Spring in Minnesota

Last weekend I went home to Minnesota to be with my family right after my grandma passed away. It was so nice being home with family, and Minnesota in the spring is one of my favorite places on earth. My parents’ yard is amazing; I am so incredibly lucky to be able to call this my home, and to have grown up there.

It had been a while since I was home during this time of the year, and it was interesting to see the difference in seasons between Kansas and Minnesota. In Minnesota everything had just started to bloom, and the leaves were just starting to get full on the trees. Spring in Kansas was long gone though; the tulips and lilacs had been done blooming for weeks, and the leaves had already started to become the dark green of summer.

At the funeral for my grandma the pastor mentioned that she had told him that after the incredibly harsh winter Minnesota had this year, she really wanted to live long enough to see the leaves on the trees and hot weather again. So as I sat on the back patio looking at the trees in the backyard, the leaves and the bright green of my surroundings meant even more to me.

 

Leaves

In my last post I mentioned that my work is now dealing with collections. I have just started with this process, and so have only been working with one collection so far. Every fall I have the tendency to pick up a few leaves that I find nice and pin them to my walls for a bit. The leaves actually sparked my first collection piece. I started by placing the leaves on my copy machine and making simple black and white photocopies I also scanned them to see what I thought of a digital, color image of the collection. I have over 200 leaves copied and I finally had to force myself to stop picking them up. Once I had a large number scanned I started to piece them into a large Photoshop file, which is what I am sharing with you all today.

 

Once I printed it out I realized that this is not the direction I want to go. The color and the format of the digital print are not doing what I want them to do, and so I will be leaving this behind for the time being at least. I debated sharing this here, but decided that I wanted this blog in part to be a place to show my progress and thought process on my work. I will be printing some copper plates this week and so will be sharing those with you as I work on them. Be on the lookout for another post soon!

299/366 – Colorful

I forgot to change my ISO after shooting with my Holga lens yesterday so this is suuuper noisy.

295/366 – Fall Explosion

A group project for a class animation turned in to a photo I really liked. When I get the stop motion video done that this is a part of, I will share that with you all too.

 

291/366 – Propagating

I replanted one of my succulents the other day, and decided to try to propagate some of the leaves. Basically all you do is gently pull off a leaf from the stem, let it dry out for a few days, and then place them on top of wet soil for a few weeks (or so I have read). I had planted one leaf in some soil a bit ago, and it grew roots but no other leaves. I’m hoping these do better so that I can have some new plants soon!

190/366 – Orange

*Thursday, November 1
I shot this yesterday morning when I was leaving my apartment to go to class. It was a wonderful site to start my day. And then I was so exhausted when I finally got home that I didn’t want to shoot anything else.

I am being so bad with this 365…

282/366 – Fall Confusion

I ordered a Holga lens for my Nikon last week, and got it in the mail yesterday. I went out shooting with it for the first time for my grad work this afternoon and decided to try out a double exposure with it. This is pretty much SOOC, just a bit of a contrast boost.

For those of you who may not know, a Holga is a cheap, plastic film camera. They have a plastic lens, and are known for their soft focus and heavy vignette. They now make lenses like this that can attach to DSLR cameras. Since my grad work is about Alzheimer’s I thought it would make more sense to be shooting with a lens that distorts and disturbs the images like this instead of getting “perfect” photographs.

On another note…I am finally all caught up.

280/366 – Saturated

*Monday, October 22
Monday I went out exploring for a bit, and found a pretty awesome location. I plan on figuring out some self-portraits for here at some point soon (hopefully).

Both of these were shot on my OM2 on Kodak Gold film

273/366 – Leaves

*Sunday, October 14
Sunday Chris and I were back in Lexington, and we went on a walk so that I could shoot some houses for my current grad work. We walked to the street where I used to live, and it made me a bit homesick for those times.

267/366 – Fall

I was in studio most of the day today, but while walking in I noticed this tree in the parking lot and grabbed a few shots.