Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Other Hobbies

Okay, so this blog is supposed to be for 'all' of my artistic hobbies, not just photography - at least that's what I promised in the beginning! :) Ever since I can remember I've enjoyed drawing with graphite pencil. A couple of years ago I discovered fine art miniatures. Most of the miniature societies agree that a miniature should follow three basic rules; it should be smaller than 16 square inches (4" x 4" for example), the subject should be no larger than one sixth of its actual size, and the detail should stand up to close inspection or magnification. Most of my subjects up until now have been pets and houses, with a few cars, boats, planes and miscellaneous wildlife subjects thrown in here and there. Recently I've decided to challenge myself to draw people, something that has never really interested me in the past. Here's my first attempt at a person - one that I did of my daughter. In the drawing she's about 5 months old so it only took me 2 1/2 years to get around to drawing her! Hopefully her younger sibling won't have to wait as long for HER portrait! LOL

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

More Photo Practice

I got in some more practice taking photos for a friend this weekend. It was a lot of fun, but I really have a GREAT appreciation now for photographers who run around photographing children - I'm not sure who was more tired at the end, them or me! I'll just post a couple of my favorites here. Thanks for letting me practice on you, guys! :-)


This little guy brings his bear blanket with him everywhere, and I wanted to try to convey how sad it is when eventually children outgrow their "best friends" and leave them behind. I didn't notice until afterwards that it looks like he's standing on bear in the second photo after his sister helped me by setting bear's head upright. I do like his head upright that way but I wished I had noticed the lack of spacing between the two subjects. Oh well. Mental note for next time!
There were grasshoppers everywhere and I liked how this one cooperated with us for this photo! :-)

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Photo Practice

This weekend I am going to be photographing some friends but didn't really know where I wanted to take their pictures yet. I grabbed my camera and my one of my available photo assistants to take a look at a couple spots I had in mind. It was getting late in the evening so I wasn't expecting to get a lot of "good" shots - more or less I just wanted her to stand in a few different places so I could see if the backgrounds looked good or not. We started out taking these along the bright red brick wall of this building until she noticed the two HUGE daddy long leg spiders crawling up the wall and refused to stand against it anymore. (I have to admit, I felt like they were crawling all over me for about two hours afterwards, too!) LOL



We then drove over to a nearby park for the next shots. By this time the sun was getting really low in the sky and it was a beautiful bright golden color. I started taking these pictures but didn't really think any of them were going to turn out at all when looking at them on the camera screen. I thought they were all going to be much too dark. I was trying to hurry to make the most of the available light left, and all she wanted to do was run, run, run of course, :) so it was a challenge to get her to sit still long enough to take one or two pictures! Most of the time I'd get one taken and off she'd go - I'd have to call her back and bribe her to stand still for "just one more" please! Overall, I'm pretty happy with all of them. I love the golden color of these - what you see here is how they came out of the camera!





This last one is my favorite!!

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Baby M

This weekend I had the opportunity to put my newly learned photography lessons to the test. A good friend of mine graciously allowed me to photograph her beautiful newborn baby girl. When I first arrived, Baby M was wide awake, little arms and legs going a mile a minute. Uh oh, I thought. This isn't going to be as easy as Kari makes it look! Many of my first few shots ended up blurry, or with a hand or arm across the face. However, after a brief milk break, Baby M settled down and went right to sleep, allowing me to get these cute shots of her. Thanks, K, for letting me practice on your darling baby girl! :o))
























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