Three Beautiful Things 09/11/14: Maggie a Turner (Sort Of)?, Paper Lanterns, Picture Studies

1.  I had planned to go to hear a celebration of James Baldwin at the National Art Gallery today, but, alas,  I needed to stay home in case the UPS delivery came, which requires my signature.  Oh, well.  I can't do everything....So, I thought, well, I'll try to take an Impressionist-esque handful of pictures of Maggie.  She was still.  I knew if I set the shutter speed to 10 seconds, without a tripod, I'd get a blurry picture and decided to see if I could get something like the effect I wanted.  I took three such pictures and this one was my favorite.  It came the closest to achieving the effect I'd hoped for.  I thought it came out kind of (I do mean kind of) J. M. W. Turner-y!

2.  Then I went out on Molly and Hiram's patio and experimented with taking pictures of their paper lanterns.  I wasn't so much going for the Impressionist effect so much as I wanted to see what I could do with fast shutter speeds and small aperture.  I also experimented with bokeh, which meant working with a larger aperture.  Here are a few of my afternoon pictures:

3.  Kathy Williams Harper (KHS '73) reminded me that when we looked at those paintings in grade school in Kellogg School District #391, and wrote about them, it was called "picture study".  She and Jim Etherton both remembered the paper we wrote on when we did picture study and Kathy remembered how we each matted our pictures.  Kathy also reminded me that two more of the pictures we studied:  The Gleaners (Millet) and The Age of Innocence (Reynolds).  These are very touching memories.