This week Ann-Christine invites us to feature our “dramatic, stunning and eye-catching” photos that are a result of backlighting. In my first photo I wanted to capture the action of a strong easterly wind when it lifted spray from the top of incoming waves as the sun was setting.
Below is a subtle, overcast sunset with the breaker’s tops again being caught-up in the wind. The Gull seems not to notice a thing!
Tree branches upon the sky, be it gray or bright blue, always attract my attention. Birds migrating through in autumn drew me to the photo on the left, and the chartreuse leaves of spring on the right charmed me.
Dune rye-grass bending in a strong northerly wind are backlit by the sun reflecting upon the ocean. Although the shot on the right looks black and white, it is an unfiltered photo of a scene where the natural light and color tones of sky and clouds create what I call “natural sepia”.
The sun was rising through a thick fog, as this mature Bald Eagle surveyed the ocean from its perch.
Most photographers love the light of ‘the golden hour’, whether it’s sunrise or sunset. Watching these two young people frisk along the shoreline at sundown was pure delight!
On your walk with life, please honor our earth, encourage dignity and share kindness. 🐾
Thanks again to Ann-Christine for this opportunity to present some favorite, dramatic, backlit images!
Patti challenges us to focus on still life images this week. In addition to traditional composed arrangements of inanimate objects, she encourages us to use a variety of sources including “found” still life scenes. Oh, Patti, this will be fun!
This post is on a trail to the beach and often is ornamented with found items. I especially enjoyed this composition of the post wrapped in orange nylon rope with a turquoise forelock waving in the wind.
It’s fresh Dungeness Crab season again. I took this series of photos a couple years ago illustrating the ingredients for a composed crab salad.
This driftwood arrangement, embellished with sculpted metal salmon beside a bench with native grasses and ferns in a Long Beach neighbors yard, is emblematic of found art on the peninsula.
My girlfriend Jocelyn placed these flowers (left over from a wedding she’d attended), in jars outside on the picnic table at her Priest Lake, ID cabin. I love the contrast of the bright flowers against the old wood and the forest background.
I’ll close with this photo of Creighton’s Gibson B-25, a lovely 6 string acoustic guitar that he purchased in 1963. Here it is the centerpiece of a still life including my piano and part of our CD collection.
*Still Life (Talking) is an album by the Pat Metheny Group. It was released in 1987 on Geffen Records. It won the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Fusion Performance and was certified gold by the RIAA on July 2, 1992.
On your walk with life, please honor our earth, encourage dignity and share kindness. 🐾
Thanks again to Patti for this adventure into still life!
Every day when the weather has cleared between showers and hail, I have been in my gardens cleaning out the detritus that has collected since autumn: branches, twigs, fir cones and leaves. So far I have removed about 900 lb (408 kg) to be recycled, and I am not yet finished. My 1/4 acre (.10 hectare) lot hosts 12 evergreen trees, 7 deciduous trees, a large stand of holly, at least 85 various shrubs (evergreen, flowering & deciduous) and innumerable ground cover and flowering plants.
This has been a labor of love for the 34 years since we had the house built. My landscape goals have been to create bird friendly grounds with perennial plants that provide a variety of textures and colors. With 8 fir trees in the back yard, I’ve learned all about shade plants! Below are two beauties in bloom right now.
In Lens-Artists post #241, I featured My Messy Garden, that looked like the view above. Here’s how it looks this morning, raindrop on the lens and all!
Spring cleanup is when I assess the health of various plants and determine what needs to be removed, transplanted and where I may want to add a bit of color or light. When that’s complete, I’ll add bark mulch, refresh the pea-gravel paths, pull out the stored outdoor furniture and relax!
Thanks to Tina at Travels and Trifles for an invitation to share our environments this week. Anyone who follows my blog knows I’m a born and raised country girl. Whenever I have “yard work” to do, I think to myself, “oh goodie – I get to play outside!”
On your walk with life, please honor our earth, encourage dignity and share kindness. 🐾
Welcome to Siobhan Sullivan of Bend Branches, this week’s LAPC guest host, who throws the doors wide open with the theme Glowing Moments. While selecting photos, I realized that there were some images for which I had previously written haiku. Since I am currently writing haiku (5-7-5), prompted by The Academy of American Poets challenge to create a Poem A Day during the month of April, I decided to combine the two challenges in this post.
wild woodland flower sacred soother of women fragile tri-lily
curer of madness hellebore the lenten rose behold her power
glowing at sunrise golden spikes of dune rye grass as hunters moon sets
envoy from the gods bringer of spiritual peace restorer of hope
whirling through the sky clouds draw a veil at sundown brilliant with pastels
On your walk with life, please honor our earth, encourage dignity and share kindness. 🐾
I’m not much of a trickster when it comes to photography, however I do enjoy “thinking outside the box,” as in the shot below of a Brown Garden Snail taken at ground level.
