with Lorelle and Brent VanFossen
Azaleas, rhododendrons, I love flowering shrubs and trees. These azaleas, photographed at Bellingrath plantation garden near Mobile, Alabama, were a color that tested the digital camera’s ability to record. It’s almost surreal.
I underexposed a bit to bring out the darker tones of the purple, and moved in with the camera on a tripod as close as I could to fill the frame with color.
I lived for many years on the north point of the Aurora Bridge in downtown Seattle, Washington. In 1990, neighborhood arts programs brought a long time childhood bedtime story – or threat – to life under the bridge.
Growing up as a native of Washington, specifically Seattle, parents threatened their children with punishment from the troll living under the Aurora Bridge. It’s real name is The George Washington Memorial Bridge, but this famous bridge built in 1932 was part of the long Pacific Highway – US Route 99 that ran from Mexico to Canada, later replaced by Interstate 5. The bridge was named for the first president of the United States as it was opened on his bicentennial anniversary of the president’s birth, part of a huge nationwide celebration.
Transients lived under the two ends of the bridge for many years. Building the giant cement troll called the Fremont Troll, grasping a VW Bug in one hand, brought a lot of attention and no room for the homeless under the north end of the bridge.
The first time I encountered the troll, I’d heard about it and was out driving at night to find it. I drove up from the road under the bridge from the canal waterfront and my headlights reflected in a huge reflective headlight at the top of the hill which turned out to be the single visible eye of the troll. It loomed up at the top of the hill in the dark recess of where the bridge connected with land, an intimidating and frightening sight.
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My business partner, Dave Moyer of Bitwire Media, WordCast, and other ventures, and I spent several weeks on the road 24/7 traveling from Chicago to Portland, Oregon, to Seattle, then Vancouver, BC, and back to Seattle, then Portland. It was non-stop movement.
He was worried when it came time to do the first podcast on the road for the WordCast Podcast. Having podcast and done interviews from the road for years, I was used to it but he was dubious about quality and control of the entire sound production. I knew he could do it and with a lot of fuss, we set up our mics on the dining table in the motor home parked outside the home of friends of mine in Seattle, surfing off their high speed WIFI network, and rocked it. We did several podcasts in two days from there.
Want to hear the results? We recorded the 100th episode of WordCast with Dave and I together in Seattle in my motor home parked in a driveway, and Kym Huynh in his office in Australia for WordCast Podcast 100: What Were We Thinking?
Proof that you can do anything if you put your mind to it, and that you don’t have to be constantly tied to a land line or single studio space to do great work.
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Lorelle VanFossen published Lorelle’s World as of May 21st, 2011.
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Lorelle VanFossen published Skagit Valley Tulip Festival: A Weed.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared Managing Multiple Authors: Showcasing the Authors.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared Managing Multiple Bloggers: Author Content Management on WordPress.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared Managing Multiple Authors: Customizing the WordPress Author Page.
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Lorelle VanFossen posted Visualizing the Peshtigo River and Impact on the Knapp Family.
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We call them “weeds,” a different colored tulip in a batch of other colors.
This was taken at the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival in Washington State near Mt. Vernon, one of the largest tulip festivals in the world.
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Lorelle VanFossen published Photographing Old Antique Cars.
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Lorelle VanFossen posted Ezra O. Knapp (1838-1916) of Riley Township, Illinois.
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Lorelle VanFossen posted Taylor Rapids, Wisconsin, The Town That Vanished.
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Lorelle VanFossen shared WebVisions: Managing Multiple Bloggers in WordPress.
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Lorelle VanFossen posted Reverend Seneca Primley (1871-1966).
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Lorelle VanFossen shared How to Manage Multiple Bloggers on WordPress.
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I enjoy photographing man-made subjects from time to time and found myself with a lot of old cars in my files. Personally, I’m not a car fan. I don’t care what I’m driving, it’s merely transportation. If it gets me from point A to point B safely, I’m happy. So it’s odd that I would have a small inventory of antique car pictures, photographed from around the country and beyond.
When I stop to think about why I have these, I think it’s the patterns and shapes. I find grinning or growling faces in the front grills of these gasoline beasts. I like the reflections in the circular tire hub caps. I find eyes in the headlights. And I just like the patterns and shapes, the lines, textures, and shiny of this preserved relics of past transportation options.
This collection comes from the pitiful attempt at a home show after Hurricane Katrina in Mobile, Alabama. I went to look at new home features as we were starting to think about building our future home, and my father went along for the fun, finding great entertainment in the old cars. I’m not sure why there were featured at the home show, but with so little there, and so few people in attendance, it didn’t hurt.
Living at the farm in Gaston, Oregon, our lives revolved around the animals. Every morning I was greeted with honks and haws from the four Littles, a family of miniature donkeys. Owned and managed (okay, their food slave) by Leslie, mom, dad, and two children were the rock stars of the farm.
Karina was the old mother, pushing near 30 give or take. Rocko was the old man, a sucker for having his matted backside dug into and scratched for hours on end, if he had his way. Nina was the girl, fairly young and delicate, a bit skittish and yet pushy when something got between her and her food. Guido was the little boy of the family, looking like Karina with his soft gray coat, and spoiled beyond belief.
In their winter coats, I caught the four waiting for food along the fence. In winter, when the ground was muck and cold, they’d stay close to the barn and house, just hanging around for food. During the summer, they’d wander all over the property eating everything and anything that wasn’t high off the ground. Our own mammal lawn mowers.
Still, I miss those cute guys.
