Neglected blogs are so sad.  To be clear, I have not been taking as many photos in the past few months.  I finished my 365 project and it burned me out for awhile.  But I have started working on some things in the past couple of weeks, and I hope to have many new pictures in the future.

Here are some new images that I’ve processed from my trips out west last summer.  Hope you like them!

It is July and I am back from a long month of being away!  I spent most of the month of June traveling, and when I wasn’t traveling, I was ill and handling busted computers.  I am glad to be healthy and home at last, getting into a normal routine of work and play.

I have thousands of photos to process from my trips- photos of every type!  Nature & landscapes, wildlife, touristy snapshots, family photos, baby photos… I have a lot to do.  And I’ve been keeping up with my 365 Project even though it will be awhile before I’m caught up on Flickr with those.

I am busy uploading new photos to Flickr from my trip Out West (I drove to Yellowstone National Park and saw a good deal of Wyoming and Montana).  Keep up with them here.  And I’ll upload a few of my favorites now and again to this site as well.

In the Sand Hills of Central Nebraska.

Northwestern Nebraska in Oglala National Grassland.

Oglala National Grassland.

In the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Mount Teewinot in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

Teton Range, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

And me!  Next to the Snake River with the Tetons in the background.  This was the last night of my trip, but it was the only real self-portrait I took, so I had to get it done.

I’m really skipping around with my processing, so I have no idea what I’ll post next!  More to come!

Followers of my photo blog might not know it, but I’m a bit of a goal-setter.  It makes me feel productive.

I have shot several weddings, engagements, and families this year (and might do some more before the year is out), but I have shot very little for myself.  And that’s disappointing because the royalties I’ve made on my photography have all been from pictures that I shot for myself.

On Flickr (a site that I really recommend if you’re into photography), 365 Projects have become very popular.  The goal is simply to take a photo every day for 365 days.  Sometimes there are more rules than that- the photos all have to be self-portraits, or pictures of kids, or pictures of toys, or something like that.  But you take and upload a picture every day for a year.

I’d heard of 365 Projects before, but never really considered doing one until last week, when it hit me that a 365 Project is not only a great way to get myself shooting for myself, but it’s also exactly the kind of thing that’s up my alley.  I love projects like this, especially when they have deadlines (shoot & process a photo every day).  I do really well with parameters like this.

But I don’t want to shoot self-portraits or kids or toys or my dog every day for a year.  I want to get out of my house and shoot photos that help me get more creative with my camera, improve my eye, and keep me experimenting with different ways of making a good photo.  So my 365 Project doesn’t have a theme.  It’s just me and my camera and what I hope will be 365 days of decent photos.

I started this project last weekend (after I shot a wedding on Sunday with Silver Box!) and I’m going to post my first four days’ worth of photos here on the blog.  I intend to post all my photos from my 365 Project on my blog, either every week or every few days (depending on how my life goes!)

So, here we go!  It was such a cold and overcast week, but that is part of the fun of getting out and shooting: getting creative.  And it’s hard to be creatively challenged during the prettiest part of autumn.

365-1: Pumpkins at the Hartsburg Pumpkin Festival last weekend.

365-2: Bright red burning bush leaves.  There is a big row of these planted at the car wash near my house.  I was crawling around looking for a shot in my work clothes and boots, and I’m sure I was a source of mindless entertainment to those waiting in line for a car wash.

365-3: I found this grate on the shore of the Missouri River last year, and just cleaned it up and put it on my mantle this week.  (I think my 365 project will involve some house pictures, because I’ve been doing a lot of work around the house this year, but I will try to vary it up with some different light setups.)

365-4: Eastern Redcedar is a type of juniper tree that is usually referred to as a cedar tree.  They grow all over Missouri, and they are one of my favorite types of trees.  In the fall, the blue juniper berries appear.  This one grows in my backyard and is home to a few birds, I think.

Click on any of these photos for links to my Flickr site.  I’ll be back next week with pictures from my trip out of town this weekend.

I was so excited to find out that one of my pictures from California was featured in the latest Modern Bride magazine.

It’s the lower image on the left side below.  The article is on the 50 best places to honeymoon, and my pictures represents California!  (Which should be higher than #18, if you ask me.)

If you’d like to take a look at the actual print version, it’s the Aug/Sept 2009 issue.  The cover is below.  The image is on page 315.  I do not get a credit because the image royalties were purchased through Getty Images, a stock photography company. ETA:  I did get a credit!  But it’s stuck in the gutter between the pages and I didn’t see it right away.  I’m famous!

I’ve had some success with stock photography, but this is the first time it’s been somewhere so high profile.  Usually, my images are used on websites or in brochures, as far as I know.

Scroll down for two other blog posts from earlier today- I’m trying to catch up on blog negligence.

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!

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.

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 was part of the Inside Columbia magazine’s 080808 Photo Essay, which was printed in the September 2008 issue that just came out.  The idea was to capture ‘one moment’ in time, on August 8, 2008, at 8:08am.

Here is the shot that I submitted and which was included.  I didn’t really have an idea of what I wanted to capture that day for submission, and then I was running late.  I wasn’t going to have enough time to really scope out a good spot, so I just started driving towards work and hoped that something would happen.  And of course it did!  I pass this row of trees outside the Katy Apartments on Forum Boulevard every day, and I never noticed the sprinklers before.  But that morning, the sun backlit the spray and it looked really beautiful.  I made up my mind in an instant and pulled into the lot.

I have also been working on some of the photos that I took way back in April on my fantastic trip to San Francisco and other areas of Northern California.  I have not had a lot of time to work on these in the past few months, but I have every intention of finishing them someday!  Here are some of the breathtaking vistas along the Pacific Coast Highway in Big Sur.  Some of this area was devastated this summer by wildfires.

This last shot was in San Gregorio, California, rather than in Big Sur.

One of my dream houses is small and midcentury modern, with lots of windows and bookshelves, on a craggy cliff in Big Sur, overlooking the Pacific.  I live in it in my head.