My Pretties

I've been exploring some new concepts in my photography, experimenting a bit with color and light.  Except for cropping and tweaking the exposure settings, I historically don’t manipulate my photographs.  There’s no posing, staging, or anything artificial about them, so working consciously to set up a photograph and play with the color is very new to me.

Last week, I took a photograph of a spider’s web covered with raindrops and ran it through Photoshop.  After inverting the image (essentially turning it into a color negative), I adjusted the color to shift the photograph into blues and purples.  This was the result.

This week’s photo was pure happenstance.  I was finishing off a glass of water than had sat overnight at my bedside when a small Tibetan salt lamp shined through the bottom of the vessel.  After drinking the last of the water, I grabbed my camera, held the bottom of the drinking glass up to the salt lamp, and took this photo through the mouth of the glass looking toward the base.

You can find the photo of the spider’s web, called “Connections,” optimized for your computer desktop at virtual-coffee.com/wallpaper/connections.html

The second photo, Oculus, also offered as free desktop wallpaper, can be found at
virtual-coffee.com/wallpaper/oculus.html

I realize that I’ve been absent from the blog for awhile, but I promise I’ve been working my @$$ off.  My third novel this year, Remembering Tomorrow, comes out on November 11th.  (The first three chapters are online.)  In January, I’ll be publishing my first non-fiction book, How to Save the World: A Traditionally Trained Shaman Insight On Our Next Step.  I’ve lost fifty pounds and five inches in my waist since June by following my No Excuses Workout.  (Before and after photos will post around the middle of December – I'm wearing my Gap jeans with the 31 inch waist again, but I still have another inch to go to hit all my goals.)  Add a move to a new house in the mix and the beginning of the school year, and it’s taken a bit longer than anticipated to move my schedule around enough to begin regularly blogging again.

That said, I'm have a three-days-a-week blogging schedule in place, so hopefully I won't be such a stranger from this point forward.