Audio Books Rule

I discovered the incredible world of audio books before Christmas and now that I'm back driving the fifty kilometres into work most mornings at the moment having an audio book to listen to is making it all worthwhile. I LOVE IT! Audible are running these great offers at the moment:

Flower Pictures New Stock Photos

Cape Gooseberry by Damian

We've been hard at work at A Flower Gallery converting all our art galleries of flower images to be available as instant downloads, so now you can come and browse the new stock categories for each of our photographers and download your favourites from as little as $1 for a 72 dpi web ready, royalty free image. If you are looking for larger print-ready flower images they are still there in the main gallery for instant download too.

Check out the rest of Damian's collection of stunning black and white images for a brooding, moody masterpiece.

Flower Images - Royalty Free

If you need some royalty free flower images for your website, I've just finished uploading the new version of my flower pictures site at www.aflowergallery.com

The stock flower images are available under Stock Photography with web ready images (72dpi 800px wide or high) available at $1 an image. I'm adding new flower images to the galleries all the time so it's worth having a look each week.

I'm currently working on creating an upload section for other photographers to upload their images to the flower stock galleries too.

Enjoy!

Digital Photography Books

A friend who, has just graduated to a digital camera, asked me to recommend a book on basic digital photography. Completely at a loss, since my books are mostly classics from the age of tranny and SLRs and I am lucky enough to get my training straight from the horses mouth, I hit Amazon and made an exhaustive search among customer reviews for a book that sounded helpful. I came up with this one: The Betterphoto Guide to Digital Photography. The reviews stressed that it contained lots of useful info about learning to use your digital camera to its full range of capabilities and that it was easily accessible for beginners. So there you go. This is the one I would buy if I didn't have a tame professional photographer happy to share his expertise, available 24/7! posted by Kit

Tall Flower Stories

Watsonias, the last of the spring flowers, heralding the imminent arrival of summer heat. Tall sentinels scattered orange or pink among the restios of our farm. How tall?

This tall!

Is this the tallest flower or is there another even bigger one over there?

Maybe my children shrank in the wash and this is really just a small spring flower! This one is actually taller than me, at about five and a half feet (not quite 2 metres). When the evening sun catches all the orangey red flowers they look like bright tongues of fire illuminating the bushes. That will be the next flower picture to catch with my camera, but I’ll have to be quick, the heat of summer has already invaded the spring, making watering necessary again and drying up the last flowers to mere wisps of seed heads.

Spring Flowers

The essence of spring - flowers, the discarded blue eggshells of hatched weaver birds, guinea fowl feathers, all collected together into a stunning, spontaneous art installation by my six year old daughter. The carpets of daisies that covered our farm in early spring are now all seeding themselves. Warm dry days have put an end to the pypies, but brought out the majestic watsonias, some of them as tall as I am. Strawberries and mulberries are in full flow and we have the luxury of berries for breakfast, home-made berry ice-cream and berry smoothies. The joys of photographing carpets of flowers, have been superceded by the culinary delights of the cornucopia of our early summer harvest and pure greed! I'll be wielding my new digital camera to capture the watsonia flowers soon though. They are the last in line of the spring flowers before dry, dusty summer hits us, with just the occasional relief of the deep blue agapanthus flower and sky blue plumbago to gladden the eye of the flower pic afficionado. After that my digital camera and I will be off flower duty for the summer, though I'm sure I'll be able to find some flower pics from the archives to brighten up this blog!

Birthdays go Digital

This is the first shot I took with my surprise birthday present, which was a Canon Powershot A620. At last my own digital camera again. The downside of being married to a professional photographer is that cameras are regarded as tools, so just as I would get the hang of my camera, it would be traded in for an upgrade. Professional digital cameras are great, fine quality, wonderful lenses, but they don’t tend to slip into your pocket, while you go for a walk with the children, so many photo opportunities get missed, just because you can’t be bothered to lug a camera bag with spare lenses around with you.

Anyway, my new Canon does a fine job, sharp as sharp macro facility, fine metering and focus, so it does most of the work for me, which is what I want in these days as a distracted mum photographer. Gone are the days when I could spend hours on one shot. Now before I’ve clicked the shutter once I’m being dragged off to look at something else, a newer, better flower, insect, leaf. So it’s just as well that I can point the camera in the vague direction of my chosen subject and tell it to get on with the rest. I am also visually challenged nowadays, needing my reading glasses to fine focus on something myself, but this clever camera doesn't really need me to do that either. Its tilting screen allows me to hold it at arms length, where I do have a hope of seeing what's what, the focussing zone system tells me what it's looking at, then I click. If I've left my glasses at home, while I'm out photographing arum lilies in a ditch beside the main road, I do have to wait to look at my shots properly till they are up on the computer though, but all in all we've got a good thing going, my camera and I! posted by Kit