Shells In Candlelight

I do a lot of crafts and art things so I have a lot of "stuff" laying around. Sometimes I just gather up the stuff and do photo shoots. I love the look of candlelight.

Texture

Earlier this year I decided to set myself a photo challenge theme for each month in order to have something to photograph if I didn't have anything particular in mind. January was Texture. I like doing detail shots and looking closely at things we see pretty much every day but don't really pay any attention to.

There is a wooden outside near my door. On one of the rare rainy days in California I took this shot.

This vine is growing on the concrete wall that separates by building from the one next door. This vine is a volunteer which comes from the apartment building behind my carport.

The landlord recently gave up on trying to grow grass in the front and put in gravel. This picture was also taken on that rare rainy day I mentioned earlier. Dry gravel isn't very interesting looking.

This is one of the walls outside the building. They were doing pre-paint prepwork - scraping off all the loose paint. Another rainy day photo. 

 artichoke. (not taken on a rainy day OR outside my apartment).

I think this was a plant outside the butterfly pavilion at the Natural History Museum. I love the soft, delicate seeds.

 

The Spirit of Trees

I'm working on a book of manipulated photographs about the secret life in trees (working title - I don't know what it's going to actually end up being). I take a piece of a tree I have photographed and make a kind of kalideoscope effect with it and see what happens. Often times animals or faces show up in the images. This one is like one of those hidden image pictures where you can find all kinds of things in it. The original image was a  shedding eucalyptus tree.

Flowers, Trees, Bugs & Birds

Hiding in plain sight

Kudos to this tree for effort.

Another path (I like paths. I might make a whole book about paths.)

I love variegated flowers. This one is like sunset in a flower.

There were ladybugs everywhere so it wasn't hard to get a good shot.

Water is another favorite subject to shoot.

Don't know what these flowers are but I really like the pods.

Humming birds ARE hard to photograph (not like ladybugs).

All these photos were taken ad Descanso Gardens.

Treasure

This is treasure from my Mendocino trip - shells, and sea glass. No jewels and gold in my treasure chest (although that would be really useful). I love shells, rocks, bits of driftwood or anything that calls to me. With an entire beach to choose from these must have been very special. I like them for their colors, or shapes. All of the shells are broken but that just adds to their character.

I might make jewelry from some of them. If I spray them with a sealer that will bring out all the lovely colors on them that are more vibrant when they're wet. The almost transparent piece of sea glass in the near center is frosted and translucent white when dry (these are all sitting in a bowl of water for the photo).



 The shell at the very top, slightly left of center has bands of yellow, silverish pearl, and very dark brown, black or blue. Such beautiful, rich colors!

Yeah, this one! Not a very good picture. Maybe I'll take a better one over the weekend.




 This one looks like a bird beak!

 

This one has some beautiful colors as well and is floating around in my brain trying to figure out how to be a necklace.

I believe these are pieces of milk glass.

People used to throw their dishware in the dump (hopefully only the broken pieces). Milk glass used to be much more common than it is now. I remember my grandmother had a milk glass pitcher and a hobnail glass bowl when I was a kid. I only see these in antique stores and thrift stores now.

So, these are the treasures I brought back from my trip. For now they're residing on my fireplace mantle along with all the other bits of things I pick up here and there.

Trees!

Ok, I freely admit that I'm a tree hugger. Deal with it!
Trees are as individual as people and as open to imagination as clouds. I very often see faces or animals in the shapes, textures or colors of trees. Follow me down the rabbit hole...

Not sure if the twisty part is natural or man made, but I like this shape. If you saw the pictures from Japanese Garden Part II, this was at the end of the path shown in that post.

Even trees like to look at their own reflection. I think this one was taken at the Hunting Library and Botanical Gardens.

Remember how I said I see faces in the trees? Do you see the angry monster?

Wounded Willow. There was a branch here recently. I wonder if the hole is the result of a disease or an animal.

 The palm tree is covered in these around it's whole trunk. This one makes me laugh. Depending on my mood I see eyes or nipples.

While nice straight trees can be majestic and impressive, tress like this have a lot of character.

Owl, obviously.

the variety of ways trees reproduce is quite amazing to me. If a tree produces a huge amount of seeds it's because most of them will be eaten by animals. These seeds are intended to drop straight down and grow right beside the parent tree. Other trees have very light seeds that float on the wind and can be carried quite far from the parent tree.

I heard someone on the radio last year talking about how plants and trees are fruiting and flowering abundantly here in California for the last couple of years. This person said that because we've been having a drought for the last 4 years the plants and trees are over producing seed in a last ditch effort to ensure their survival.

 Texture, color, shape. Can't you just feel it?

This is one of the roots of the previous tree. Much smoother texture. Possibly from being walked on?

Sometimes I take pictures like this to use as background texture on design projects.

This was either a detail of the same tree or one near it. I'm pretty sure it's eucalyptus. When they shed their bark what is left looks (to me) like human skin.


I could go on and on about trees. And I probably will in another post.

Japanese Garden Part II

Most journeys start with a path, whether you make your own or follow one make by someone else. I'm thinking about doing a book about paths since I have so many photos of them.


Most of the photos here are detail shots of things that caught my eye with commentary on why I took the shot.

Clicking on the photos will open up larger images if you want to see more detail.