Another example, is this ‘Dune Rune’. Alloniscus is a seaside wood louse that burrows just under the sand surface at night leaving images I call Dune Runes. To see other examples of this tricky critters writing and design skills, click on the Dune Runes link at the top of my blog.
Also, I find it fun to photograph objects that others have repurposed in unconventional and creative ways, like the Sedum-filled case below…
…and this human-sized bird nest with an invitation for passersby to curl up in it, take a nap, take a selfie or just reflect upon life .
I’ll close with another favorite perspective. Donna has an example of this technique in her introduction of this week’s challenge. Below we see a sandy beach leading to the ocean shore and cloudy sky above framed by a large driftwood tree stump. I am so looking forward to taking shots like this with my new camera! I’m sure the photos will be much sharper focused. Maybe I’ll do a compare/contrast for a Wordless Wednesday – stay tuned!
On your walk with life, please honor our earth, encourage dignity and share kindness. 🐾
Thank you to Donna of Wind Kisses for encouraging us to explore photography with “outside the box” perspectives! Her examples are wonderful and you can see them by clicking the link below.
The first day of first grade, our teacher asked her students to raise our hands if we couldn’t see what she had written on the chalk board. I raised my hand, so she directed me to a desk closer to the front. When I still couldn’t make it out, she told me to walk toward the chalk board until I could read what was written. I stopped about a foot away from it. By the next day, mom took me to the optometrist to get my first pair of corrective lenses.
Lindy in fifth grade distributing valentines.
Around when the above photo was taken, while sitting in the optometrists chair as he made adjustments to my new pair of glasses, I gazed out the window and was amazed at how clear things were. “Look mom,” I exclaimed, “it’s snowing!”
Hard contact lenses were a new technology when I was fitted for them at the age of fourteen, and eventually I had gas-permeable (more comfortable) contacts. As I aged, I continued to wear contacts and somewhere in my fifties I needing to add reading glasses. Through all these years, I was never able to just open my eyes in the morning and see anything unless it was at the end of my nose!
Then, in 2017, I had cataract surgery and my cloudy natural lenses were replaced with artificial lenses that had been engineered with my needed correction. It was like magic! When I woke up I could see everything around me perfectly. Truly a new experience!
When I was out and about I could see many more details distinctly, even in the distance. It was much like being transformed from living in a photo with the background a blur, to having the clarity of a telephoto lens.
Thank you Anne Sandler for this challenge and your introduction with a photo tour of Australia! Anne asked us to show and tell about a new experience we had, which stumped me for quite a while. I had just ordered a new camera for myself with a larger capacity telephoto lens, and thinking about it opened up the idea to relate my journey with near blindness. With each new technology, from glasses to contacts to cataract surgery, I have experienced the world around me with fresh acuteness. Being able to see is a joy – a privilege that I have treasured all my life.
On your walk with life, please honor our earth, encourage dignity and share kindness. 🐾
My gardens consist mostly of perennial plants, trees and shrubs designed to provide food and shelter for birds, year-round. Some time ago I stopped pruning back the deadheads of Cone-flowers, and left the dry mop-heads of Hydrangea on all winter until about this time of year. Below are daffodils blooming amidst the cone-flower stems.
For three days in a row this week we actually had seasonally warm spring weather, so I dedicated as much time as possible to cleaning and re-landscaping the back yard. I removed one shrub and one tree, both of which I considered ugly, and the tree shaded out other much nicer shrubs. Two mottoes that guide me in the garden; “if it’s ugly – out it goes!” and when pruning , “if it was meant to be here, it will grow back.” Below, a scraggly shrub in the willow stump that was ugly year round.
Above, lower photo is after trimming the fern, removing the ugly shrub, and transplanting a golden mock orange shrub into the newly empty hollow of the willow stump.
Today the temperature dropped and the rains returned. We may even have snow tomorrow! But for those few days, I had a productive time in my gardens with the faithful companionship of both beagles; Daisy always on patrol, and Max looking on approvingly from sunny spots!
Thanks to Sophia Alves for inviting us to share spring images this week. It took me a while to decide to share my messy gardens, however it is the reality of spring – always a lot of cleaning to do!
On your walk with life, please honor our earth, encourage dignity and share kindness. 🐾
Walking With Eagles is a collection of original poems and photographs by Lindy Low Le Coq. A lifelong naturalist, amateur photographer and bird enthusiast, Lindy’s verse, composition and photographs open a window into the essence of her subjects. Her poems and photography reflect the rich natural wonders of the Pacific Northwest.
Bald Eagles mature over the course of five years. Walking With Eagles invites the reader to take a poetic and visual tour of this odyssey.
view ~ Walking With Eagles ~ in top menu bar for a preview, though the folio is much nicer!
Lindy Low LeCoq 