I’ve definitely felt the need to be quiet here lately but am slowly emerging from that. In an effort to be a little more present here I’m trying with two themed posts a week, hopefully Sundays and Wednesdays but I’m flexible. This will be in addition to the every couple of weeks Forest updates and the occasional random post I feel like throwing in here. The theory with these Life Snippet posts will be that they are photo only, generally, and are capturing random moments throughout my week….people or not. I’m liking the black and white thing so that might be present here quite a bit—we’ll see. Also, I’m trying to force myself to use my dSLR more…this is my excuse.

It’s been awhile since I did any of these portraits. I took a lot of photos like this of our harvest last spring and summer but then we moved to the house and life got a little bit hectic. Now I am taking this week to process a lot of older photos and get both this website and Wildscape Photo updated a bit. With the Wildscape update I’m going to include a garden section where you can see some of these fruit and vegetable portraits.

Several months ago Chris pre-ordered some canvas—-can’t remember the company at the moment—with the intent of having some of these fruit and veggies on the canvas and put in our kitchen. We need to paint the kitchen too but I thought I might as well get onto the processing part of the photos so we can get the ball rolling.

I’m not sure which variety of tomato this is. By the looks of it I’m guessing Amazon Chocolate or Cherokee Purple as they are both heavy, full bodied fruits, and we grew those last year.

I can’t wait until May—tomato season!

June 1: Black swallowtail caterpillar munching on some parsley

June 4: Leo hanging out with me while I write some blogs.

June 5: A cropped photo of what I’m 97% sure to be Venus exiting the sun during its transit last week. I took a bunch of photos but thought I didn’t get anything at all until I opened them a week later. I used a red filter to force the camera to be able to shoot into the sun, turned my F-stop to 32 and ISO to 100 and hoped for the best. No, I didn’t look at the sun when I did this—you should see all the outtakes before and after with the sun half off the screen. I was aiming and hoping for the best.

June 6: Trying to make some tomato sauce….

June 6 (again): until I was rudely interrupted by a talkative storm that turned my power off for the evening.

June 7: Samson in one of his favorite spots…

June 8: Hanging out with my niece Zoe. Sometimes she gets to spend the night at my parent’s house when I come in to visit and it is always a good treat. It’s a slumber party!

June 9: Poor Red, he’s on his way out. Such a good kitty.

June 9 (again): Zoe looking like a big kid, being serious and listening to what her mom is telling her while we ate lunch at McAlisters’s

June 10: Driving down Texas 6 on my way home from DFW. This is the town of Calvert—don’t speed when exiting the town, the cops are waiting for you! I’ve always wanted to stop here and poke around the town but haven’t; maybe someday soon.

I forgot a few days—but that’s alright, I’m enjoying this little photo adventure!

Last weekend I drove down to the San Bernard NWR for the Migration Celebration. It was very busy and full of activities but I only had time for a trip to the San Bernard Oak and to see the exhibit hall which included the photo contest exhibits. The photo above is the 2nd place award I won for the Nature Photography as Art part of the contest. As I said, I entered on a whim, mostly to test my skills to see if I even had a chance. And I guess I did.

But, I don’t think I will enter this contest again.

The photos above were the rest of what I submitted but did not win anything on.

I think I need to find something less bird-crazy next time. Something a little more artsy like what my photos tend to be.

One of our Christmas presents to each other with Christmas money we received from family was this beauty a 65mm macro lens. I had yet to play with it so I took it out in the backyard one day at lunch and shot some seedlings, garlic, and dill. It is pretty freakin’ amazing! I love using the reverse macro mounting technique and use it quite extensively, but this lens is crazy! The depth of field has a similar feeling to the reverse mounting, but it seems sometimes I can get more in focus in the whole frame with the macro lens.

It will definitely be a working experiment!

Last weekend I had the privilege to do a maternity session with one of my best friends. Stephanie and I met while sailing on the U.S.T.S. Texas Clipper II during the summer of 1998, between our senior year of high school and freshman year of college. I don’t recall how we got introduced but she, paired with our friends Michelle and Rosemarie and my friend from high school Erika, all became good friends in college. So, that summer we sailed through the Panama Canal and down through the southern Pacific Ocean and to the Galapagos Islands and here we are in 2011 when she is expecting her first child in February! Time flies!

I love this photo a lot because of these tiny little Aggie shoes. Her husband is an avid Longhorn, errrr…t-sip, and of course she bleeds maroon. She’s not the only one to be in a divided household, I know several others! Of course this might all be moot after November 24th and perhaps the final Aggie v. t.u. game.

We shot photos inside the nursery and then went to downtown McKinney to take the rest. We weren’t the only ones out there doing portraits, there were at least two other photographers out there. McKinney offers up a lot of unique backgrounds for shooting portraits and I’m glad to have asked Steph about going there. The only downside was the wind had kicked up that day so we had some hair-in-the-face issues.

It was definitely a learning experience for my first official gig as a portrait photographer and it gave me a bit of a buzz to keep doing it. I would love to do this a few times a month; coming up with creative ways to take portraits is exciting. After I started processing them at home I thought about all the shots that I wished I had gotten and just filed them away to remember later.

Can’t wait to meet the wee one in February!

A couple of weeks ago Chris and I had one overlapping day as he went to PA to work and I was heading back to Texas. Part of our day together was at Penn’s Cave and the first half of the day was spent at Leonard Harrison State Park and hiking down the Turkey Path to the bottom of Pine Creek Gorge. It was a beautiful hike down as is evident in the photos below. I highly recommend hitting this park up if you are in the area. The trail itself is switchbacked well and maintained nicely. Though I am out of mountain hiking shape and was still huffing and puffing, Chris and I still went up the hills quicker than the majority of folks on the trail. Take your time if you aren’t used to climbing mountains!

Down into the gorge….

Pine Creek, at the bottom of the Turkey Path.

We did not see any snakes out—a bit too chilly but if they were going to be out, that would have been the day—the sun was perfect.

Having been on steep, narrow trail, I wouldn’t say this was that at all. But to cover all the bases….

Looking up at the trail…

This one is an HDR, as are the three above, however I’m not sure I like the heavy contrast and color. I will probably rework this one eventually.

If we’d had more time I know we would have explored more and found other photographic adventures. Processing these photos has me itching to get out and take some more shots, but now that the time has changed my daylight will be limited in the evenings!

Since Chris and I hadn’t seen each other for two weeks we were able to get a day off together this last weekend in Pennsylvania. I was being sent home and he was going to be there for a few more weeks. We took off to sight-see around Pennsylvania and ended up at the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. We snaked our way down the trail to see several water falls and then finally to Pine Creek itself.

The photo above is just a teaser to the rest I am going to process later this week. I had a bit of fun with this one, it was my first HDR image. I only merged two instead of the normal three, but I have some others I am going to try. I didn’t rely on a tripod, just holding my breath and resting the camera on rocks or railings to keep it in the same spot. I am not the biggest fan of HDR, some folks are really great at it while others can make it look cartoony and fake. I’m not sure if I completely like this one or not but it’s pretty good for my first time. I tried a few months ago but could never get it to look how I wanted it to look so I gave up. I suppose not all photos are supposed to be ‘the one’.

Chris’ tripod took this one for us.

Hope I can share some more waterfall photos soon!

Photo by Chris, click photo to see more details