When working the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival, I always look for contrasting rows of colors. This garden section of Rodengarten near Mt. Vernon, Washington, had interesting rainbow tones of yellow, pink, reds, blacks, and whites.
I chose to do this vertically to compress the feeling of the stripe patterns of colors. Conveniently, shadow fell across the dark toned flowers, darkening their leaves adding to the sense of stripe.
The wind was blowing and a bit of sun broke through the cloudy sky for a few minutes, brightening up the flowers in the foreground and back but not overheating them as it was still early in the morning and the sun was just behind me. I still had to wait for a pause in the breeze to capture this image, and the brighter light allowed for a faster shutter speed to stop most of the motion.
For me, these have the feeling of watching a parade marching off in the distance.
A spotted this tulip picker on the horizon in the pre-dawn light of Mt. Vernon, Washington, during the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival.
With the brightening sky behind him, I was able to underexpose the image to create a semi-silhouette effect, a dramatic image of a Mexican collecting the tulips up to put into boxes and crates and shipped out around the globe.
Among the many beautiful photographs of the tulips from the International Skagit Valley Tulip Festival held annually in the Mt. Vernon area of Washington State, I love it when I can find a simple tulip and focus on just the color and micro patterns in the image. Tulips are such powerful symbols of Spring for me, growing up not far south of Mt. Vernon.
This closeup image of a red and yellow tulip explodes off the screen with its intense color, a color that isn’t even true to the original as film, even digital, struggles with such vibrant tones.
While the colors are intense, the tonality of the colors are about medium, making it easy to meter and adjust your exposure accordingly. However, I tend to underexpose a quarter to third to enhance the vibrancy of the colors.
I crouched down on the path next to the batch of tulips along the Rosengarten Tulip Garden, a popular stop on the Tulip Festival circuit, trying to stay as small as possible to avoid being stepped on or tripping someone, with the camera on the tripod sent to hang upside down. This gets the camera low to the ground, allowing me to shoot straight onto the flower. It is also a challenging position as you have to hang yourself a bit upside down to get your eye to the screen of the digital camera, or look at the subject upside down in the frame. Luckily, my digital camera as a rotating LCD screen that allows me to swing it out and position it for better viewing, though its still a strain pretzeled up around the tripod.
With a slightly stopped down exposure, I had to wait between slight gusts of wind and people passing and causing a breeze in order to get the tulip stopped and still.
The cropped close image is almost sensual with the yellow colors hugging the center solid colored petal.
I love the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival and have many years of photographs from its bountiful rainbow of tulips. This one is from the 2007 festival, a very gray sky and wet few weeks.
We always bring our full camera gear, different tripods, lenses, everything we can to get the landscape views as well as the close in macro photography perspective.
I liked this purple and yellow tulip dripping with rain water, the patterns in the petals and veins of color. I knelt down on a knee pad with my camera upside down on the tripod to get low to the ground, moving in as close as I dared. I wanted to get in closer, but the heat of my body in the freezing cold morning created a slight breeze, shaking the tulip, so I zoomed in from about three feet to fill the frame. Even then, it was hard to get the maximum depth of field in the low light while maintaining enough for focus. I took a dozen pictures of this and this is the best of the collection.
I look at this picture and see pictures within pictures, telling me there was more that could have been told in this flower. I see that I could have zoomed in and focused on any of the specific pattern details, the raindrops, or the fascinating stem that is so smooth moving from stem to petal. Digitally, I could zoom in and crop these, but the lack of true sharpness in the original makes these tough for that kind of magnification.
Still, thoughts like these always serve to remind me to work harder, in spite of the cold and wet, to really explore a photographic subject and look beyond the surface pretty.
The Magnolia Festival princesses are an honored tradition in Mobile, Alabama, harkening back to the southern bell days of plantation life. Festivals through the Spring and Summer are attended by local young women dressed in this flouncy hoop skirts of bright pastels in pinks, yellow, green, red, and purple.
At a local festival, one of the princesses paused to talk to a little girl on the street, comparing shoes or outfits. Both in pinks, I couldn’t resist grabbing the moment, seeing a future princess in the young girl. A timeless moment.
Winter is one of my favorites, and trees coated in snow is top of the list.
I captured these ancient trees along the pond at the farm in Gaston, Oregon, where we stayed the first two years back in the Pacific Northwest. Their twisted and gnarled branches were perfect for creating a lacy effect with the heavy dusting of snow frozen to their branches.
As with all snowy white photographs, I would have normally overexposed the image to whiten the snow, but I chose to underexpose the image to bring out the darker subtle tones of the branches.
It’s a creative decision to focus on the white of the snow or the dark of the branches and underground. Bracket across then choose from which image you like.
This was a long exposure due to the low light in the snowy weather, thus a tripod was critical to capture this scene.
My husband, Brent VanFossen, plays classical guitar as well as steel guitar, specifically fingerstyle. He’s been playing since he was a kid, rock and roll style, and learned how to do fingerstyle guitar while we were in Israel, then realized he needed to go back to the basics and started on classical guitar training. He’s traveled around taking guitar workshops and attending conferences. He’s come a long way and I’m really proud of him.
The practice guitar he has here disassembles down to a narrow case, about the size of a clarinet travel case. It is nearly inaudible, with the sound heard through earphones. It gives him a chance to practice without carrying the huge guitar or making disruptive noises.
Here is is practicing during a long airport wait in Prague after a week long guitar workshop and a couple weeks spent camping around the Czech Republic.