Down from the door where it began

Haha. A photo of a Hobbit house someone up North built down by their mailbox. It's just so cute with the little rocking chair. The whole thing is maybe two feet tall (to the top of the hill). I kept swearing I was going to stop and take a picture of it, and we finally did one morning. Title from Tolkein's poem "The Road Goes Ever On" (referred to as "the walking song" by Frodo and Bilbo in LOTR, I believe).

The Road Goes Ever On

The Road goes ever on and on
   Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
   And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
   Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
   And whither then? I cannot say.

                                        -J. R. R. Tolkien

Definitely one of my favorite poems, so I had to quote it just in case not *everybody* had heard it before. XD

Brûlée

Doesn't the center of the top of this mushroom look like a perfect Crème Brûlée? Granted, the mushroom itself is poisonous. But still. Gorgeous caramel colors. I should have burned in the light spot on the left edge of the photo, though. Hmm.

A Tender Twist

Personal Jungle

Broad-leafed plants always make me think about what life would be like as a small creature. Like a chipmunk. (Especially a chipmunk. They're so cute. Maybe it's because I watched a lot of Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers as a child. Anyone remember that show? Haha.) I would definitely make a little hideout under plants like these. It'd be like a personal little jungle.

Anyway. This is the first photo I have ever processed with Lightroom's "Direct Positive" preset and actually liked. Usually it's just far too much for me and I'd rather make subtle changes with color saturation myself. But for this image, and one other that is very similar (same type of shot, but with a different plant), it wasn't overwhelming. Just radically vibrant and "popping." It's always nice to finally appreciate a style of processing.

Dusk Rolls In

Taken up north while I was out for a walk with my grandmother. Of course, the mosquitoes were starting to come out, so we didn't stay out long. Just long enough to walk to the end of our gravel road and see the moon starting to peek through. The sky was a gorgeous lilac, almost an opal. The color even bled into the fog.

Of course, all this was a bit hard to capture on my camera, considering I had no tripod with me. But I managed it. In the end, I desaturated the grass a bit and brought out the pinks in the sky. Quick tweaks with a lot of subtle punch.

Little Creek

Mister (Your Pantaloons)

I don't post photos of either of my cats often. No particular reason. But I took these several weeks ago and liked them because they turned out more like studio portraits than I would have previously thought. Window light, however, is the best kind of light.

This is my cat Mister. Named because when we adopted him, we'd been told that he was female. So, he obviously needed a name to make up for his bruised masculinity. These days I call him just about anything. Mister Fuzzy. Fuzzers. Pantaloons. Mister Fuzzy-Wuzzy (I have a song that goes with that one). The list could go on, but I'll stop.

He does have quite the kingly personality. He'll sit on a chair at the dinner table while we're bringing our food to the table, looking over the plate in front of him as though he expects to eat like us, too. Since he was a stray he does have a taste for people-food, and because he's thin no matter how much he eats, he does get to sample our meats and gravies.

He yowls. Yoddels. Echoes in stairways and bathrooms. Knocks cups into sinks for water. Insists that my bed is merely borrowed ("Don't you see the litter? That's clearly my bed."), carries beanie babies around the house (a ducky, an orangutan, and a black bear), sprawls across my desk just as I'm starting to write, thinks brushing is a torture devised just for him, and steals my pillow from under my head whenever possible.

But it's okay. He's my fuzzy. And that spot just behind his ear? The softest fur ever.

Simple in Red

Feather-Dusted Sky

While up North this last time, I made quite the effort to take lots of photos with my fisheye optic. I think I should have toyed with this one more pre-shutter-release; I think it would have been fun to have a smaller "eye" and make it more globe-like. But I do really like how the sky turned out with this one.

Swan Dive

Unfurl'd
Our legs like swallowtails
Are we like those--
Fear the sun and dive
For shadow
Does not burn in the deep

Haiku

I just finished with a small batch of photos. =)

I have a confession to make with this one. I was really excited about it after taking it because I knew I just loved the basic composition of it. The little mushroom habitating a little cliff formed from a root in the steep slope of a creek's bank. I loved the debris and reflection and texture of the creek in the upper-left corner. I loved the root defining the edge between bank and water.

And then I had a full-out spazz attack when I got home and realized that I must have moved the focus ring while taking the photo. It was blurry, but in an almost distorted way. And I hadn't taken a second picture. Usually all I need is one, but I have to admit that always using a digital camera has made me into a shutter bug--these days I usually take two or three shots of even a simple photo. Simply because I can. I have the card space, and it's not hard to delete an image after I upload it to the computer.

So, here I was with a shot I'd loved the idea of, and it was practically unusable. At least at first. Then I thought about it for a while. And GIMP popped into my head. Specifically my Lomo effect plugin.

Lomo to save the day. I mean, it's not perfect. I would have prefered the picture to have turned out without digitally manipulating it. But at least this way I can still be happy with it. =)

Aquaglow

Taken last week while I was away for a family reunion. This is the "centerpiece" of some gorgeous woodworking inside a church. I won't go into much more back-story here, though.

I take a picture of the woodworking every time I go there, and this time I decided I wanted to put a new edge on it. I wanted something more striking, more complimentary to the design. Usually the lighting is very difficult to work with (as is the case in 99% of churches), so even if you calibrate it right, you generally end up with some glaringly ugly contrast issues or the "eggshell white" effect where every bit of white is a slightly different shade of white.

I must admit I got lucky on the lighting. It was just the right minute of the day where the natural lighting was best for that little church. I even forgot to switch to RAW mode. (I switched to JPEG only because I was worried about card space. Contrary to popular belief, I am a digital photographer who only has a 4GB card and a 2GB card. Most photographers carry at least one 16GB card, and usually several 8GB cards. Next time I have ~80 bucks on me to drop, I hope to reconcile that a little.)

Anyway. Post-processing was fun. I loved the slight tinge of aqua on the bottom-center of the image, so I dropped all color values other than aqua and green, and moved up their saturation values a bit. All that was left was getting the contrast and highlighting on the woodworking just right. Of course, in Lightroom, I was in love with a version of this photo that had considerably less contrast. It was a bit brighter because of that. I don't know, but everything always looks better in Lightroom. As soon as I export it to Photoshop so I can add my watermark, I think, "Oh. That's...flat." And I wind up boosting contrast levels. Oh well.