And now here's the new stuff

These shots are from the Stenzel Healing Garden at Good Samaritan Hospital in NW Portland. I shoot a lot here because it's convenient as well as beautiful. I'm thinking of putting a small book together for patients who can't get outside. What do you think?

finishing up other stuff before getting to the new stuff

I love poppies for their slutty bright colors, but even more for the seed pods they leave behind.

Not sure if it's my age, or just what is happening to me, but I simply adore dried-up grasses and dying blossoms, and could shoot and admire these natural deconstructions endlessly. Fall is coming.

grumpy nuns

I can relate. Tending toward the grumpishness myself, nevertheless, it's a little inhibiting to live next door to so many of the disapproving old girls, emphatically closing their windows whenever my friends and I hold forth on my cozy little balcony on warm days and the occasional evening.

Okay, we cuss and some of my friends smoke. I can see how it could make the nuns uncomfortable. And maybe the day I shot a nude model reclining on the stovetop and the kitchen window was open for the light, could have been a bit startling if they were looking that direction, I guess.

But I'm consistently friendly, and until it became obvious even to me that my overtures were unwelcome, I'd wave from the window in daily morning greeting--as we tend to open the blinds nearly simultaneously. Our schedules are quite similar, it seems.

So yesterday when I was enthusiastically shooting the prolific curbside garden that the old girls planted and tend daily, and the perfect light was fading quickly, one of the crusty dears approached me briskly, demanding to know what I was taking pictures of--the lens was trained on the stone wall in front of their annex, so to capture the light on the dry, bare branches of an ancient, damned near dead, arborvitae.

I told her what I was shooting and she was nonplussed. I was taking pictures of the light on that ugly old bush? So I offered to show her what else I'd captured of the vivid cosmos, zinnias, hydrangea, etc. in the parking strip, and she skeptically watched me scroll though the images on my camera's LED. Unimpressed, she harrrumphed, and walked away suggesting that I try to shoot the dahlias instead. Yeah. The dahlias. How obvious.

and again with the flowers and gardens

it's one of the things that makes me interesting

I love to shoot portraits and nudes. Not necessarily at the same time.

roomies

They've been so good all summer, barely a complaint about the heat or occasional irregularities in their meal schedule (I plead the fifth on that count), but the other day when I finally noticed that their water bottle was bone dry, they didn't even squeak an accusatory insult in my direction!

After refilling the bottle, I watched poor Trudy suck on that thing for a full five minutes, and I promised from now on to always check it before I leave for work in the morning. Sheesh.

go toward the light

Spent yesterday morning in lovely rooms around Portland's eastside with a favorite companion who shares my enthusiasm for vintage sparklies--Miss J Purcell. Here are a few samples from the Sapphire Hotel, Bella Norte and Flutter.