2024 Triptych

 

2024 Black and White

 

2024 Landscapes

I did not enter two landscape images this year.  I chose to enter one landscape and one creative, open image. The landscape image I entered was taken from the Mt Donald Mclean lookout in the Waitakere Ranges.

2024 Natural History

Both of these images were taken while we were in Tanzania from 2013-2014. Click on the images to get a closer look.

 

2024 Song Title

February Competition was Song title:

I chose Blue haze by Miles Davis 

Kaleidoscope by A Great Big World

Movie/Song/Book Title

Our most recent club competition was Movie/Song/Book title.  The idea was to encourage our club members to step out of their comfort zones.  I found myself struggling quite a lot with what to enter so chose a typical "me" photo.  One I took of my sons years ago and titled it " You've got a friend in me" from the song from the movie Toy Story.

It was now time to decide what I would do for my second entry so I fell back to creating a quilt inspired image like in previous posts on this blog so I went about researching quilt patterns and spent hours placing thin strips of paua shell in my carefully planned template and thought surely there is a book about a quilt or a song that I can just throw in here.  This was the image I turned in.

What I turned in I titled "The Matrix" because if I squinted my eyes a bit I thought it looked like the introduction to the movie.  The judge of this competition encouraged me to have a closer look and see if I could maybe make the segments different lengths more like the actual image in the intro sequence.

So I went back today and this is what I came up with:

This is a screenshot of that opening sequence that I should of had a look at before entering the first matrix image .

Triptych Images

Triptych: A set of three images or artworks meant to be appreciated together.

We recently had another triptych competition. These are the images I entered.

I spent some time one day playing with food colouring dropped into milk.  I loved the individual images but when this triptych competition came along I was pleased to be able to show some different steps of the process.

This was such a fun process to put together. First, I had to build up the background and the sandy ground using a sand coloured towel and sand poured on top of it. Then I placed the fully built lego set and the mini figures in their places.  I then started taking the completed set apart bit by bit and set up the mini figures to look like they were building the set. Finally I took the entire set apart.

 Please do click on the images to get a closer view of all those pieces.

Quilt Patterns

A dear friend of mine is a quilter.  Not like the kind of quilts you imagine when I say the word "quilter".  

I should actually call her an artist.  She uses cloth to make the most beautiful works of art.  The following images were inspired by her beautiful art.

I use macro photos that I have taken of Paua shells and crop them into the shapes I need to fit. I know that abstract photos might not be everyones first choice, but I love the patterns and the movement in the colours that can be found in Paua shells.

click on each image for a larger version.

Kiwiana

Kiwiana: Items or artefacts relating to or produced in New Zealand. 

Our first photo club competition of the year was Kiwiana.  One of the foods I chose to photograph is a candy that is called " Jaffas".  There are stories of how people would take these round candies to the movies and roll them from the back of the cinema to the front.  With this in mind I decided to set up my candies to look a bit like the seats in a movie cinema.  

When I was buying this bag of Jaffas, the person who was bagging my groceries dropped the bag and the result of dropping the bag was just one of these candies was damaged.  I loved how the damage in the candy made it stand out and be a little different from all the others.

Weather

A few years ago, we had a competition with the theme of "Weather".  It was such a fun competition.  I entered this photo I took while we were in Tanzania of a lovely family that was up for a challenge.  While I stood under an umbrella they got completely soaked in a massive downpour all while mostly seeing the humour in it.

2021 Exhibition

This year we were able to hold a photographic exhibition in a local library.  We had about sixty entries from our club members.  Each member could submit six images and up to three would be chosen to be shown in our exhibition.   Three of my images were selected for exhibition. 

This image was one I entered into our black and white competition at the beginning of the year.

I had set out some shells on the glass table top of our coffee table and I was really inspired by the reflections that I saw in the glass.  I had all sorts of shells initially but decided I liked the simple colour palate and repeating colour and texture of this image.

As you might have noticed over the years I have taken many photos with an orange and blue theme. 

Portfolio Competition 2021

Our portfolio competition is a competition that is supposed to show our versatility as a photographer while if possible having a theme that runs through the images.  One of the other requirements is that these photos are supposed to have been taken within the last 12 months.  

 I did not actually see that there was a sort of geometric theme running through these images until after I had finished them and turned them in.  

  I spent an afternoon photographing these images on our coffee table in the living room  Not any special lighting, just using light from our window and a reflector. I wanted to do something abstract with these images.  Each piece is a macro image of the inside of a Paua shell.

  A dear friend of mine is a quilter and after spending some time looking at her quilts, I was inspired to use these images in a quilt design.  I love the bright colours and textures that can be found when you look closely at these shells.

I love the expression that can be captured with photography.  I spent about ten minutes talking to my model asking her questions and waiting for her responses. She has such a lovely expressive face. My intention was to just use a single image but realized as I lined up these faces together in my editing program that there was much more to her than just one expression.  It was such a fun experience and I hope to do more of these expression experiments in the future.

This image was quite a challenge for me.  I set up for it three times and then took it all down unable to

"make it work".  Then, as I was running out of time, I walked out to our mandarin tree and picked a mandarin and started peeling it.  I was looking at the translucent quality of each segment of the fruit.

