108/365: My big camera, my Nikon D300, was in the shop for what seemed like weeks, but it came back and I felt like commemorating the event.

109/365: My dog, Martha, gnawing on a bone. I love the way she holds it in place at the bottom. So cute.

110/365: This candle is usually not on the floor, but on the kitchen counter. I hope you feel better knowing that.

111/365: My grandmother had this platter and another one with a Paris theme in storage. I love them, but I haven’t figured out where they will go yet. But I took this for my mid-century loving friends, who would think it pretty cool.

112/365: The buds on the Star Magnolia shrub in my front yard are fuzzy. I love the way they last the winter like that, and in a few weeks, they will burst open in large white blossoms.

113/365: This fence is the view from my back porch. It glows during the golden hour. I like photos like this that show off depth of field (the term for how much or how little of the photo is in focus).

114/365: I bought this pillow for a buck at an antique mall. It is in excellent shape (sometimes these pillows harden up over time). I love the golden green color and the tufted buttons.

115/365: My sister-in-law (sort of) had a baby on this day. I was standing in the kitchen and idly thinking about the baby and how the world would change as he grows, and as I stood there I noticed the phone book. The phone book (and the reality of the “yellow pages”) are already almost obsolete in an age of 411 and Facebook and iPhones and all of that. By the time her son is in college, it’s hard to believe that phone books will still be printed in large quantities and left by your doorstep every year.

116/365: I bought two cheap pairs of glasses at Zenni Optical online, and this was the second pair. They turned out pretty well for the price. Another self-portrait.

117/365: Some family members gathered to celebrate my grandmother’s 81st birthday. I took a picture!

At the end of November, I posted Flickr calendar views of October and November. I’ve now made it a third of the way through this 365 Project! Can you believe that? Here are the calendar views for December and January. I made little images for both, but you can click on the images to go to Flickr.

Wow! This week is clearly a catch-up week for me. I got sick with the flu, and with the malaise and the recuperation, I haven’t been posting my 365 photos to Flickr or this blog for a few weeks. I still didn’t skip a day taking photos, even through the illness! But some of these are lacking in inspiration. I am really looking forward to the days growing longer in the coming months, because I’m exhausting my energy for night photos and indoor shots of things around my house. I need to branch out a little!

89/365:  Several inches of snow fell overnight, and my dog ran out first thing in the morning.  These tracks (complete with little loop-de-loop) were the first ones she made as she started her ‘perimeter check’ of the yard.  I love that she clearly changed her mind or caught a smell or there was some reason that this is what she did, and I am happy that I grabbed my camera.

90/365: I was going for a little 70s style here with the colors and the wood.  My kitchen has a 70s vibe even though it was built in the 1990s, and I like it.

91/365: This is a pretty swirly colorful bowl that I got for my birthday a few years ago.

92/365: The snow stuck around for a few days because the temperatures were very low.  I went for a walk at the Pinnacles Youth Area (north of Columbia, Missouri) and was greeted by some amazing icicles along the edge of this rock shelter.  So cool!  It looked like teeth.

93/365: This is a fountain in downtown Columbia.  The temperatures were very low, and an ice shell formed around the fountain, which was lit from below by a flood lamp.  It was really cool looking but hard to photograph.  This is my favorite shot of the attempts that I made.

94/365: One of my Christmas presents, a vintage plastic Beacon II camera.  It came with a leather case and a flash unit.  I don’t know if it works but it’s pretty cool.

95/365: This is a close-up photos of a blue shag pillow that I have that I love.  I like how this turned out.

96/365: Another cutting board shot, this time with an apple.  This is where I started getting sick, so the photos for the next few days got a little bit boring.

97/365: I set up this shot because I thought the pills would look pretty neat with backlighting, but I didn’t realize until I was processing the image that the water was not level in the glass.  I also wish that I’d chosen a better cloth color for the table.  I thought it would pop with the NyQuil, but it doesn’t really work very well.

98/365: I’m not sure what I was thinking.  I wanted to shoot something in the house, but inspiration had run out.  I liked the idea of a pattern with the toilet paper rolls, and the way the light would drop off between sounded interesting, but I didn’t pull it off here.  Oh well.  I was sick.

