The second in a continuing series where I post pictures from my 365 project.

365-5:  This is my dog, Martha, doing her watchdog routine in the backyard.  It was a cloudy night so I used a little bit of flash to light her.  I think I’m finally starting to get the hang of the canted angle shot, and I like the way it works with the ultra-wide angle lens here.

365-6:  I went to Branson this past weekend with family, and this lovely (natural) waterfall was just down the road.  I spent quite a bit of time trying to capture it from different angles, but straight on was just the best.  This won second place at the Jeff City Photo Club last night in the projected image category.  (Yay!)

365-7:  I returned to the waterfall on Saturday and took a few more pictures, but it was a sunnier day and I wasn’t having as much success.

365-8:  This was the gravel road near our cabin, with some late fall yellow blooms in the foreground.  It was a misty morning.

365-9:  Monday was the prettiest day in (what seems like) weeks!  Martha and I went to the dog park, where I took this picture of her with the fall leaves.  She matches!  This probably could use a better crop- you can’t quite see her big doggy smile.

I have been woefully negligent towards this blog!  It’s very sad to see, and I’m really going to rectify this mistake in the next few weeks.

First up, a long-overdue video slideshow from my trip to California in spring 2008.

I put this together for a meeting of the Jeff City Photo Club in May, which I presented to good reviews.  It represents about 14 months of work on photos taken during a photographic-intensive vacation in Big Sur, Yosemite National Park, and San Francisco.

Photos from this slideshow have been exhibited around my city in the last year, and a few are currently viewable in the offices of Columbia Podiatry.

Coming soon: pictures from two family shoots in May, a wedding that I did solo, two weddings that I worked on as second-shooter, and a link to my new Etsy shop.  I look forward to my triumphant return to this blog!

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!)

This month’s contest theme for the <a href= “http://www.jeffcityphotoclub.com/”>Jefferson City Photo Club</a> was ‘farm scene’.  I went out early on a morning a couple of weeks ago to get started on these photos, which was good because I didn’t really have another chance to try again after that.

I had a couple of photos in mind that I didn’t end up taking.  I had the idea in mind, but it was difficult to find what I was looking for.  On the other hand, I did take some photos as they presented themselves to me.  That’s how I see it: the pictures present themselves to me, and then I either manage to capture it or don’t capture it.  I’m sure that seems like a passive view, but, really, what is photography if it’s not something of a passive view on the subject?  Especially, particularly, when talking of landscapes and nature.

The monochrome image is the tire on my dad’s tractor, and the other two images were taken as I drove around gravel roads outside of Hallsville, Missouri, not far from my parents’ house.

Updated: The red tractor image won second place in the color print competition!

I took this in Big Sur, California, last April, along with the images in my last post.  I have more of those Big Sur coastline landscapes on my Flickr site if you’d like to page through them.  I think I will be using them in my October exhibit for the Columbia Art League (which, when I know more, I will tell you all about).

August and September are a great time of year for ‘farm scene’ photos.  Everything is lush and green and gorgeous in mid-Missouri.  I wish I’d had more time for those!  But I had two gigs last weekend (a wedding and a 25th-anniversary party for a downtown business in Columbia) and so my work for the week is pretty much cut out for me.

I’m a regular attendee of the <a href= “http://www.jeffcityphotoclub.com/”>Jefferson City Photo Club</a> in Jefferson City, Missouri, which has monthly themed contests.  There is quite a lot of great competition every meeting, but I wanted to share some of the images that I created for this month’s contest.

The theme was ‘drop of liquid’, and I had a few aborted attempts at this subject: drop of water from a faucet, drop of water in the sink, drop of water on the glass-top coffee table with an interesting pattern underneath.  None of these led anywhere.

Finally, I had a ‘eureka!’ moment when I spied a CD-ROM.  The refraction of light on the bottom of the disc would be a perfect surface for the water.  But then, how to get the perfect drop of water?  I poked around a little before realizing that Visine would do the trick.  Visine was even better than I thought it would be, because the lubricant held the drop in a perfect rounded formation that looked really cool on the CD-ROM disc.  These were shot on the kitchen countertop with a long exposure.  I just adjusted the camera to get a good crop and composition with the rainbow of light.

See the perfect bubble of water?  Full spectrum of color as well.

The above images were taken with the camera looking down on the drop. 

For the below images, I adjusted my tripod so that I was eye-level with the drop of liquid.  From that perspective, the drop appeared to be floating above the light, although it’s really sitting on the surface of the disc.  Everyone thought it looked like a UFO.  I have to admit, I was watching the first season of The X-Files right before I started shooting.  Coincidence?

Feel free to email me if you want any info on the Jeff City Photo Club.  The group meets at the public library on the third Tuesday of the month.  September’s guest speaker is Noppadol Paothong, the photographer with the Missouri Department of Conservation.  I saw him speak last September, and he was pretty interesting.  It should be a well-attended meeting.

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!