We have to do homework with Lily every night – ten minutes of reading and at least one assignment.

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I spent an hour on a Saturday wandering the Philbrook museum gardens for textures to photograph. I posted them in large size to Flickr for free use in adding textures to your photography or web design. Link to Italian Garden Photo Textures.

This purple leaf is one of my favorites textures of the day.

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After some inspiration from David Hobby’s blog, I decided to do some water drop photos. The above water drop with the apple reflected inside the splash is one of the more popular photos I took of water drops. It is a fun indoor project that is perfect for a busy photographer because it can be accomplished at night and regardless of the weather.

For more inspiration, see two of my favorite water drop photographers on Flickr are SteveP and Drippy2009.

More of my strobist water drops photos on Flickr:

My backyard currently has around 300 orange Tiger Lilies in bloom. The photo opportunities are fantastic because of the amount of orange and green bokeh that is possible. My favorite was the one with the grasshopper perched on a lily petal.

A few more favorite photos:

The Tulsa Digital Photography Meetup Group was held at the Tulsa Zoo on June 13th. The event this time was a Photography Scavenger Hunt. At a zoo, you might wonder if that means trying to capture a list of photos of animals. However, the goal was to use a long list of photography techniques. Marty Colman (The Napkin Dad) gave each person the following list and a few minutes of instruction before sending us out in small groups to try to capture the list:

• Framing – Creating a focal point by framing with other objects
• Leading Lines – Foreground lines that pull the eye into the image
• High Key – Images that concentrate on the paler tones using flat lighting to avoid shadows
• Low Key – Images where the details are in shadows
• Shadows – Images depicting the shapely absence of light
• Frozen Action – Images where the action is stopped
• Movement Blur – Showing the presence or illusion of motion
• Abstract – Images are based strongly on lines, shapes, colors and form
• Silhouettes – Using backlighting to leave the subject blacked out
• Partial Portrait – Show only part of your subject and still convey a sense of their personality
• Negative Space – Accentuate your subject by using empty or monotonous space
• Fill the Frame – Fill the complete frame of your image with your subject.
• Ground Level – Gaining perspective from the ground up
• Monochromatic – Color on color, tone on tone without being black & white
• Reflections – The beauty of reflective surfaces
• Depth of Field – Only a distinct slice of your scene is in-focus, while the rest is blurred out
• Hyperfocal Distance – Foreground & distance in sharp focus
• Strong Diagonal – Using diagonal lines to pull the eye through an image
• Wide Angle – Using low focal length for increasing perspective
• Macro – Either your macro setting or to crop your image to get in close to your subject
• Repeating Elements – Two or more of the same object

I did not cover the entire list, but I did shoot a reasonable number of photos using those techniques. I plan to keep this list and use it again — possibly for a photowalk.

Here are some of my photos from the event:
Macro and Shallow Depth of Field

Repeating Elements

Monochromatic

Framing

More photo from the meetup:

In May, the Tulsa Digital Photography Meetup group went to the Tulsa’s Blue Dome Art Festival around First and Elgin in downtown Tulsa. The goal of this meetup was to photograph strangers which is something that I had never attempted before outside of sports.

I was nervous for the first few people that I asked but everyone was very friendly and no one said no.

Here are a few of the photos of strangers that I took.

The tie dye family who sells Tie-Dye t-Shirts.

Tie Dye Family

These people are not strangers since they are in the meetup group, but I could not pass up the opportunity to take a portrait framed with the hula hoops.

My favorite photo of the day did not include strangers. It was a simple, but colorful detail of the Tie Dye T-Shirts which is the lead image in this post.

There was another meetup in May for the Tulsa Digital Photography Meetup group. This one was in downtown Tulsa and featured several models. There were five strobist stations set up for people to learn how to shoot with off camera flash. Here is a description of my strobist kit which was used for the photo station at the top of the stairs.

The photo shoot was featured in the Tulsa World including this video:

Tulsa Digital Photographers from on Vimeo.

More of my photos:

Another recent Tulsa Digital Photography meetup was at the Tulsa Garden Center. I spent about 45 minutes in the greenhouse taking pictures of the orchids and other flowers.

There were yellow orchids…

… and white orchids.

And more while orchids and some that…

…were purple and white.

There were also some cactus and lilies.

At the Tulsa Digital Photography Meetup where I took the orchid photos, we also went to the Linnaeus Teaching Gardens and generally around Woodward Park.

These blossoms were not far from 21st street.

The Woodward Park herb garden:

There is a statue of Linnaeus at the entrance to the Gardens. This is a detail of his hand holding flowers:

This is a small oriental statue in the Linnaeus Teaching Gardens:

The Tulsa Digital Photography Meetup group went to the Philbrook museum in March 2009.  The assignment for the day was to turn the camera on B&W and look for textures rather than color.  Here were some of my photos for the day: