Tuesday, May 4, 2010

JaciHarmsen

 The next featured photographer is from Colorado. I've only been there in the skiing season, but I've always imagined it must be beautiful there when spring comes.
I've been into photography since I was a teenager. I shot with a Minolta XG-1 back then. I made the switch to digital a couple of years ago with a Canon Rebel XTi. Most of my images are with my 55-250 IS, but some are from my 18-55 or 50 1.8. I mostly shoot animals & landscapes. I live in Colorado, so I have some beautiful scenery & a lot of wildlife to shoot. I sell some photos as microstock & found out about zazzle on one of their forums. I have a hard time picking my favorites. Ask me tomorrow and they may be different from today!
1. This Mt. Rushmore image is my most popular as stock & was my 1st two sales here also.
2. This amazing reflection was taken near my home.
3. Hallet's Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park.
4. I saw this beautiful mule deer while out hiking.





Monday, May 3, 2010

Emily Hanson

As well as her beautiful flower photos, this store is worth a visit for some stunning fractals.

I have a lot of photomanips in my store. I do much floral/nature photography in addition to my abstract art. I use Paint Shop Pro as well as Photoshop to do the manipulations. Once a week or so, I get some flowers from the grocery store to photograph and mess around with on the computer. For the average cost of around $5 (once in a while, I splurge and get the $8 bouquets), it is a fairly cheap hobby. (The fractal art I do is free, Apophysis is available for download at www.sourceforge.com. There are many scripts you can download for Apophysis online for free also.)

I live in Minnesota, so I have to wait a while for the natural flowers to spring up. But in the summer, I take my camera on walks.




Sunday, May 2, 2010

Shopaholicchick

A well-known face on Zazzle, shopaholicchick has many stores featuring different themes, of which:
Chasing the Gnome is my photography store, with photographs taken on my many travels. There are photographs from across North America, as well as Europe & South Africa, some are already on the store others are waiting to be added. I have an addiction to photographing doors and windows and I love using naturally occurrences to frame my photographs, whether it is a window frame or a tree.
My shop name came to me just before I spent a semester abroad through my school, when preparing to go my professor and I were talking and somehow it was decided I would keep a blog of my travels. After thinking for a bit about what I wanted to name my blog I looked over at a shelf and saw a little ceramic gnome my mother had brought me from her first trip to Germany, at just about the same time a traveling gnome commercial came on TV....and thus Chasing the Gnome was born. When I let my professor know the blog url she began to laugh and told me about her first trip to Germany's Black Forrest region, she had been with a group of people and she wandered off a few yards into the woods when she came to a clearing. Sitting on a little rock or stump in the clearing was a little man smoking a pipe, and she stood there she heard what she thought was her name from behind, and she turned to see who was calling her there was no where there, of course when she turned back around her little gnome was gone...so of course after that story I knew the blog & photography store name was meant to be!