Z is for...

Zippers and Zebras

Whilst I’m relieved to get to the end of the Alphabet, I’ll also miss it. Photography is a great form of mindfulness for me and something as simple as having a letter to focus on can give your mind a direction. Something to look for. A means to take more notice of your everyday surroundings.

There’s been a few people complete the challenge now and a few still working their way through. There’s no time limit. If you want to see what others have done just search the hashtag #debsisolationalphabet in Instagram. I’ve posted one photo per letter on Instagram but shared many more on my personal facebook page.

I’ve finished off with a Zebra that lives in a pot plant in the kitchen of our little two bedroom bunker in Fairfield in Melbourne where I am locked down for the pandemic with my partner and his teenage son. It’s a small kitchen with a big pot plant which seems a bit incongruous, until you remember that living without plants is like living without photography. Just not something you want to do.

24 of the 26 photos were taken in the bunker in either the lounge room or the kitchen. Most with window light, some with lamp light. None with flash as most of my gear is locked down at RMIT and I can’t get access to it. One photo (U) was taken in the driveway. And X was taken in a park as the restrictions started to lift and we were allowed out for recreation and not just exercise.

I’ve also included a self portrait of me with a zippered jacket. I’ve included my phone in the shot as I was using that to operate the camera. I think all of the photos were shot with my Fuji X-T2 but there might have been a sneaky shot with my partners Olympus camera. I’ll have to check the metadata to be sure. The Fuji is now going to get packed up and sent for repairs and a sensor clean. The LCD screen on the back isn’t working, which was a bit frustrating but not insurmountable. It got a lot easier once I got the wifi connection working and could operate the camera from the phone app, which is what I’m doing here. That made life a lot easier and a lot more fun. And I now know by heart that if I press the menu button, scroll left, down two, across one, down 6, it gets me to the wireless communication without having to look through the viewfinder to view the menu. Which is handy when the camera is on a tripod, wedged in a corner because I’m shooting with a 60mm lens on a crop sensor camera in a small space.

Now the goal is to keep keywording my files in Lightoom. Put some books together, enter some competitions and update my teaching materials ready for when Short Courses kick off again at RMIT (looking like September at this stage).

Cheerio
Deborah

PS. Special thanks to Steve and Tommy for letting me taking over the corner of the lounge room that gets the best light for the last several weeks and for being in some of the photos too.

Y is for ....

Yolk.

The penultimate post.
Feeling a bit lacking in inspiration.
I couldn’t find a Yak around the neighbourhood so here is a yolk.
ISO 200 60mm f/4 1/4sec Tripod
Backlit by the kitchen window.
Converted to Black and White to subvert the dominant paradigm (?!) (a yellow yolk is so obvious). So I use a cliche to explain avoiding a cliche.

Maranoa Gardens - Diamonds

No fog, no sun but still a delightful meander around the paths of Maranoa Gardens, an Australian Native garden in Balwyn, Victoria, Australia. And the best part was catching up with a very dear friend for the first time since lock down.
If I ever get sick or depressed, just drag my ass out to a park or garden to breath in the beauty. A walk in nature really is my happy place.
I mentioned that I'd be happier to receive a Banksia than a Diamond. So henceforth Banksia's will now be referred to as Diamonds and there were plenty of sparkling diamonds I was enamoured with.
I recommend listening to this with Ben Harper's Diamonds on the Inside as the sound track.
PS. I did make a nice mp4 slideshow with nice smooth transitions etc, but I can’t figure out how to embed it. You can see it on my Facebook page if you want to. CLICK HERE

X is for Xanthorrhoea

Commonly known as a Grass Tree but in this Alphabet Challenge x’s are hard to come by. In my younger days they were called Black Boys but that is now considered offensive.
As Covid-19 restrictions are gradually being eased it is great to be able to catch up with friends and go and take photos. We do really well with the Social Distancing until we slip into the old habit of ‘chimping’ our photos and sharing our results. Which in laymans terms means looking at the photo on the back of the camera and comparing our shots. Which means you have to get closer than 1.5m. Ahh, the things we took for granted.
I’ve chosen one image for the Alphabet Challenge and added the others into a slideshow because it was such an interesting plant to photograph (if you like abstract images). This one wasn’t flowering otherwise there’d be a stack more photos!.
I’ll share some other photos from Maranoa Gardens, where I found this beauty, in another post.

W is for Wish

I had a model lined up to blow the dandelion to make a wish but he had homework to do. I was in a bit of a crappy mood for no particular reason so i went for a walk and found a few dandelions and was playing around with placing them in front of the sun and then my battery died and despite having a spare with me every day for the last however many weeks, this day I didn’t. So I carried a few dandelions home and then they started to fall apart and I thought I’d scrap the idea and come up with something else. I stuck them in a vase on the kitchen bench and sat at the kitchen table to wait for the kettle to boil. I glared at the dandelions accusingly, as if it was their fault I was in a crappy mood, and all they did was look whimsical and dreamy with the kitchen light behind them so I picked up the camera and this is what I got. I was dodging all sorts of things in the kitchen behind them but love the colours and the creamy bokeh. I think it matches the mystical world of making wishes.

Fuji X-T2 60mm
ISO 400 - f/4 — 1/50sec Handheld.

I might keep an eye out for some more dandelions so I can make a series as I love the dreamy look of this.

Dandelion wish.

V is for Violets

I scrounged a few meagre violets from along the side of someones driveway while I was out walking. When I came home this wine glass with water in it was sitting on the bench, leftover from the night before when I was trying to manage the ISO alcohol consumption levels by have a BFD (Booze Free Day). I figure if you’re going to drink water instead of wine there’s nothing to say you can’t still use a wine glass. Anyway, that has nothing to do with the photo other than the wine glass was sitting on the bench and I popped the Violets in the water to keep them alive until I figured out how I was going to photograph them. As I looked at the Violets waiting for divine inspiration to hit me, I thought they looked quite cute in the wine glass and I remembered seeing some refraction shots where light bends and creates cool leffects and ‘voila! Bob’s your Aunty’ or some thing like that.

I would have liked to play around with flash but all my flash triggers are locked in a cupboard at RMIT and I can’t get access in the lockdown, so window light it was. Managing reflections on the glass (using black card) while still trying to keep light on the flowers was a bit of a bother. This also affected the overall exposure which also affected the colour of the cardboard in the background. It’s far from perfect but it’s good enough for an Alphabet Challenge.

I bought a vase at an Op Shop last week (you’ve no idea how excited I was to see an Op Shop open!) so I also did a Violets in a Vase shot because I feel like I get double points for alliteration in my art.

Fuji X-T2
ISO 200 - 60mm - F/5.6 - 0.9sec