Fall Fair Time

It's that time of year again. I've submitted 9 images to the fall fair; 2 art pieces and 7 photos. I wish more people (artists) put stuff into the fair...I don't know if they can't be bothered, think it's beneath them, or plain forgot.
I do this because I like sharing my stuff and for the exposure. Ribbons are nice too but i want my name to become familiar to the community. Although I do professional quality assignments in portraiture, design and so forth and am slowly building up my portfolio of published work I do not consider myself a 'professional' yet in that I have not yet registered myself as a business. Probably next year...but for now since my opportunities for photography are the same as everyone else I don't feel bad about trying for the aggregate prize!

I've also put in a dried floral arrangement that I stupidly did not take a picture of. It's theme is traditional European (grain, poppies, cornflowers) with the addition of a weirdly curled onion stalk and embellished with a bit of sparkly pipe-cleaner bent in the shape of the poppies the pods came from. Opium poppies. That's right...a lot of people grow Opium poppies as an ornamental flower in their gardens although they may call them 'bread seed poppies'.

Just recently the police 'busted' an opium poppy grower in Chilliwack, B.C. who was on the verge of harvesting 8 acres of pods to make an Asian tea additive- lol! It's kind of ludicrous but I guess they had to since it's a controlled substance...8 acres isn't exactly a flower bed! Anyway, I got a few nice compliments from the people running the fair over it and it's mostly because of the weird onion. Will post picture later.

For Digital Art/Open:


An older piece for a dramatic Digital Art contribution:


My specialty has a category; Panorama. This particular image(s) is Kamloops, B.C.


For People/Open:


Again in the People/Open category:


Boxing Marmots- a fairly recent picture for wild animals category:


My little soul sucker for Domesticated animals:


Fine arts...an unashamed Trekker I am!:


For fine art a portrait of the che-F:) :


A cowboy in the action category:

On Photography and the Web

This is just a bit of a rant because I need to vent.
Let it be said that I am a photographer who had created a website from basic html code and was formerly quite happy to use Microsoft's browser and programs for those things that they USED to do well. :(

Bigger
The only reason I had left to use Internet Explorer as a web browser was because I could edit the html code directly in Notepad using the 'view source' command. This was the old version of Internet Explorer that comes on my disc.
Since I've decided to play it safe and enable automatic updates Internet Explorer got updated and I can no longer use the 'view source' to edit my code. A MAJOR MISTAKE ON MICROSOFT'S PART WAS TO ALIENATE SOME OF IT'S LAST FANS BY ROBBING US OF THAT FUNCTION. NOW I HAVE TO USE ANOTHER EDITOR BECAUSE NOTEBOOK ITSELF IS SUCH A USELESS LITTLE PIECE OF GARBAGE WITHOUT BIG BROTHER IE TO BOSS AROUND.
This is why I've been delayed on updating my website. Now might be a good time to mention what all goes into an update:
1/ Sorting the latest batch of photos and making thumbnail versions (a subject unto itself that would include tweaks and copyright info)
2/ Writing up the new pages that correspond to the new photos- not too tough; mostly copy/paste. This could actually be the biggest step depending on how much additional info goes onto each page.
3/ Creating the new archive at the Evil Site that is Photobucket- while still free, I don't recommend it to anyone- I have to be very careful when I upload that I don't inadvertently hit an ad!
4/ Upload the new pages to the server with an FTP program.
5/ Check all new pages and make corrections where necessary- really the most tedious thing.
6/ Back it all up- 3 times.
I'M GOING TO REITERATE MY DISGUST, DISAPPOINTMENT, AND DISDAIN FOR MICROSOFT BECAUSE OF THEIR DISABLING THE EDITING FUNCTION WITHIN IE. Why did they do this??? It was the most wonderful of conveniences to write code that could immediately be updated with a 'save' and 'refresh' command. GONE NOW! And the thing is you can't downgrade IE so what's the point in even having it on the computer anymore???

Feb. '10 update

A few weeks ago I finished uploading most all of my 2009 pictures to my stock gallery- a big chunk of that website done- just some captioning to do. Now I feel a bit freer to update more specialized galleries such as the carnival people of (primarily) West Coast Amusements, which is a company I worked on for quite a few years in the 90's. Basically it was there that I started to really get into portrait photography alongside the pencil portraiture that I was already then known for. Looking through those photographs is interesting in that it's not always obvious if I was improving...there are places in the sequence of images that shows plain old shutter bug shooting and then all of a sudden a rash of really nice portraits. It kind of speaks of the nature of the travelling lifestyle- rushing around a great deal of the time and only when we slow down and really look and consider our surroundings/subjects can we really see what it is that we're trying to capture.

Carnival People section is at the bottom.



I remember NOT remembering if I had shot so-and-so's portrait or not...there is a lot of repetition of some people and I know the flip side of that is there are people whose faces I missed. That was my goal at the time- capturing a ‘perfect' on-the-spot portrait with my camera...because that's how I aspired to draw portraits. (This obviously results in minimal success rates!) My attitude obviously changed along the way - it just doesn't happen that way often enough. I went through a lot of film (and pencil erasers) with a decent (but not exceptional) success rate of 1-2 out of a 36-exposure role of film if I'm being honest. Digital has improved photographic chances of success –even with a random approach, which I’m trying to avoid- but not the drawing! Anyway, I'm posting the good with the not-so-good and will eventually highlight my favourites.

