More photography

Hello again! I've just finished taking a 3-week photography class taught by John Perez at the Indianapolis Art Museum. It was fun; maybe a bit too much oriented towards cameras with manual controls, which I don't have, but I think I still learned a lot, including how to do some fun effects! Here are some of my colour shots. I've also posted some black and white shots on my other blog, Jill Blogz (see the link to the right).

One of the things we learned about was keeping some parts of the image sharp and blurring others (depth of field). Here are some examples.







And here are some fun effects created by moving the camera on purpose! The first one was taken while standing on an escalator.



And the next two I took at home. The first one was taken looking at my stash of fabric; the second one focused on one of my small quilts. Cool, eh??

More artsy stuff

School is underway and I feel like I'm never going to get caught up!! Aargh! But I did make time on the weekend to do some artsy things. I went on a paper-buying binge at a recent sale at JoAnn's with the intention of using it to make more little books. So on the weekend I decided I'd better get started.

I had some papers that reminded me of ... yeah, yeah ... a prairie landscape! So I made my little book. Then went into Photoshop to create some layouts of the pictures from my latest trip and glued them into my little book. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out! I was going to add some sewing, but was afraid I'd mess it up and accidentally stitch over a picture, so decided to quit while I was ahead.

Here are some pictures:








I'm looking forward to making more books! I cut out the pages for one with all the colours of the rainbow (each sheet of paper has pictures of flowers or leaves in the different colours). I also bought paper for a blue book, a pink one, a brightly-coloured one ... and probably a few more besides!

And finally .... my sunflowers are blooming! Each year I buy seeds at the dollar store (as you know, I'm not the world's greatest gardener; okay, I have a brown thumb!; so I don't see much point in spending a lot of money) and not much grows except for sunflowers. I was late planting them this year, so wasn't sure if they'd even flower, but here they are!