Painterly... or messy?

It was a beautiful sunny day yesterday and as I drove by, a red maple bush was just catching the sun. I got home but the bush kept calling my name, so I took my camera down the street and took some long exposures, moving my camera to deliberately blur parts of the photo. Tonight I tried layering a few of them - painterly, beautiful or just a big blob??? What do you think?

Send any comments directly to me by email: judiangel@gmail.com Comments section below doesn't seem to work for me. Thanks.

En français, s'il vous plâit!

Hello Friends,

We have just returned from a month in rural Burgundy, France where (surprise) I took loads of photos. From 2000 + I've edited them down to around 70. Click on this link if you want to see the whole album of edited pics...     France photos

Colin doesn't really get my interest in cemeteries, (although he happily went looking for them with me)... well I don't fully understand it, either.... but I was really drawn to them. Every small village has its own graveyard, some of them very old, most of them set high on a hill. I think I like the dramatic settings. I guess it's nice to have something to pursue when doing other things on holiday.

I had intended to do lots of Photoshop while I was away, but alas friends, wine, food, hiking all got in the way. :) So that's next on the photo agenda.

Hope some of you get the cemetery thing...

About Feedback...

As I go about life, I meet some of my friends who are following this blog and realize that people are sometimes actually looking at it. That said, I'd just like to make it clear that any comments you might make by 'replying' to a notification email, aren't getting to me.

So, if you do want to make any comments on anything you see in the blog, it's best to email me directly at

judiangel@gmail.com

Thanks. :)

Summer Musing

Here's some of the things I've been up to this summer...

I'm still working on learning more about compositing...combining elements from different images... 

Here are a few more early results... The 'flying carpet' was actually a learning exercise with someone else's images.. ... but the mind boggles with the possibilities... 

In the first image, the so-called 'super moon' taken on the Sunshine Coast, just didn't look big enough to me, so I made it larger, but then also had to increase the size of the reflection in the water. 

In this picture I added all the flying birds which I had photographed separately from the original shot. 

And finally in this exercise, I put in the square picture of the clock, but then distorted its shape. Notice how I also created the corresponding shadow and changed the flying carpet so it was darker underneath and lighter on top. The birds were also layered in independently. 

Still loving photographing the grandkids. And why wouldn't I? They are so cute!! 

Hannah

 Emmy

Cormac

Aidan

A whole new direction... Compositing

Don't ask!! I do love made up words, but this one seems to be designed for Photoshop. I'm reading and trying to teach myself more about how to layer different images in ways that make for a more interesting final product. Still lots more to learn, but I was happy with the way my first effort turned out.

A Sunny Window on the World

Got inspired by a really good 4-day course on Travel Photography

Before all the babies arrived I took this fun course... I learned lots from Rick Hulbert, a really good teacher and an architect/planner who was responsible for planning the whole north side of False Creek. The class showed me more about how to 'see' when travelling... plus many little tricks to make buildings stand up tall, what to include and what to leave out of a shot - architecture, street scenes on and on...

It's fun being a tourist in my own town... these are a few random images from the four days of shooting during that class...

Selfie... haha

See the geese?

OK, I was spying on them.. but they were having so much fun! 

As always comments are welcome... And if you have nothing else to do, you can visit my website that has recently been updated. judiangel.com

Thanks for being there... Jude

Baby break

And baby #2, Ruby, arrived on Mother's Day. Here she is... the little sweetie...

I hope to post some more photos from a workshop I took a couple of weekends ago... once the excitement of baby Grayson dies down. :)

I haven't been blogging but I've been taking photos and....

thinking about focus....  not camera focus, but the kind of focus that made me start the blog in the first place. 

Meantime, I hope you missed me because I missed you. We've been travelling in the South Eastern US and Washington DC, so I have been making pictures. (See below.)

I think I've finally reached some conclusions about my photographic work....

• It's OK to have different photographic interests as long as I don't get so scattered that nothing hangs together. A few concurrent projects is OK. 

• I need to spend more time sharing (some might call this marketing). 

• So from now on I'm going to be entering more competitions, submitting images for stock websites, updating my own website more often, creating small projects like photo cards and looking to have my work shown in more venues.

And now that I and you know where I'm headed.... I'd be happy to receive more ideas from you on how and where to share my work. Short of spending every weekend at a market stall, all ideas can be on the table. 

So, about the US trip. We visited some wonderful historic sites and of course, there's nothing like Washington, DC. The Americans seem to know how to do museums very well. I haven't finished ploughing through the 1500 +/- images that were left after the first cut, but these portraits from Virginia's Colonial Williamsburg seemed to emerge as a nice little grouping. 

After you've finished looking at the photos, I've posed a couple of questions for you.

I kind of think these are more interesting travel photos than just buildings or museums. Do you agree?

Aside from posting these pictures on this blog, or my website, what else could I do with them? These people genuinely work at their trades within this living museum and are happy to be photographed....BUT...  I don't have model releases for them, so I can't sell them to a stock photo site. (I don't think.) 

Would anyone be interested in or even care about these photos? Or are they just a more satisfying way to take travel photos?

OK.. folks, your turn!! If it works for you, you can use the Comments section at the end of this page. Otherwise, some of you have kindly sent me emails with your feedback. Let the discussion begin!! And thanks... 

Back from Calgary and its big skies and bright sunshine

If this arrived as an email I suggest viewing this post online. Click on judiclick.blogspot.com

I took a break from this blog while grand-parenting in Calgary over the last week. I wondered whether perhaps I was blogging too intensely anyway since I heard from so few people after my last post. Please know that I do really appreciate your comments and feedback and you can email me if you can't make the comments thingy work. (I'm trying not to sound too pathetic and desperate, here!)

To find an upside to Alberta's freezing cold and to take a more project-based approach to my picture-taking, I decided to focus on the winter prairies near Calgary. For three days, after dropping Emmy at daycare, Colin and I drove out of the city, seeking interesting landscapes. I certainly didn't need all the lenses, tripods, filters etc because I was more grateful for my gloves than any other piece of equipment. Just too cold to be fancy. 

Below is a small sampling of what I captured. I'm interested in whether you think this type of work might be appealing enough for a show or other type of commercial use (like stock). Or is it too much like everyone's prairie scenes? What suggestions do you have for how to use these types of images... and there are lots more where these came from. I had a busy three days! 

Of course this still doesn't answer the burning question about what kind of photographer I want to be, but at least it's a project and I may be getting closer. And I do like the simplicity of this type of image.....  Hello out there.... :) Please comment below, or email me. Thanks. 

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