Golly, the past couple of weeks have just seemed like a year and a half to me.  I have had a lot of things going on, some of it involving emergency surgery on my loved ones, so I have not been getting work done that needs to get done!  That should change this weekend.  I will return soon with lots of new stuff.

However, I did get my pictures installed for my first ‘show’.  Really, that’s a big word to describe what is just a line of my pictures in a hallway, but they do have little tags on them with my name and they are in a public space where people might even possibly notice them. 

If you’re in the Columbia area, they’re at the Columbia Mall in the customer service office hallway, the entrance to which is right next to the Gap. 

Feel free to tell me what you think if you do stop by and see them.

Time got away from me this month, and I realized over the weekend that I needed to finalize the pictures for the rotating exhibit, like, weeks ago, and get myself to the frame shop, like, now.  So I’ve been working on these for the past couple of nights and sent the rest of them to the printer today with the hope that I can get them framed this weekend.

I still don’t know any details about where my photos will be hung, but I have been assured that they will go up in July somewhere in town.

I decided to go with a theme for these pictures, rather than just collecting some random images together, and my first theme would be these images of slow water and rocks that I took in Yosemite National Park in April.  It was the most wonderful trip, but I’ve been so busy since I got home that I have barely had time to process anything.  This was my first real chance to sort through, image by image, and post-process.  But it was only about 200 or so of the 5200 photos that I took on that trip.  (!)

I intended to do six to ten of them, all in black & white or warm black & white, but as I was wading around knee-deep in the pictures, I realized that there was too much color to let it go.  I still have three monochrome images that are part of the exhibit, but the rest are subtly colorful rocks & water.

No, the colors are too good to drop.

These were all taken on the same trail, Mirror Lake, which is lovely in the spring.  I was there in the early morning before the sun was too high, and I probably spent two hours just taking pictures of the water and rocks of Tenaya Creek, which is at the base of Half Dome.  So gorgeous!

The only problem was the sign at the beginning of the trail that warned of mountain lions.  As I was snapping away, I kept looking over my shoulder, certain I was being stalked.

I have more images from the upcoming mini-exhibit in a set on my Flickr page.

A couple of months ago, I was interviewed for an article about Flickr, the photo-sharing site.  The article went live online this evening and will appear in the Saturday, 7 June 2008 edition of the Columbia Missourian newspaper.

Strangely, the online version is linking my name to this website rather than my Flickr site, so in case you are a visitor from the paper (hello!), my Flickr page is here:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/aabbbiee/

I am a fairly active member of Flickr, especially as far as the local community goes, and I really love the site.  However, I think the reason I’m included in the article is that I got in somehow with one of the journalism professors at the University of Missouri (which publishes the Columbia Missourian).  This is my second time in the Saturday Missourian in less than a year, both photo-related stories.  Not that I mind, obviously!  I love it!

In other news:

I received confirmation today that I will be involved with the July rotation in the community artist program at the Columbia Art League.  This means that I will have a display of photos up for a few months at a bank or church somewhere in the area.  I guess that could properly be called an ‘exhibition’, but I am not too worried about labels.  I am just thrilled to prepare and hang some of my pictures, and maybe have some people walk by them on a semi-regular basis.  Still no word on where they will be located, exactly, but I will not keep it a secret once I hear back.

I am hard at work on photos from my sessions last week and will certainly have something to show by the end of the weekend.  I’ll leave a couple of peeks here just to entice you to return to see the results.

I have my first photo in an exhibit that opens this week at the Columbia Art League gallery in downtown Columbia.  This is, technically, my first involvement in an exhibit!  However, I may have more news in the next few weeks, so stay tuned.  I am still waiting to hear details, so I don’t want to announce anything until I know everything is set.

This is the annual members’ only show at CAL, and it’s called ‘Colors of Spring’.  I submitted this picture that I took last summer at my grandparents’ house at the Fourth of July party.  It was one of my first pictures taken with my Sigma 105mm f/2.8 Macro lens.

This is Echinacea, or Purple Coneflower.  It’s a small print, about 8×12.  I have to start printing larger for shows because the small ones just get lost next to the enormous 20x30s and the like.

The show is the last one in the old space in the Strollway Building for the Columbia Art League, which will be moving to a new home in the recently remodeled Missouri Theatre building just down the street.  The building looks really great.  I did like the old sign they had up, but if they had to tear it down, I don’t mind a revert to the original building, which is what they did.  It does seem like a big improvement.

I have a big week ahead of me, with two family shoots and a small wedding.  Not to mention that I’m still working on photos, but I should have them done by today or tomorrow if I buckle down and work.

From that perspective, however, I am very happy that I got a new workspace set up at home with a good monitor, freshly calibrated and ready for action.  In fact, I think this monitor is better than the one I’ve been using at work.  Many of my prints end up darker than I thought, and the pictures actually do look darker on this screen!  So that gives me hope that I will be making good choices in terms of color and contrast.