I have been very un-inspired to keep up with this challenge which Jill and Marsha are doing great with. But for some reason, this weekend has seen a change, and I have completed a couple of Labs and made a start on some missed ones.

Lab 18 Reflections
Reflections are one of my favourite things to photograph. I love the abstract quality of trees reflected in water and this pair are the same picture but I turned one of the pictures 180 deg.

Lab 26 Bugs
I don’t really like bugs but except for moths I can tolerate them and take pictures of them. I have made a collage of some bugs I’ve seen over the last couple of months. Nothing recent as we have had rain everyday for a couple of weeks. In a picture, close up, some of them are very beautiful, but if they come near me when I’m looking at them… I’m off…

Jill, Marsha and I continue to work through our Creative Photography Book.

Week 14 is called The Hunter.
Steve Sonheim believes that creativity flourishes when constrained. Mine certainly does. It is my favourite photograpic exercise.
Steve’s gave us 6 items to find, prompts which made me work to think out of the box.

The prompts:
Orange ~ I was at the garage having my car washed and noticed a pile of rusting lorry bits. (This is also where I saw the cracked mirror that I used for PAF this month)
Careful ~ the sign on the car on the Weston Eye, well, eyelet.
Tight ~ the tightly pruned and wrapped yew trees I saw last week.
Range ~ the range of two wheeled bikes I saw in town
Petit ~ I noticed this on one of those single glass bottles of wine at the supermarket
Grave ~ I failed and went with the obvious for this. I wanted a grave looking face but each time I asked one of the ladies at my lunch to make a grave face she (and everyone else) laughed!

Off to see what the other ladies came up with.

Lab 11 Light and Dark
Lab 12 Monochrome Shadows
Lab 13 Backlit

I am working through my Creative Photography book with Jill and Marsha.

I am behind!
Lab 11 Light and Dark. Make the white white and the black black.
I really enjoyed doing this assignment once I had decided what to photograph! I have some white china and some black serving bowls, I thought they would be good but when it came to it I thought I’d give the Cruet a go as it was sitting on the table doing nothing.

Then I remembered I had some paper whites (narcissi) in a black pot on my windowsill.

And next to them; waiting for hyacinths, is my pottery and white china flowerpot.

So, no china plates or pretty black bowls!

I love the outcomes of this assignment but I find it such a faf to keep re-setting the camera. I am too impatient by half when there is photoshop to play with.

Lab 12 Monochrome Shadows. Finding and seeing.
This assignment was right up my street as I always notice shadows. It was interesting to make the picture by isolating the shadow in the frame. I couldn’t find any shadows that were interrupted by other objects as Steve suggested.

On the top row:
The seahorses are a wind chime.
I liked the orchid shadow with its subject.
A flower on a stepping stone and a bridge over the river.
The middle four:
Tree branches, Me & Him, a very pretty curved bench and the shadow of the blacksmith’s sign.
On the bottom row:
On the left hand side are a few things on my desk and the fabulous shadow they were making on the door.
The dots (actually triangles) just didn’t look right without the blind that is making them.

As it was a beautiful sunny day I thought I would have a look at
Lab 13 Backlighting.

I have no-one here to stand between me and the sun, the dog won’t co-operate either.
I tried with plants.

If we get another nice day on Tuesday I will ask my friend to play when we go out for lunch.

I am looking forward to Lab 14.
Steve has asked us to find and photograph 6 ‘things’ a prelude to Rinda’s scavenger hunt perhaps?

I have been having so many problems with my web site host and not receiving any support from them for a number of days now. I apologise if you have had any problems trying to look at my blog. I have now migrated to a new hosting company so all should be well. I still have the header to re-install to make loading quicker but that will have to wait another few days. I have been able to get this blog post done at last. I started to upload stuff on Thursday evening! I might just get it published before midnight on Friday

Jill, Marsha and I are working through Steve & Carla Sonheims book this year.

We are up to Unit Two, Seeing the Light. (That reminds me of the Blues Brothers Film, you know, where they are in the church singing those incredible gospel songs) sorry, yes Seeing the light. Lab 10 is about metering. As I’m a bit behind I’m not sure when you will see my attempts at this.
For now I’m catching up with Lab 8 A fun self portrait.

My lovely son helped me with this by bringing his office chair down to the garden and spinning me around (much too quickly!) but he did stay with me. Some of the results are dreadful hilarious. Chins going every which way! The jungle of a garden looks great though as you can’t see the mess detail.

The point of the exercise (I think) was to learn about the ISO setting by having some fun. Now I have to say we did laugh a lot and I played about with the settings until I saw a blur that I liked.

I used my dslr held clutched very tightly with two hands held out in front of me, and the shutter on continuous shooting.

The self-portrait of my son with the blur was taken with him holding the camera with two hands, standing up! and whizzing around! Oh to be young!

The effect on this one is one of the oil painting settings in Topaz. I like that it brings out some detail in the blur and blurs me a bit as well.

Lab 9 is a mixed media project with Carla.

I loved doing this. First of all we needed 10 pictures of textures, no problem for me as textures fascinate me. The images of the textures were then printed onto fabric, which is backed with paper to enable it to go through the printer. I was amazed that this could happen (a bit out of touch here) but disappointed that the colours weren’t brighter and the greens faded so much in the rinsing, (when the prints are dry you peel the paper off and rinse the fabric for a few seconds.) Next you make them into flags, a bit like a Tibetan prayer flag.
I took the prints to my craft evening and showed them around. Every one was so complimentary and had fun trying to guess what the textures were.
I asked the girls to choose a flag each and I embroidered their initials on, adding some positive, healing thoughts for each of them.
There are 4 flags without initials. Would you like your initials on one?

A slideshow of all the flags so that you can see them a little bit closer. If you hover your mouse over the slide you can read what the image is.

[slideshow_deploy id=’10795′]

Lab 10 Metering, Plus and Minus.

I have had so many problems, not being able to upload anything to my blog since Wednesday that I managed to do Lab 10 today (Friday)

I remember doing a whole series on metering, particularly underexposing flowers, with Kim Klassen. I always loved the softness of underexposure.

I still like the softness of the underexposed flowers.

I really like doing this in camera but it is so easy to adjust things afterwards in Photoshop. Perhaps I should try harder. Do you set your camera up in a particular mode or do you use photoshop or similar afterwards?

So, that’s me up to date. Next week it’s about Light and Dark.

Marsha at Cool Quilting has joined Prairie Jill and I working our way through this book each week through the year.
This weeks assignment: 100 Shots. The trick is to learn the habit of shooting a lot and to overcome the inhibition of wasting shots.

I don’t have any problems with this!
I took these last week with the assignment for Lab 6. I made the most of a beautiful dry day, never knowing when we might get another one! I took more than the required 100 and put 50 in a collage for you.

On Tuesday this week we had another beautiful day! My friend & I went for a walk to see the snowdrops. It was a spontaneous outing, the field was ankle deep in muddy puddles and in unsuitable footwear we picked our way around the trees. I did manage a few pictures, though not a hundred.

I am looking forward to see how Jill & Marsha got on.

Next week: In a spin Hmmmmm…..