99/365: I was out late and came home through the fog, and took this photo just a few minutes before midnight.  This is the streetlight outside my house through the branches of a dogwood tree.  We had several days of fog after this, and I was really enchanted with the way the streetlights looked at night.

100/365:  100 days of pictures and I only missed one!  It was a foggy morning and I went to Capen Park to take some photos from this bluff, since I thought the perspective with the distance would make the fog work in the photo better.  Hmm.  I’m not sure this is the best shot from that day, but I like the expanse of this rock.  I should have gotten lower to the rock, I think.  I’m overthinking this.

101/365: I’m cat-sitting for my aunt, and this is one of her two orange marmalade tabby cats.  They are identical except in personality.  This one is far more outgoing than his brother.  I like his yellow eyes.

102/365: Streetlights outside my house in the mist.  I didn’t brighten this enough for it to work the way I wanted, but I still like the way the mist makes the streetlights look at night.

103/365: Self-portrait!  I bought some new glasses and wanted to post a picture of them because they’re weird and silly.

104/365: My friend is an obsessive tennis lover, and I had my camera stuff at his house so I took this picture of his hopper filled with tennis balls.  I like the colors.

105/365: This is a redo of a photo I took earlier in this 365 project.  It was kind of a throwaway photo, but other people really liked it.  I wanted to do it again when there would be some reflection on the street from the rain, so I went out to do this picture in the rain.

106/365: A photo of my house with some dramatic sunset clouds.  I reprocessed this photo a couple of times and I’m still not happy with it.  The problem with the 365 is that it happens *every day* and it’s hard to be creative every day.  But that’s the point of the project, to exercise my creativity even when it’s hard!  But that’s also my excuse because I’m not happy with this image because I didn’t take enough time to get it right.  Ugh.

107/365: Another bowl in my house.  I have a lot of clay things, like bowls and mugs and pitchers and vases.  This one is really well-made and I like the little swirl at the bottom of it.

The images below were taken in the Altamont Pass of the Diablo Range in Northern California.  It is home to one of the oldest and largest wind farms in world.  The countryside is beautiful, and I love the way the turbines look against the soft, rounded hills.

On the day I drove through from the Central Valley to the Bay Area, I was particularly struck by the green grass and solid blue sky together.  Spectacular!

I have been very lax about posting images this spring (though I often post new images on my Flickr site), but tomorrow begins a new season of photography for me.  I should have new posts and images up semi-regularly after this.

Well, a very happy and belated Welcome to 2009! from the Abbie Brown Photo Blog!  

I know it’s been awhile since I last posted, but it’s not for lack of work!  I have been busy with photos in 2009, though I have had no new shoots.  I may have a few lined up in the next few months, but January and February have been spent working on photos shot during 2008 and a long-overdue reorganization of my backup system.

The photos that I’m currently working on date to my trip to California, in April 2008.  When I returned from the trip, it was the start of wedding season, and I immediately started assisting and second-shooting at weddings.  The weddings, engagement shoots, and other events continued into the fall, so while I was working on photos nearly constantly, I really never got to delve into the vacation pictures.

Now I have the time, and I’ve spent a lot of it on those photos.  However, there is no shortage of them!  I took thousands on that trip, so I will be working on them for awhile yet.

Before I post a few of these new-old California photos, I want to drop a link to a new website that I just created for the Jefferson City Photo Club.  This club is very active, good for beginners as well as experts, and I have enjoyed attending it throughout the past year.  As far as I can tell, it’s the only camera club in central Missouri, so it serves all of mid-Missouri.  Some of the attendees drive from Columbia (where I live) as well as Osage Beach, Fulton, Hermann, Rocheport, Eldon, and Sedalia.  The club also has a Yahoo! group for discussions, but did not have a place where general information about the club could be found.  So I put together a site a couple of weeks ago.  Take a look!  If you have any feedback, let me know.

Okay!  Here we are!  I have posted some photos from this trip previously: a collection of Big Sur landscape photos (which are now on display through the Columbia Art League), and a collection of running water in Tenaya Creek in Yosemite National Park (which were previously on display through the Columbia Art League). Since I like to do groups of similar photos together, here is a collection of photos of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, California.

I did walk all the way across the Golden Gate Bridge, and took this photo and many of the others below from the pedestrian walkway.

This was taken at Baker Beach near sunset on my last night in California.

This was taken in Sausalito, California, at sunrise.

