Life is Beautiful

at every stage - especially if you are a rose!

Debris Photo Quilt Creatures

Working on some new creature designs made with digital photo quilts, created out of 2"x 2" square cuts composited from 16 themed photos.  The four above are a cat, giraffe, emu and a larger cat cut from a collage of street debris and steel road plate photos.

Disturbing the Vultures

Out and about in the neighborhood.

Variations on a Foggy Rodeo Beach at Dawn Theme

For a new self-directed photography class, I elected to shoot a series of photos based on invisible forces of nature, which were to focus on the unseen forces of gravity and magnetism. So, I got up at dawn to shoot high tide at Rodeo Beach.  It was very foggy.  My favorite picture didn't even include the tide.  And when I thought about it, I realized every photo ever shot represents invisible forces of nature.  So I shifted gears and decided to do variations on a theme instead.  The theme is my dawn photo session in the fog.  The variations reflect different techniques.  Here's what I ended up with:
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1 and 5:  Original printed photos, taken at Rodeo Beach, of Fort Cronkhite and of the high tide
2:  A digital patchwork of 3" square sections taken from several foggy photos
3.  The Fort Cronkhite scene printed on fabric, then quilted and machine and hand embroidered
4.  A digital composite of the Fort Cronkhite scene with a photo of my father in 1942, in the army during WWII, combined with a periodic table of the elements and a table of fundamental force particles.  My brainy father, who I miss, was a rocket scientist, chemist, lawyer, artist and photographer.  He would have understood the science.  He hated the army.
6:  A reshoot of the original foggy high tide photo with two wooden artist models playing with a red rubber ball.

Color Emerges Out of the Gray Fog

These photos were shot in Salem, Oregon, where it can be foggy.  It happened, however, that it was sunny when I took the pictures.  Am experimenting with adding gray gradients to color photos to illustrate the impact of a little color on a gray day.

Migratory Sea Birds

Terns and Seagulls at Drakes Beach in Pt. Reyes National Seashore.  It's September and I believe some, if not all, are getting ready to migrate.  Probably not happy I disturbed them! More photos from Drakes Beach and nearby Mt. Vision up soon @Shutterstock here:  https://www.shutterstock.com/g/Lucy+Autrey+Wilson

Fairies in Sausalito