camera compared to using the same lens without any extension tubes. (Stick with me, I don't speak "technical" when I talk about shooting pictures!)

Shooting with the aperture wide open results in the very shallow depth of field you see here. (The alternative is to use flash which isn't something I like to do when shooting flowers in a natural setting.) Yarrow is a perfect candidate for shooting with extension tubes because the cluster of tiny blossoms is nearly all in the same plane, making it easy to get a nice sharp image of the flowers with everything else "fuzzed" into the background bokeh.

Round Two Image for Photography Slam competition...

The previous five posts qualified me for the Final Round in the Photo Slam competition described in this post. This image, entitled Mammoth Hot Springs... surreal landscape of the travertine terraces... is the one I chose for the final round where we were judged on a single image. Some of you may recall having seen it before when I posted it over a year ago after our September, 2009 trip out west.

The top three contestants in the photo slam will be featured in a gallery show at Glen Echo Park in November, 2011. I will definitely post more about that as the time draws near.

Fifth of Five in Round One Portfolio for Photography Slam competition...

As I've been typing the titles for these images, I cannot help but think of Star Trek: Voyager and Seven of Nine (the Borg character played by Jeri Ryan). (OK ... so I like sci-fi on television... but I like to read sci-fi too!)

Anyway, this imge, Tiny dancer..., is of a hoverfly on a balloon flower petal and is the last of the images in my winning first round portfolio in the contest described in an earlier post.

Fourth of Five in Round One Portfolio for Photography Slam competition...

This image, entitled Hydrangea wet with raindrops... is one from a year or more ago that somehow never got posted here. It is the fourth of five included in my winning first round portfolio in the contest described in an earlier post.

And I'm still floating on a cloud for having done so well in the contest... placing in the top three means that some of my photographic images will be in a gallery show during FotoWeek DC 2011 (about a year from now).

Third of Five in Round One Portfolio for Photography Slam competition...

This image, entitled Bumblebee in Coneflower... may be a repeat of a post from 2009... but I'm sharing it anyway because it is one of the ones included in my winning portfolio in the contest described in an earlier post.