A shot of the Golden Gate with the beautiful white city of San Francisco in the background, taken from the Marin Headlands, just after sunset.

And a picture of myself, taken at Sausalito at sunrise! These photos, and others from my California trip, are available on my Flickr site. I will try to blog more often during the rest of 2009, even if I don’t have new shoots to post.  I always seem to be working on something related to photography!  

Perhaps next time I will talk about my new backup system!  Look forward to that, and have a great Valentine’s Day and enjoy the rest of winter.  (My Christmas tree is still up!)

I had a lovely trip through some of the prettiest parts of Missouri on the most beautiful fall weekend of the year.  The St. Francois Moutains, in terms of size, are barely foothills in some parts of the world, but for Missouri they do very nicely.  Part of the Ozark Plateau, they are one of the oldest mountain ranges in the country- older than the Appalachians, older than the Rockies.  They started forming 1.4 billion years ago, while the Rockies were only formed 70 million years ago.  The St. Francois Mountains are igneous rock, formed from volcanic activity, and they are the center of the Missouri mining region.

I travelled through here as a kid and as a teenager with my family, and I’ve wanted to return with my camera since I moved back to Missouri.  I finally got a chance with a couple of the state parks in the region, but I had to leave most of it for another trip.  Maybe I’ll get to return in the spring.

The above photos were all taken at Elephant Rocks State Park, outside Graniteville, Missouri.  I am looking through these and realizing that I haven’t finished processing everything from that trip!

The above photo was taken at Capen Park, in Columbia, Missouri, which is not part of the St. Francois Mountains, but is on the far northern edge of the Ozark Plateau.

The above two photos were taken at Little Dixie Lake in Millersburg, Missouri.

And this one was taken in my backyard!

For more photos from fall, or more of my landscape & nature images, hop on over to my Flickr site, which is where I post photos regularly.

I’ve been attending the meetings of the <a href= “http://www.jeffcityphotoclub.com/”>Jeff City Photo Club</a> since about February, and last month’s meeting was an evening shoot.  As a follow-up at last night’s meeting, we showed off our images we took.  I was pretty excited for this opportunity.  I’ve had pictures in the monthly contests and presented some post-processed images that fit the subject of the monthly contest, but nothing that really represented what I do.  I was pleased with the reaction to some of these images below, especially the HDR-like images.

The other members of the club seem to be mostly of the ‘post-processing is cheating’ school of thought, which I do not understand at all.  Ansel Adams, for one, was known for the efforts he put in post-processing his images in the darkroom, and I am certain that he would take advantage of the abilities of digital imaging and PhotoShop if he was alive today.

I want to make the images look the way they looked in my head when I saw the scene and set up my tripod.  If that requires PhotoShop, so be it, but that can’t make up for lousy technical abilities.  You still have to learn to use the camera.  You also have to learn PhotoShop, and it involves a giant learning curve.  I know I have used it on and off since the late 90s, but I still haven’t mastered even one tenth of the program’s capabilities.  But in today’s field of photography, you have to understand that post-processing goes hand-in-hand with digital imaging, just as it did in the darkroom.  Make use of the tools that are available to you!

Here are some of the images I displayed last night.

These were all taken around the Missouri State Capitol building in Jefferson City, Missouri.  The light trails picture was a four-second exposure while I was swinging the camera around near a light on the pathway.  I have more of those on my Flickr page, but they were just for fun.

The two pictures with the Capitol dome and the fountain are high dynamic range images, or HDR.  It involves taking multiple exposures of the same scene (exactly!  I use a tripod and a remote so that I don’t wobble the camera at all) and then layering them together using either one of the software packages available or doing it manually in PhotoShop.  I do it manually because I haven’t been pleased with the outcome of the software packages.

Anyway!  It has been a very long few weeks for me, and I have a ton of work waiting for me at home.  I had two shoots over the weekend and my first wedding is coming up this weekend, but after that I have a lull for several weeks and I’m very happy about that.  I hope to get this work done so that I can use my time on nature images as the summer winds down and autumn approaches.

The Visions photography contest is held annually in conjunction with the Columbia Festival of the Arts in late September.  I have not decided if I am participating in it this year.  I also may have a lead on another place to hang work if I pick out some images and get them framed.  We’ll see!

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.