In Retrospective

Three-quarter of the year 2017 has gone by, and I found myself making no major accomplishment of anything outside of my comfort zone in respect of photography. My photo library is small in comparison with previous years and nothing much stands out that excites me. I blog for the sake of learning photography and I am not too thrilled when I don’t feel that I’ve made progress in my content or the images I posted.  Instead of keeping up my weekly posting schedule, I make a decision to post only when I am inspired and have something meaningful to talk about. I need more time to be further educated and experiment with new ideas and concepts.

I recently converted my old posts at blogger.com to WordPress. These posts were written at the elementary stage of photography adventure. I can see what I can do better to tweak the composition or use the software I’ve since learned to edit each picture.  This is another item on my to-do list to go back and rework some of the pictures.

I love to photograph flowers but I want to try something different either through the camera or the editing. As always, I like the dreamy and blurry look, but sometimes a touch of dainty detail adds a sense of reality.

We were through several really cold weather and ice has now become my favorite subject. On a hot day like today (high 96), I can look at this image and be feeling a chilling breeze. Believe it or not. This image was selected to be on the cover of a postcard used to invite people to come to the art show I attended.

Earlier this year, I received a notification from Facebook informing me that this sailboat picture has received 4654 views. It was just a shot I took at Shore Acre Park in Coos Bay, Oregon during Christmas time two years ago. If FB is true with the number, it is surely an encouragement.

For my college reunion, I was fully occupied during the tulip season this year. This is the first year when I did not go to Woodenshoe Tulip Farm. I can never get tired of being there and crawling on the ground for hours and hours.   You can come out with hundreds of different shots by simply shooting from different locations of the farm, under various light conditions, and with varieties of lenses. Every year I brought home completely different images.

For work, I have my share of intensive traveling. Now in retirement, I don’t have an equal opportunity to travel and I missed all the pictures taken during the trip.

This story will be retold for years to come. We saved the baby Stella Jay when he fell out of his nest and had him stay overnight in our house in July 2010. His parents came to claim their baby the next morning and the baby (we named it B.J.) jumped down to the ground and hid in a cedar tree behind our house. In the next week, we watched how he was trained to fly. To our amazement, this bird came back to see us many times. I don’t always have the chance to take his picture. But, how do we know it’s B.J.?

Stella Jay is very loud and they usually behave aggressively. All the Jays showed up for the food in our feeder except this one. I have not seen B.J. eat the food from our feeder. He usually stood on the railing or the tree limb and looked into our house for a long time. While other Jays are making their harsh calls, B.J. was always quiet. His demeanor and our mystical emotional attachment to him help us to identify him. It has been seven years. We often wonder if he is still alive.  Why do I like to photograph birds? This story explains it.