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Lorelle VanFossen shared Managing Multiple Authors: Managing Writers in a Multiple Author Blog.
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Lorelle VanFossen published Lorelle’s World as of August 18th, 2011.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared WordPress Tips: Exploring the WordPress Text Widget.
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Lorelle’s World as of August 25th, 2011
Just Bugging You
I’m not a fan of funny email jokes (seen them 58 times before you did and emailed it to me), videos, and other virtual time wasters. But this one had me going for over an hour. I emailed the graphic to a bunch of my RVing and outdoorsy friends and they are now having too much fun with it.
This was originally shared by John Nash on Google+. Enjoy!
Lorelle’s World as of August 18th, 2011
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Lorelle VanFossen published Lorelle’s World as of August 11th, 2011.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared Testers Needed for the Plugin Beta Tester WordPress Plugin.
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Lorelle’s World as of August 11th, 2011
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Lorelle VanFossen published Lorelle’s World as of August 8th, 2011.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared The Most Powerful Life Changing Conference Event, SOBCon, Comes to the Pacific Northwest.
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Lorelle VanFossen published The Beautification of a Danelion.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared How to use WordPress Bulk Edit to change author names on posts.
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The Beautification of a Danelion
In our series on Background Magic, we talk about how to do this, to blur the foreground of your subject by holding a leaf or flower petal in front of it, close to the camera lens. It becomes a blur, almost a transparent wash of color around the subject.
Brent and I were photographing wild flowers on an island in the Puget Sound San Juans, experimenting with many different effects when we took this. Dandelions are everywhere in the Puget Sound area, dotting the landscape with their tight yellow heads which turn into white golf balls when they go to seed in the late summer. We challenged each other to photograph “boring” flowers in new ways and Brent came up with this winner.
Lorelle’s World as of August 8th, 2011
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Lorelle VanFossen published Lorelle’s World as of August 1st, 2011.
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Lorelle VanFossen published Lavender Festival: Photographing People and Hats.
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Lavender Festival: Photographing People and Hats
When I photograph people and I don’t have time for signing model releases, I take care to hide their faces. This beautiful woman, an artist selling her wares at the Lavender Festival, Washington County, Oregon, turned her head away to reveal the lovely hat she was wearing, which was what I really wanted to capture in the first place.
I love hats, and I love people who wear hats. They are not easy to photograph, both the hats and the people who wear them. If you catch them from the front, most of the time their faces are shaded and the camera can’t handle the contrast between the brightness of the fore and background and the darkness of the shade under the hat. Photographing them from the side helps, but you have to watch for extreme dark and light areas.
Photographing from the back is perfect as you get the hat on the person without the worry of over or underexposure issues. If that is the story, then you’ve aced it.
This woman was dressed so perfectly for the event and her lavender artwork in a beautiful antique dress and this magnificent hat with the huge flowers and ribbons. If I’d had more time, I would have asked her to pose for me, had her sign the model’s agreement, and spent a lot more time arranging her with her artwork. Unfortunately, we were on the run. Maybe next year.
Lorelle’s World as of August 1st, 2011
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Lorelle VanFossen published Lorelle’s World as of July 25th, 2011.
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Lorelle VanFossen published A Reflection of Trees.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared Word11 AudioCast – UX: Developing Content to Enhance the User Experience.
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Lorelle VanFossen published Alligator Feeding Frenzy.
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Alligator Feeding Frenzy
It was feeding time at the Alligator Farm in Saint Augustine, Florida, and we were there to capture the excitement.
Brent slowed down the shutter speed a little and increased the depth of field by closing down the aperture to capture the blur of motion as the alligators spun and twisted over their meaty dinners thrown out by the alligator farm workers.
The sounds were terrifying, splashing, gnashing, and snapping. Body slam noises as they propelled themselves up and out of the water to strike at the food with all their powerful forces, smashing down their fellows as they all thrashed around after the food.
Brent shot a whole series of the feeding frenzy, and this is one that jumped out at us. It wasn’t important that we have any particular alligator in focus. We wanted the frenzy of motion. The few bits that are in focus help the viewer to understand what they are seeing, alligators feeding, but the rest is an artistic rendering of the forces at work as we watched.
