Bracelets and April BJP

I’m so excited to announce that my bracelets have been posted to my website! You may view them here.

I’ve been diligently working on my April journal page. It represents my moving and settling in to my new home journey. As the garden has been blooming in bright colors, I decided to use a vibrant color palette to reflect that and my blooming happiness. I’m hoping to finish it this week.

My camera renders oranges and reds so intensely that I had to really tone down this photo quite a bit in Photoshop. It still appears like the background color is overtaking the colors of my beadwork. I don’t know how I feel about the empty part in the middle of my heart. I’m thinking of filling it up with something, possibly pearls. I may leave it empty though to represent an open heart which I aspire to have. What do you think?

I’m starting to meditate about my May page. I want it to represent a link to my very first page from last year called “The Garden in my Heart”. Now that I have a physical garden once again, there will be a connection with that. I’m still thinking about it…

Creative Everyday 2008

Jan9

In 2007, I discovered how important it was to me to commit to a daily creative habit. Living my life in an artfully expressive way is as important to me as breathing. So, with this commitment in mind, I was excited to join Leah Pilken’s challenge to be Creative Everyday. This is a low stress challenge to incorporate creativity into your life on a daily basis. If you haven’t visited her blog, I encourage you to go check it out. A special thanks to Sue for sharing and pointing me in that direction.

When I woke up yesterday morning, I was completely wowed by the sunrise and moved to get creative with my camera. I love to be creative with my camera because it helps me focus (pun intended) on a unique and special moment that has moved me enough to capture it in a photograph. As I listed in a previous post, one of my goals for this year is to experiment with transfer methods so I may incorporate my photography into my artwork in some way, whether it be in my jewelry or in my mixed media work. In my sunrise photograph, I see a 4-color combination that I would love to incorporate into a piece of jewelry, too.

How are you creative everyday?

White Balance

Oct24

One of the disadvantages to having a camera with auto features is that you rely on the camera to just do all of the technical work for you. Point and shoot. Easy, right? Even auto focus which is a wonderful feature for my eyes pushing half a century old. Since I started using my Nikon D40 camera, I’ve been taking mainly outdoor shoots and indoor shots using the popup flash. Now that I am using my new light tent, I am taking photos with flourescent lighting. My first couple of shots (in my last post) came out so dark and flat looking even though I had my camera on a tripod and was able to slow down the shutter speed. I was getting quite frustrated and was beginning to doubt my new purchase. I always had better luck with natural lighting so why not just stick with that, I said to myself. Then my wonderful SO mentioned 2 little words that changed my focus (pun intended). White balance. White balance? Ooooohh, the camera has to be told that the lighting in the photos is from flourescent bulbs because, in essence, different kinds of lighting have an effect on the colors in your subject. Somehow I knew this but I never really thought about it in depth before. So, I pulled out the Nikon D40 bible that I had shoved in my camera bag, thinking I would never read all of that. I turned to the white balance section and sure enough, there is a setting for flourescent lighting. Now I was starting to feel pretty dumb about all of this. Those gremlin voices were screaming, “Geesh Karen, you’ve been taking photographs for how many years??” So, I let them have their say and just chalked it up to a learning experience. So, without further ado, here are my latest experiments.