Happy new year! I took a long, and productive break from blogging and, to some extent, from social media. I hope you all had a great end of 2021.
This will be a relatively long post. No one is going to read it entirely, I know. Feel free to jump to the sections that interest you, or simply look at the photographs near the end.
During December, 2021, I got busy with the following:
CHANGES TO THE WEBSITE
I decided to move my website entirely to Artspan, leaving on WordPress only this blog. The site is now integrated with the blog in the menus.
During the process of populating my new site, I have only included my recent work in series centered on botanicals, but I might expand my repertoire later. Narrowing down is helpful if you want to be found by search engines.
NEW FORMAT FOR THIS BLOG
Most of my last years’ posts were attempts to glorify my own photography. I have planned a few changes that hopefully will introduce some variety. In future posts, I will also write a little about photography books and websites and the work of other photographers that have inspired me. I will also try to incorporate very brief tutorials in Photoshop, showing how I obtain certain “especial” effects in my own work.
BOTANICAL PORTFOLIO uploaded to GEO GALLERIES
I uploaded a selected sample of my B&W botanical photography portfolio to my Finerworks’ permanent inventory. FinerWorks is a large print-on-demand company that, among other things, can be used to fulfill and drop ship orders from sites like Etsy, Shopify and SquareSpace. I am planning on using that inventory to fulfill print orders. And since Finerworks allows users to sell prints directly through their (relatively new) Geo Galleries, I decided to try it out. If you are curious to see how Geo Galleries looks like, click here.
PLACES I have been
On the 11th and 12th of November, 2021, my friend Beth and I went to Santa Cruz, CA. Since we both have day jobs and commitments that prevent us from travelling on the fly, we ended up there on two sunny days. Ugh! Photography was very challenging on the first day, when we visited the Natural Bridges State Park, to see the monarch butterfly migration.
After that, we headed to the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, for botanicals.
We then went photograph the sunset at the Wilder Ranch State Park:
The next day, Beth and I decided to go for forest photography at the Felton and Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park. That paid off a little better, since most of the trail is in the shade, inside the forest. I had fun photographing the many different places the Big Leaf Maple lands after it falls from the tree.
On the last week of November, I visited the Quarry Hills Botanical Gardens in Sonoma, near Glen Ellen, CA. That garden is dedicated to Oriental flora, and there are always interesting new subjects to photograph there, plants I don’t regularly see in the Sacramento area. I was after the seedpod of an Oriental species of Magnolia (featured photograph), which I found, along with a few other curiosities.
December was a very calm month in photography. The weather was promising for landscape, but the gasoline is expensive, and preparations for Christmas involve spending money. I did take photographs at home though, for my new photo series, tulip curves (more on that later).
I am looking forward to a new year of blogging, and I hope that I will be able to write blog posts that are informative, engaging and fun. Have a great 2022!
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It is all about the light 
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