I'm also engaged in another project of digitally enhancing old photos that my father took for the purposes of stock imagery. This is a kind of specialized type of image- what they sometimes call vintage photography and is usually incorporated in art or illustration projects. More on that another time...

Art show coming up next month and I just selected what I’m putting in- pencil portraits from last year. I’ve kind of kept my drawing to myself in my focus on digital art and photography but seeing as I did so many portraits that I’m pleased with I will show them. Most likely the ones below and larger ones can be found here.

Summer

Summer is here with a vengeance.
After a cold winter followed by somewhat less cold days and the occasional rain storm that passed for spring we are now baking in 35 degree weather. We've also had lightning storms the past week which ignited forest fires in the surrounding area. The current conditions make it very risky if you live in these parts and your home is located on a forested hillside that is peppered with just as many pine beetle ridden trees ( dead trees ) as green Ponderosas.
Fortunately Merritt is doing alright with just a few small fires that I heard of. Kelowna, which is about 125km east of us, had entire neighborhoods evacuated because of fire.

Smoke on the connector coming in from Kelowna

I don't mind the heat because we have air conditioning in the house for which I am so grateful- it allows me to work very hard outside in the garden...which is far from what it should be. We talked to a contractor and just to have the top soil removed and carted away was estimated at 4 hours of work at close to 500 dollars. We have a small lot that is full of all kinds of grass and weed- mostly weed which forms a dense network of tangled roots. My husband and I have been manually pulling it out with a pick axe and I think we are going to finish it this way rather than go with the contractor.

Classic cracking in hot weather!

Now that he is almost totally recovered it will go faster with two of us working on it...it turns out that it was not a broken blood vessel that caused his nose bleed- it was a major artery that runs alongside the brow bone. I suppose such a thing is easy to misdiagnose when the doctor on call only spends a few minutes with you and there's no one around who checks to see how much blood the patient has already lost. :\

Anyway, we also made a gym in the back of the house. This is something I've always wanted- a place to do pull ups, legs stretches etc.I don't have much upper body strength and now I can build it up again without having to fork out for a gym membership. It's basically wooden closet rods suspended on fence posts set in concrete blocks- very sturdy and most importantly, private. :)
And in all this we are trying to quit smoking again...down to half a pack a day from a full pack but it varies...the struggle goes on!

Heavy wind blowing the crud from the mill north

On the photography front I intend to expand to do weddings and portraiture. I went to the Community Futures Office in Merritt to find out anything I could about starting a business and was sent some literature via e-mail on what steps I would need to take and what steps I should take. I will be creating a web identity to reflect this and will advertise it under my own name I think...my current web site is undergoing an overhaul as I hit an obstacle with my image server that could only be solved with rather drastic steps.
On the bright side of that it will give me more of a reason to update this blog! As I get my galleries back on-line I will update so anyone who is particularly fond of a certain type of photograph may very well find it via the search engines.

Sister And Stuffs

Yesterday was a fun day- my sister came up from Surrey to visit for the day bringing along a lot of stuff she wanted to offload on me ( the pack rat! ) since she just moved to a new place. Clothes, books and the like- she's trying to streamline her life and knows that she can always get stuff back from me- lol
We showed her around to places she hadn't seen before- like Nicola Lake which is still quite frozen on the southern end.
While my husband pitched stones across the ice as far as possible my sister and I "walked on water" as I jokingly put it. It was the first time she had really seen a mass of water this size frozen to the point where people could walk on it- it's still a novelty to me despite what I witnessed in terms of testing the ice at the fishing derby last month at Mammette Lake.

We also drove out to Lower Nicola for a cruise after popping into the Courthouse Gallery for a quick peek at the art that's now up from all the local artists and photographers.

Bigger view at DA
Edit: I've since decided to change the name of this piece to 'Haida Girl'.
I met a few people who I had seen on the first day when I brought my works in and was introduced to Opie who is a well known painter and jewelery maker ( carving in metal and gold ). He liked my print 'Spirit Of Haida' and bought it! I'm so proud of this because I'm not native myself but have a real love of that artistic heritage and Spirit Of Haida is my portrayal of the beauty of it and how it can inspire beauty. That was really a special feeling for me.

Bigger view at DA
Later on that evening my husband and I went to the official opening where I met a few more familiar faces and found out that one of my photos 'The Harness Maker's House' had been selected to win an award for the heritage category. Can't beat a day like that! Unfortunately their web site isn't updated to show what all the local artist's contributed so I will wait until the newspaper comes out to get some more info on the results.
Also in Merritt the Olympic torch passed through town. Merritt is really gearing up for the 2010 Olympics.
On another subject, my husband just became a member of the Outdoor Writers Of Canada and I'm quite proud of him for that achievement. He has been writing about and promoting hunting- in practical experience and from the preservation of the heritage it represents- for a long time now so this is kind of like an official stamp of recognition of that.