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Lilac and wooden birdie
Some time ago I took a photo of cut hydrangea in a vase placed by quite an ugly window, you could see it in my post Out of place. I decided to use the same vase and the same window for another out-of-place photo, this time with lilac and a little wooden bird that decorates my interior. Again, I was intrigued by the contrast between the beautiful flowers and the place. Here is different, let’s say a bit more artistic, processing of the photo: I already have other flowers in my mind to put there and shoot, such as yellow Lysimachia or white Marguerite, sounds like it might be a…
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Charm of the faded
Back in March I was capturing books and tulips and I tried several settings. I shared some of the photos in my previous posts Books and tulips and Yellow and blue. There was one more setting though and today I’d like to share some images it brought. The titles of the books below are not important. I chose the books because of their size and the colour of their covers, they looked great together. Some of the tulips I was shooting with were already faded but I decided to use them anyway. Their last moment of glory… I processed both photos in Lightroom and then I sent one of them…
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Yellow and blue
I love combination of yellow and blue and I used it in another set of photos with books. The first and second photos feature a fantasy novel by Jules Verne “The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz”. It’s an old book and I love all the illustrations it contains. I read it ages ago and when I was flipping its pages on this occasion, it felt tempting to start and read it again. There are only little differences between the two photos but along with the format, I find them interesting. The third photo features another book by Jules Verne “Dick Sand, A Captain at Fifteen”. I might have never read it…
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Books and tulips
Book images belong to assignments of the second month of Kim’s Be Still course and one would say that they are easy to be created. Not everything is as easy as it looks though and I can tell you that I had a hard time with them. For this first series I used tulips that I bought last weekend. I hesitated in the shop whether to buy a bouquet in one colour or this mixture but when I made the decision and brought the tulips home, I was really pleased about how wonderful the mixture looked. As you might have guessed, the book in the top-down photo above focuses on…
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My birthday flowers
I have birthday at the beginning of January and I always get some flower(s) from my colleagues when we get back to work after Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Two years ago I used the flower in my 52-week photo project, then last year I used it at the beginning of my still life project. Have you seen (and remembered) those photos? It started to feel like tradition and I didn’t want to make this year any exception. The thing is though that as I get the flower usually on Monday and can’t shoot it until weekend, the shooting is quite a difficult job because the flower gradually fades and…
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Getting messy
In the last assignment that we got in the Be-still-52 course, Kim asked us to get messy… The idea was to use whatever we found appropriate to create a scene that doesn’t look neat but makes an interesting image and take a top-down photo. I had some plants at home that I needed to replant and decided to shoot the replanting which I supposed would be messy enough. Yeah, it was… The first plant is a succulent that was very small when I bought it but it grows really fast. I thought I would separate the offshoots but the root system was not easy to divide so eventually I ended…
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Coffee and change
Take some change, coffee or tea and shoot top-down or any other way that suits you, that was another assignment from the Be-still-52 course I’ve been following this year. I gave it a try and found out that there are so many possibilities how to fulfil this assignment. I agree with Kim who mentioned that it could be quite an interesting series. We still have Czech crowns in the Czech Republic so you can see a few pieces of our Czech change in the images. I have two favourite photos from this shooting, both in two versions. All images have been processed in Lightroom. Photo No. 1 was shot top-down…
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Beauty of the withered
When I was preparing props for my in-crate assignment about which you could read in my previous posts Autumn in the crate and Inspiring hydrangea, I gathered also some withered flowers from my garden and tried to set a few compositions with them. They might have not made it into the group of my favourite shots of that day but they made me think. About fading beauty, about a circle of life, about having (or not) a character. Withered doesn’t have to mean ugly, does it? In the course of this almost year long still-life experimenting, I’ve learnt that some photos carry a plain message but other can wear different coats and arise…
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Inspiring hydrangea
As I promised in the previous “Autumn in the crate” post, I’m going to present a different set of in-crate images today, this time with hydrangea. Even more different than I imagined because when I wanted to create a square-formatted image from my hydrangea-in-crate shots, I found out that all those shots were captured in too tight composition to do that successfully so I tried and set a similar scene for another shooting a week later. Well, as it happens, the newer photos do not look the same… Not only the sky was overcast that day and the light was very different, also perspective changed. But it was an interesting comparison for…
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Snowy
When I woke up on Sunday morning, the light felt different. I was wondering what was going on but as soon as I got up, I knew the answer. Everything behind the windows was covered with snow and its fresh white colour dominated surroundings of our house. Our garden, neighbours’ garden, our yard… I loved the occasional colourful contrast like in the following photo. Our neighbours across the road are building a new house and its unfinished condition looked wonderful against the snow. As soon as I saw it, I grabbed my camera, opened our kitchen window and took a few photos. I took some also from our dormer window…