If you're joining this journey with Part II I'll give you a brief background for the shoot (if you saw Part I you can just skip this paragraph). In late May the Japanese Garden in the Sepulveda basin invited photographers and painters to come in for a few hours and take pictures/paint without the distraction of the general public wandering around. These photos (and the ones from Part I, which is about the wildlife I encountered there) are the result of that event.

This was just the perfect composition with the bridge, the tree and is reflection.

So many lily pads and flowers it was hard to choose which one to shoot. I liked this one hiding a little within the green.

There are so many interesting things about the water plants. This one looked like a bowl and I love the serrated edges. On the ones where they were laying flat the surface tension sculpted the water into pointy bits.

I was saddened that so much of the vegetation there seemed to be in distress - dead trees, blackened or otherwise infected lily pads. I think the plants there are not doing well.

Bamboo fountain. The water collects in the bottom one until it fills up and tips down to spill into the gravel below. Kind of mesmerizing.

As much as the garden is about plants, it's also about structures. This is the underside of the bridge that goes from the garden, across the maintenance access road to a platform overlooking the water treatment plant next door.

This is the only color of bougainvillea I ever saw until I went to Hawaii in the 80's and discovered that it actually has many colors - orange, yellow, pink, red.

Of course there is a lot of water in the garden - rivers and a lake. The "milky" look is from shooting moving water at a very slow shutter speed.

View from inside the tea house. That view could easily be a painting on a wall. I especially like the juxtaposition of the flowing willow tree against the straight lines of the tea house wall.

Surprising splashes of red in a sea of green lawns and trees. I believe this is Japanese Maple. I could be wrong, I don't know a lot about trees, but that's what I'm guessing from the color and the shape of the leaves.

Another splash of red. This is an Ornamental Plum tree. I love these trees! In the morning when I got to the gardens it was completely overcast and the leaves on these trees looked black. I had to look closely at them to make sure they were still alive. When the sun came out a couple of hours later the red became very visible.

I have no idea what kind of plant this is, but it reminded me of Audrey II in "Little Shop of Horrors". The ropy parts are actually part of the plant, not just trash left behind. This is one of those things that is much more interesting in person than in a photo.

I liked this for the different textures - water, wood, stones. I actually had to lay on my stomach in the grass on the other side of the lake to get this shot.

So many things in this picture that I like - the delicate, lace-like plants on the surface of the water with the lily stems coming up through it and the angular reflection of the plants. There's also the edge of a wooden box frame just under the surface of the water.

So, these a just a few of the hundreds of photos I took that day. I hope you enjoyed them. Please feel free to leave comments below. If you want to get email notification when I put up future posts you can enter your email address in the box just above the post. 

The Japanese Garden Part 1

The Japanese Garden in the Sepulveda basin held an event late in May where they invited photographers and painters to come into the gardens and do their thing without the general public wandering around. About 20 people were there to accept the invitation. Out of the 20 only about 4 were painters.

While I fully expected bamboo, a zen garden, a tea house, plants, trees and all the other things you would expect to see in a Japanese garden I was surprised at all the wildlife I saw there.

I have never seen a goose this color before! I saw it as I was coming into the garden (top photo) then again on the way out (bottom photo). I think it was sleeping in the bottom photo.

I'm more used to seeing Canadian geese in this area and boy are they usually noisy! This family was very quiet compared to other geese I've seen. They seemed to be completely unconcerned by the people in the garden, walking right past them to get to where they wanted to go.

I was lucky enough to get a photo of this crane in flight. It didn't stay in the area long.

I heard one of the docents say the name of this bird, but I don't remember what she called it. It didn't seem to be comfortable with the few of us who were taking it's photo. It took off shortly after I got this shot.

Mallard ducks are very common in this area. There are a lot of them in the wildlife reserve "next door" to the Japanese Garden. I startled this one and his mate (I think we startled each other). They were hanging out in the reeds beside a plank bridge I was walking over. They scrambled out of their cover just after I walked past them. Since I didn't make any effort to chase them they didn't go very far away so I was able to get lots of great shots with the water drops on his head.

There were LOTS of swallows (Barn Swallows in the bottom photo) there busily building houses under the concrete bridge at the edge of the lagoon (top photo). This must be exhausting work as they get a bit of mud on their beak then go add it to the nest - again and again and again...
They seem to make communal nests because I can see 3 of them in the nest in the photo and another one flew out while I was watching. Very busy little birds!

It wasn't only birds there in the garden. I came upon this bunny. It let me get fairly close before it decided to be somewhere else although it didn't run away as if it was afraid. It just sort of hopped a little further away.

This dragonfly landed on the "boardwalk" I was crossing when I startled the ducks.

There were plenty of fish in the lagoon. I mostly only saw little tiny ones, then when I went over by the reeds I saw these bigger ones. This one was very colorful - iridescent blue on the side!

And I found a sun bather. I didn't even notice it until it moved. There was another one already up on the ledge but it ran away when I walked by. This one was climbing up the wall - maybe it had a date with the other one and I messed it up! oops. It let me get pretty close.

 There were lots of bees in the water lilies!






We were only allowed to be in the garden for about 3 hours but it was a great time. I chatted with a couple of the other photographers. It was nice that the group was small enough that we weren't climbing over each other to get shots.

I've lived in the Valley all my life. I thought I had been to this garden many years ago, but after going inside I realized I've never been in there before. I'm glad my friend told me about this photo opportunity. It was a good day.

Part 2 (when I get it posted) will be more landscape and detail oriented. I take so many photos I have to break the blogs up into themes.