A Reflection of Trees
A select few artists and photographers specialized in working with reflections, images captured in lakes, rivers, ponds, and puddles, then turning them upside for display, making what would normally be seen upside down be right side up, a portrait of abstract Monet-style photography.
This particular image I took in spring at the Bellingrath Plantation and Gardens, along one of the many ponds and estuaries of the slough coming off the Gulf Coast and mixing into the fresh waters of the Dog River and other waterways around Mobile, Alabama.
I loved the stark trees in the water, the blue sky, the flowering azaleas, all came together for a powerful reflection image. I underexposed a bit, playing around with capturing the darker tones of the image, and this was the best of the lot.
Lorelle’s World as of July 25th, 2011
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Lorelle VanFossen published Lorelle’s World as of July 18th, 2011.
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Lorelle VanFossen published Tree House.
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Lorelle VanFossen published The Stack of Old Books.
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The Stack of Old Books
Among the man-made patterns I love to photograph are books, specifically old books. I love the pattern of them stacked, their cover jackets of different colors, patterns, and textures, especially the older books with their leather and paper bindings.
I think of the hard work that went into designing the colorful covers, the care taken to find the perfect font and collection of images to grab the attention of the passerby and leap off the bookstore shelf into their hands.
As an author, I think of the powerful impact seeing my first book cover on a book that wasn’t self published. I couldn’t believe it. After all the years of self-doubt at being called an author, here I was, a published author. Joy filled me, immediately doused by humility and responsibility. With this book in my hand, I now had to be more than I was. I had to be a real writer. I had to live up to whatever an author was.
This didn’t last long as thirty seconds later I was asked for my first book autograph from Chris and Gorgeous Cree. I signed a book to both of them. They laughed and said that I had to sign two books, one for each of them. I was humiliated, having never thought about autographing my own books, and a part of me wanted to save every single one of them so why give two to a married couple when all they needed was one.
I tucked that book into my bag and signed two fresh copies for them, totally three autographed copies in the first two minutes of experiencing my own book. I still have that original first copy, that’s how stingy and protective I am of my first book. I use it as my proof and edit version. It’s been sliced into individual pages and stuck in a notebook binder and every other page has red marks on it with edits and corrections. I’m working on it right now for the version 2 due out hopefully by the end of the year.
To me, these books represented all those hopes and dreams the authors had. They were all in a pile at a swamp meet market in Mobile, Alabama, looking like they could fall over at any moment. That’s fairly symbolic to me.
One of my favorite quotes by the outrageous Quentin Crisp is:
It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.
When I look at these books and my own inadequacies in getting my second book out the door, I often wonder if I’m the ballet dancer of the pig farmer.
Tree House
Traveling around the Oregon countryside during the Lavender Festival, I found this amazing tree house soaring up into the forest ceiling. It was around the McMinnville area and also featured a whole survival boot camp layout with a rope and board tree-to-tree bridge, tires to climb through and over, and other obstacle courses.
I’ve always wanted to build my own tree house like I did as a kid. I was so brave then, hauling up boards and bits of left over lumber from the building of our house in Lake Stevens, Washington, using bent roof nails to pound the boards into the trees without a thought as to the health of the trees.
How I’ve changed, becoming more humane to trees, but I still long for that tree house.
Now that I have my own forest, I need to look into healthy and safe ways of building tree houses that respects the trees. Hmm.
Lorelle’s World as of July 18th, 2011
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Lorelle VanFossen published Lorelle’s World as of July 11th, 2011.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared Firefox 5 Crashes: What is Causing Them and How to Fix It.
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Lorelle VanFossen posted Genealogy is Serious Big Business for Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.
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Lorelle VanFossen published Sadness at the End of a Space Era.
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Lorelle VanFossen published Rows of Tulips – Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared Basic Facts and Resources You Need to Know Now About Web Accessibility.
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Rows of Tulips – Skagit Valley Tulip Festival
Rows of tulips at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.
There were several intriguing things about this composition that compelled me to take it.
First, the leading rows moving into the distance towards the cars. Then the cars at the end of the line. It’s like a strange parking lot in the flowers.
Second, the building and mounds of compost in the background. They echo each other and look like mountains, which would be in the distance if the overcast sky permitted.
I like the lines, the rows, curves of the cars, then triangles of the building and mounds. It’s a busy image, but somehow, it still appeals to me.