 I decided I was going to make it work this time and rushed out to my garage, set all of these pieces into place and snapped the image. 

 I was pleased to receive the trophy for the best digital set for these images.

Feel free to click on each image to enlarge them.  

Low light

 The brief for out lowlight competition was not complicated.  Take a photo with a long exposure time.  I realized I had not taken any long exposure photos in a few years. I found some I had taken about 5 years ago.  

The first is of a tunnel that we drove through on a visit to my friend in Hawaii.  The second of a firework display I took while photographing a friends birthday party.

I love the warm tones of these images. I also love that you can see the camera movement in these images.  It was so much fun to experiment with both of these images.  Feel free to click on the images to see them larger.

Natural History

 This year for our natural history competition I entered this image of a squirrel.  I love this image and think it has so much personality.  It was taken at the height of summer in Texas so it was around 102 degrees F (or 39 degrees C).  We were taking a walk and I saw him laying there on the ground looking just as hot as I felt.  

Photojournalism

This year in our photojournalism competition, I entered two images that I had taken years ago.

One of my nephew when he was probably about 4 or 5 years old and one of a dear friend that I got to know in Tanzania.  The idea of this competition was to make sure each image told a story or made you want to know more of what was happening in the image.  

The image of the young woman holding the donkey skull in the desert won the top digital photojournalism image.   

We had driven out to the desert to find some filming locations for the coming week and my friend wandered off. When she returned she was holding this skull and was looking into the setting sun.  

Black and White

Our first competition for this year was Black and White. I love this competition because the only guideline is the colour and you can enter anything you like.  I chose to enter images that were taken in the last year. 

One image I chose was of seed pods.  They can look menacing or dangerous or otherworldly.  I found a whole pile of them outside our community centre months ago and collected them thinking that I would eventually make an image of them. I went home that day and started to consider how I would photograph them.  My husband carved a dome for me out of styrofoam and I painted it black then went about threading the stems of the seed pods into the dome.  I placed it on a black back ground and started photographing away.  As I spent more time looking at this group of seed pods I noticed how the group of them actually looked a lot like one of the individual seed pods, I thought I would make a diptych out of them.  But I wasn't happy with how it looked I wanted them closer to each other. I ended up cutting each image in half and had them touching and lined up.  I loved how they turned out.  Click on the image to zoom in.

Portfolio Competition

One of my most favourite of all the competitions our photo club has is Portfolio. 

The goal of this competition is to show the versatility of the photographer.  Ideally, the photographer would enter three images that show three different genres of photography. 

As you probably know from previous posts, I really enjoy doing food photography and portraits.  So, two of my entries were portrait and food.

The portrait image is a quiet portrait I photographed in studio with butterfly lighting.  I placed my strobe above and centred on my models face so that she would have that lovely tiny shadow under her nose.

I have posted this image before but it was modified previously, so wanted to show the image as I entered it into this competition.

The food image I entered was one that had been brewing for quite some time.  I had been quite fascinated by the colours found in blood oranges when they are cut open.  I managed to find some blood oranges at the veggie shop and decided this was my chance.  They ended up being quite difficult to work with as they stained everything around them.  I chose to change my focus to strawberries but keep the blood oranges in the images as a supporting role.  I also hid a little nod to my son who loves video games in my image with sugar cubes in the shape of tetris blocks.

I found the third image to be quite difficult as I wanted it to be different but also sort of inline with the theme of the other images.  I finally decided on more of a design study which included abstract images that were in effect macro images of Paua shells.  I was inspired by a quilting pattern I had seen recently, so decided to go with a Paua Quilt design.

I hope you enjoy these images and are able to see the pinkish, reddish and black theme that unifies these images:

Food Photography Workshop

In May of last year, I led a food photography workshop.  In preparation for that, I did two set ups then moved my lighting around and took photos of those set ups with the lights shining on different spots in the images. These are the images I liked the most from that exercise.

Natural History Competition

This competition took place in August 2018.   I entered them into a Natural History Competition.  The deal with Natural History is you can not edit things out of the image.  So here they are: A lion and a swallow.

Portrait Competition

I realized today that it has been over a year since I last posted.
I will try to catch up on some old images, but I thought you might be interested in my portrait competition images.
My husband says that people might be interested in the behind the image story so I will try to do that more.
This first image was inspired by one pf my photo school teachers, Greg Heisler.  He used gels to change the colour of the light that illuminated the subject of his images.  I have not really done that before in my photography so, I thought I would try it out.  Here is the image I ended up with:

The second image I entered was one I have been thinking about taking for a long time and finally got the opportunity to this past weekend. 

I have been wanting to try out beauty dish photography for a few years and had not taken the time to set the lights up and just take the photo. I love the tiny shadow that the beauty dish creates under the nose and the shaping of the cheek and jaw line  So this is the image I came up with for our competition.

 I love this image in colour.  The image with half black and white and half colour goes a little bit against what I would normally do with portraiture.  Because it was a competition though, I wanted to do something a little extra with my post processing.  

I hope you enjoy.