Keeping me humble

As probably everyone who knows me know. I love to take fotos.  I have my camera up way too often according to my very patient family.  However, being a portrait photographer is very different from being a landscape photographer, or even an event photographer.  I have no lack of inspiration when there is a person standing in front of my camera.  I can shoot for hours and never get bored or run out of ideas.  When I look at the gorgeous nature I am surrounded by,  I see it and I appreciate it, but somehow I just cannot manage to get it to translate into the images I attempt to capture.  It is funny, you would think that if someone is good with a camera, that is it, they are good, and can take images of anything.  However this is not true, not true at all.  So despite my total lack of a knack for landscape photography,  I still try.  It is a good way to keep me (very) humble, and I am learning,  albeit very slowly to improve my images.  So if there is something you are not good at, do not give up,  use it as a challenge to learn and grow, and if you are like me then, there will be a lot of room to grow!  Ha Ha,  if you cannot laugh at yourself, who can you laugh at?  I leave you with one of my more recent attempts to capture the incredibly beauty mother nature provides. 

Breathe...

Sometimes life just seems to be flying by.  Today is one of those days.  It always seems like there is not enough  hours in the day.  So today,  I am just coming up for air.  Just trying to tread water. Just trying to remember to breathe, to slow down.  To feel, to hear, to see this life that is just flying by.  Trying to stop the blur, and make time stand still.  Timeless,  it is where I want to be.

Happy Duck, dirty knees

I love this image cause even though I realize ducks cannot smile.  It sure looks to me like that is exactly what this guy is doing.  He just looks so happy.  I am not so sure that he was considering there were a bunch of crazy kids running around, and then a crazy lady crawling up on the grass in front of him with this huge black thing coming out of her eye!  ( ha ha).  This image is the classic of how to take what could be a rather boring image and make it more interesting.  All I had to do was get down,  get way down, in the duck poo covered grass, but it was worth it.  I love teaching photography, and find it fun to give a student a single simple tip, and watch them run with it and improve their photography.  So I guess my tip for today is to get down.  Had I taken this shot straight on it would not have been nearly as interesting to look at.  New perspectives can do amazing things to help your images, especially when photographing animals or small humans( I am a child photographer, so I see a lot of them).  Get down to their level and see what you come up with! And yes, I end up doing a lot of laundry, but the kids love it when I get down and dirty with them.

Transparencies

Sometimes my insecurities can take over, and I feel like I am a fraud.  I am not really who I think I am.  I am not good enough at this or that.  Thoughts that I am not a good enough mother, or a good enough photographer plague me.  And at the same moment that I feel these emotions and feel these thoughts trying to control me,  I logically can see the transparency of it all.  Good enough,  what does that even mean.  Everything, and I mean everything in life is relative.   What is good enough for someone is not for another.  Why do I care if I am good enough.  If I am doing my best at something (albeit, occasionally failing) that is enough.  That should be enough for me.  Do I love taking fotos?  Yes.  Does it make me happy?  Yes.  Do I enjoying pushing myself to take better and better fotos?  Yes.  So it is.  That is enough.  I am enough.  You are enough.  Just the way we are.  Sure we can always strive to be better, that is a good thing, but we can also appreciate how far we have come and wherever we are on our journey.  Sit in the moment and take it in, and try (at least I try) to be grateful.
 This image of a slightly translucent and rather minuscule flower was a bit of challenge for me.  I like to shoot with a shallow depth of field (DOF), but I am discovering that I really have to close down my aperture (bigger f numbers) in order to get enough of the these tiny things in focus.  This of course shuts out more light.  This process makes me think how grateful I am that I finally worked up the nerves some years back to get out of P mode and go over to manual. The process I now go through to zone in on the correct settings is almost like a form of meditation,  and though the results are not always the best,  the process, the journey, is a success in itself.

Experimentation in small measures

I am a portrait photographer.  I have tried to take nice landscapes, and I just do not seem to have what it takes.  Of course I do get the occasional decent looking shot of a beautiful lake or some exotic location, we all can get lucky sometimes.  But in general, I feel like my landscape photography is rather lacking.  Being as I actually started off as an underwater photographer,  I thought that nature/landscape photography would come quite naturally for me.  It didn't.  It doesn't.  Aboveland shooting is literally a whole other kettle of fish!  (pun intended).  I found this difficult to deal with, though honestly I supposed if I dedicated myself to the craft and studied and tried, perhaps I could become a better landscape photographer, but that is just not where my passion lies.  But I love nature.  I love gardening, I love plants, animals,  heck I even love dirt and feeling it between my toes!  So how do I incorporate this into my passion for photography and lack of not being able to dive like I used to.  Macro!  That is right,  the closest thing to underwater photographer I have found is macro.  I love it,  it is addicting, though it can be rather time consuming, and since I usually have three crazy munchkins and often two furry ones on all my nature outings, it can be rather difficult to capture the images I dream of making.  But this is a journey,  it is part of life.  so I take the shot when I can, and just enjoy it with my naked eye when I cannot.  But this summer I did invest in a new macro lens, which I am really enjoying.  I hope to be able to spend more time developing the skills I need to make amazing macro images.  The camera settings are not the same as when I shoot portraits, and I am enjoying challenging myself.  I leave you with one of my first images I took with my new lens. I am sure there will be many more to come.  BTW I am slightly obsessed with ladybugs!

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