Colleen Easley

I bet you’re getting tired of me saying it was another rainy day; but hey, I live in western Washington, what can I say?  Anyway, you guessed it – another rainy day in Olympia.  But today I had to go grocery shopping, so I decided to take the camera along, knowing I should be able to get some sort of photo at the store.  I thought about doings something in the produce department, but on the way in, I spotted the outdoor flower stands with pansies and primroses; both of which grow well here in the winter time.

The store greeter must have thought I was absolutely nuts shooting pictures outside the store on a dark, rainy evening.  I explained to him about my 365 project, but I could tell he just didn’t get it.  At least he left me alone with my follies.

I shot all the different colors of primroses and a few pansies with and without flash.  I was trying to be fancy by holding my flash unit in one hand off to the side, but the result was a lot of blurry photos.  It’s hard to hold a D90 with a battery pack with one hand!  Without the flash I had to remember to put the white balance to florescent or the whites all went green.

Right inside the entrance was the flower department, so I took a bunch of orchid pictures.  And when I got to the produce department, I got some great green, red and yellow pepper shots.  But in the end I decided on this beautiful pansy as my photo of the day.  I wish the plant description spike hadn’t been in the picture, but I don’t think they would have liked it if I had removed them.  And besides – like the title says – these are pansies for sale!

Nikon D90 with Tamron 90mm Macro lens. 1/6, f/3.0, ISO 200, off camera flash

Today was a busy day.  We had to travel to Seattle (a 1 1/2 hour drive) to visit my parents and to make a delivery of an item we were selling on Craigslist.  We had just finished up with that sales transaction when I got a phone call from someone else I was communicating with on Craigslist in regards to a Nikon CoolScan 5000 Film and Slide scanner.  He was selling and we were interested in buying.  He was only about 20 minutes away from where we were so we arranged to head over to check out the scanner.  Result – we bought the scanner and now we have our work cut out for us to scan all our old 35mm slides.  At least this scanner has a feeder which should make the project a little easier.

Now that we had all our Craigslist business taken care of it was time to head over to my Mom and Dad’s for an early dinner.  By now light was starting to fade on an already gray day and I was beginning to wonder what I’d do for my photo of the day project.

My parents have a nice yard, but at this time of the year, there isn’t much color.  I shot a few red berries, several evergreen shrubs and a few other odds and ends, but finally decided on the simplest of shrubs – wild salal, a ubiquitous evergreen perennial which is native to the Pacific Northwest.

I choose this image because I liked the way the light and dept of field gave the photo dimension.  The color green pretty much represents the northwest at this time of year.  So unless we get some snow or until spring rolls around, I’ll have to be content with the multitude of evergreens for macro work.

This photo was shot with my Nikon D90 with Tamron 90mm Macro lens. 1/60, f/3.0, ISO 280