Color Series - Blue

This week we are exploring the color blue! I was heavily inspired by a variety of blue flowers I found in my yard. 

This flower was part of a wildflower seed pack that sprouted up - so far this is the only blue flower I have seen from this plant.

The three photographs above are all from the same plant, just shot in a different way.

 Part of the American Flag that was in my front yard.

 A blue frog hiding amongst green leaves at Mystic Aquarium. 

These last two photographs are a Bombay bottle and a wine bottle that I posed in still life fashion.

Color Series - Green

This week we are exploring the color green! With this color I was obviously mainly inspired by all the green foliage outside (leaves and grass) among a few other things I found.

 I saw this grass growing around the drain and thought it looked interesting how it surrounded the drain like that. 

 Some green moss I found on a summer hike.

 A close up of green leaves.

 Some clovers I found in the yard.

 A green garden hose spread out on a bed of rocks. 

 A green lizard that lives at Mystic Aquarium.

 A different view of the clovers from above. 

And lastly, a different variety of green leaves from a tree in my back yard. 

Color Series - Yellow

This post is the first in a photo series of color photography that I am doing throughout the year. With these photographs, I won't be sharing tips with them because that would obviously be a bit redundant. Instead, I will share what I was inspired by and what I looked for with each of the colors I do this year.

I found this flower by itself in my yard and decided it would be perfect, I ended up placing it a few different places to see what location looked the best with it and loved the way it looked on my sketchbook - as shown above. 

 Since lemons are yellow, I also figured those would be a good choice. With this photograph, I placed them randomly on top of each other on a cutting board. 

 A yellow color pencil was next, although I wish I had found a few more and thrown them in there as well. 

 This pooh cup was also a good choice, and was the focus of a lot of my photographs. 

 Yellows complementary color is purple, so I used this purple pillow with yellow flowers to show how well these colors work together. 

This is another lemon photograph, but with this one I lined them up and ended up really liking the way this looks. 

Fashion Photography

Fashion photography is used to showcase items such as clothing and accessories like hats, sunglasses, and jewelry. With the fashion photography that we often see in magazines, the photographs tend to be more high fashion than the ones that I chose to show below. The photographs I chose to display show the simpler side of fashion photography - simply showcasing an every day article of clothing. The photographs below showcase a dance costume, a hat, a hat and sunglasses, a pair of boots, a romper, a scarf, a pair of sunglasses, and a pearl earring.

Here are my top 3 tips for taking fashion photography-

1) Experiment with both simple fashion photographs and more complex ones, find what works for you!

2) Don't be afraid to have your subject pose in a more uncommon way, as this can showcase the piece in a different way.

3) Lastly, you can edit your photographs in a way that showcases the fashion piece even more. An example of this is the scarf photograph, I turned this black and white so that the emphasis was on the white scarf.  

Photographs That Didn't Make the Cut 2017

For my last post of 2017, I wanted to take a look back at my posts this year and talk about why some of the photographs posted here didn't get chosen for their designated posts. When I take photographs for my blog, I try to take as many as I can so that I have a large variety to choose from. Then I sift through those and find the best ones to narrow them down to eight photographs. Most of the time I am able to weed photographs out because I don't like certain elements of them. Here are eight instances where this has happened with an explanation of what I didn't like about the photograph.

In this photograph, I didn't like how you couldn't properly see the zebras faces.

I didn't like the angle of this photograph because it makes the whale look oddly shaped. 

This is another one that I didn't like the angle with, I wish I had taken it so that you could see the elephant's face straight on. 

This photograph looks fine on the surface, but to me it looked a little blurry and I don't like how it almost looks more like a painting than a photograph.

The lighting in this one is a bit yellow and I don't like how the one cookie is tipped over. 

The lighting in this one is a bit too bright in some spots, and I don't like how ordinarily plain this photograph is. 

This photograph was a tough choice for me because on the one hand I can see it is kind of blurry, but it makes it look foggy which adds an interesting effect. However, I wish I had zoomed in to the trees a bit more so that the railing of the boat wasn't visible. 

This is another photograph that felt a bit too plain for me, I also should have cropped it a bit so that the sweater in the bottom wasn't visible - but I already figured I wasn't going to use this photograph for its designated post. 

Winter Wonderland 2017 Photoseries

For this post, I was inspired by the snowstorms we recently got and I decided to go outside and shoot off a series of wintery photographs. With these photographs I particularly liked the ones that had some color in them besides the white of the snow - the color added a pop to an otherwise white photograph.

The two main things I would advise for taking winter photographs outside would be to bundle up so you don't freeze, and to be cautious of slippery snow or icy patches. 

Connecticut Trolley Museum Winterfest

The Connecticut Trolley Museum is a location that offers a few different things. They offer Rails to the Darkside in October (a haunted trolley ride and walkthrough attraction) and during the winter they do Winterfest and the Tunnel of Lights - a trolley ride through the woods to look at lights. The trolley runs from 5-9 pm on select nights throughout the month. Tickets are $3 for kids under 4, $10 from 4-12 years, $12 for adults, and $11 for seniors - the tickets are discounted if you are a museum member. Lines can get a bit long depending on what time you show up, but they do move along pretty fast. I will say that the trolley ride was a bit boring, but it might be fun for younger kids. The inside of the museum was lit up nicely though.

Here are my top 3 tips if you plan to go to Winterfest- 

1) Dress warm, especially if you are going to go on the trolleys!

2) There is an open wagon and a closed trolley, if you don't mind being cold, the open wagon is fine - but if you want to be a bit warmer - sit in the closed trolley.

3) It is a bit icy in some spots there - so just be cautious of where you are walking. 

Here is a link to their webpage on Winterfest if you want to check it out - www.ct-trolley.org/events/winterfest-and-the-tunnel-of-lights/