Janet Brien's photos

It's a wonderful thing when a twinkling light catches your eye and it's possible to capture the magic of what you see with your camera. This can be a maddeningly elusive challenge! When I looked to see what was flashing at me, I remember mumbling, "You'll never get that shot...it's gonna look like nothing." However, I consider such nay-saying commentary to be a personal challenge, an irresistible invitation to find a way so I can return with, "HAH! I GOT IT!" I spent some time looking at my subject and then I took a bunch of pictures with different compositions, angles, depth of field and I also stood at different distances away. I had about a dozen pictures to look through, and most of them went flying into the trash. But I got a couple that were ok, and then I found myself staring at this picture. Hooting gleefully, I announced to myself, "HAH! I GOT IT!" :)

Here is my third pick from my fountain pictures, where I chose several water images and used the Topaz filter suite, "Restyle", to change the color palette. Such fun to use, there are actually too many wonderful choices to pick from...one must almost just close your eyes and click randomly or you will be in there forever! :D If you roll your mouse in the upper left corner, you'll see the other two pictures I picked. These images were all taken at a fountain that Steve and I saw during a garden tour in Ashland a few years ago. Explored on August 15, 2016. Placement unknown; alerted by Jaap van 't Veen of Explore.

Oh, how I adore these trees. The delicate, colorful leaves of the Japanese Maple tree are lovely in all of their life stages. Here, in June, the leaves are as colorful as if it were the height of fall. With their natural red color, it's an easy thing to get a wonderful back-lit image which show all of the fine details! And I even got a bonus strand of spider web to get everyone's attention! :)

When it comes to flowers, I find that wildflowers are often as pretty or even more lovely than planted flowers. This beauty was found in a garden full of planted flowers which I also loved, but it would have been terrible to leave without capturing this tiny stunner! :)

These gorgeous flowers were found in one of the gardens that Steve and I visited a few years ago. I think these petunias are almost unreal in their color and I have read that you can only purchase these flowers as small plants. If you were to attempt to plant seeds gathered from this flower, the resulting blooms would not look at all like this striped beauty.

Such an impossibly beautiful spike of flowers was impressing the local insect life as well, and if you look carefully, you'll see that many of the blossoms have visitors inside! I found these on the Ashland Garden Tour a few years ago!

The summers here in southern Oregon can be brutal, with dry, sweltering days that cause delicate poppies to shrivel up by mid-afternoon if not earlier. This flower was probably an incredible sight as the sun rose in the sky, and still, though it has clearly lost its battle in the heat of the day, it's still lovely. Explored on August 9, 2016. Highest placement, page 6.

Here's another flower from the Garden tour in Ashland! Sometimes you get lucky with the lighting and you find a flower that's well-lit with several others that are in shadow. A bit more deepening of the background for a more dramatic effect and I had my picture complete!

Last week I shared a fountain image that I captured at one of the gardens on the tour in Ashland. I chose three to play with and here is the second of them. I used Topaz Restyle to tweak the color palette. Although this may look as if I didn't change the color much, the original image wasn't blue at all, but more grey in tone. So, I turned it into the color that would tempt me to dive in! :)

One of the coolest floral sights is witnessing an allium (onion species) grow and then finally bloom. Every day the bud casing grows larger and you will begin recognize the shape of florets forming in their pointy-hat house. They will continue to grow ever-larger and strain against the sheath-like covering, stretching it until you can see the florets clearly. Eventually the bud cover cannot withstand the pressure any longer and it splits open, the still-forming florets bursting out into the air! What a show to watch as the florets continue growing until they form a glorious round ball! This was another gem I photographed on the Garden tour in Ashland a few years ago.

Though they appear to be huge, these flowers were quite small, and were growing among a lush carpet of rich green leaves and dozens of other blossoms. I was able to single the pair out for a tight close-up! I found them while Steve and I were on the Ashland Garden tour a few years ago.

Would you just LOOK at the crazy hair on this Pasque flower that's gone to seed? We are talkin' outa' control, takin' the frizz level to MAXIMUM! On the same estate as yesterday's picture, I found a patch of this goofy "grass" and spent the next while trying to capture the glory of all this frizz. This picture makes me very happy because it shows the marvelous feather-like detail and this-way-and-that mini stems, and then you also get to see the blur of a few others beyond. I would like to extend a big THANK YOU to Karen Forsyth over on Facebook for letting me know that this isn't actually a crazy grass but instead, a Pasque flower that's gone to seed! I had no idea! :D

I had never seen flowers like these before and they totally stunned me with their dramatic color and presence. During the garden tour that Steve and I went on a few years ago in Ashland, we visited one home that really knocked our socks off. The size of their estate was huge and sprawled over several acres. Every inch was landscaped beautifully and planted with rainbows of flowers and interesting plants. I wish I could have spent the whole day at this garden, but I did manage to capture quite a few of the fantastic treasures that I found. Explored on August 4, 2016, placement unknown.

I was tickled to find False Sunflowers growing in one of the gardens that Steve and I visited during the garden tour a few years ago in Ashland. These flowers are so bright and cheery, and this one also happened to have a very cool wasp crawling around on it!

(+1 in a note) I discovered a wonderful sea of pink flowers that just begged for a bokeh shot, filled with lush green and splotches of magenta. This is another picture I rescued from my archived garden tour folder. :) Please let me know if you have an idea of what these flowers are called so I can properly identify them. :) I also took a top-down picture to show the lovely details of this flower, just roll your mouse over the upper left corner to see. :) Explored on August 1, 2016, placement unknown.

What fun to share all these pictures from the Garden Tour Steve and I went on a few years ago! The first garden we visited had a very large fountain and, being an abstract and texture junkie, I couldn't resist taking a series of pictures to see if any would come out looking cool. I ended up picking three to play with, and then I used a super cool filter suite on them! Topaz Restyle takes an image and applies different color palettes, changing the look from a subtle change to unrecognizably dramatic. I usually opt for realism in my pictures so I rarely use this suite, and it was awesome to get the green light to look through the hundreds of palettes. The sheer volume of filters is unfortunately also its downfall, because it takes too long to choose which filter to use, and it's a bad choice if you're in a hurry. Happily, I wasn't, and relished the opportunity to see how the images would look. (I'll be posting the other two images a week apart and then I'll put them together with notes so you can see the trio and how different they appear.)

I love the shapes of forming flower buds. They are so varied and sometimes they don't look anything like a bud at all. These are a perfect example—they look like some sort of strange triple-headed space alien! I took this picture during the garden tour that Steve and I went on a few years ago in Ashland. Looking at these buds and the fine detail I got, I really wanted to process the image. However, the background was a white garage door, which meant it would be a perfect opportunity for a textured background! I'm really happy with the result—what do you think? :) Explored on August 2, 2016. Highest placement, #59.

I'm a sucker for backlit flowers, and these stopped me in my tracks! Pretty blue stars on extra hairy stems and countless buds that promise a grand show over the coming weeks. I would have loved to have seen this plant at the height of its bloom, but this sight was a very pretty one indeed. :)