Digital Photo Tip: Concentrate Attention
As a photographer you want to control where the folks viewing your images look. A strong focal point, or center of attention, in your photos will almost always make them more powerful and more interesting. We’ve all made pictures, shown them to a friend, and gotten the “what the heck were you taking a picture of?” response. Most of those should go in the trash can. They should have been tossed before you even showed them to anyone.
Where you put your main subject in the frame is most important. If you’ve been around photography or art for any period of time you’ve likely heard of the “rule of thirds” or the “golden mean.” That’s a technique for positioning the main subject at one of the power points within the frame. I’ll write about that in more detail another month.
This month I’d like you to think about using differences in brightness, color, or sharpness to direct attention within the frame. Continue reading
Thick, leathery, glossy, evergreen foliage makes salal (Gaultheria shallon) desirable both in the garden and in the florist’s palette. This time of year you won’t find either flowers or fruit on salal — those will come in the warm months — but the foliage provides a comforting green layer at the edge of woodlands. Salal is particularly common along the Pacific coast from southeast Alaska all the way down to Santa Barbara county, California. It also grows up into the middle elevations of the Cascade and Coast Ranges. 
The latest Rock Garden Quarterly arrived in my postal mailbox today with a bunch of my photos from Deception Pass State Park to help promote the upcoming Western Winter Study Weekend. There’s a link to this blog, so I figured I’d better get busy and write something new for the hoards of visitors coming my way.