Lately, we’ve been spending a lot of our Sundays doing yard work. Strange, considering we both avoid it as much as possible. But it’s paying off! Our lawn is looking better and better each week as we gradually kill off the moss and weeds and grow new grass. I’m actually being diligent about watering the flowers, including these English daisies, that I planted back in March, and I’m even confident about the strawberry hanging basket I bought. For once, I feel pretty good about our yard! I’ve come a long way from the days of feeling utterly overwhelmed and frustrated by it. (Keep in mind, this is my first yard, ever. I’m a total novice.)

Yet another good Pinterest find: mint lemonade! Perfect for the sunny weather we’ve been having lately (and a good way to use up the rest of my fresh mint).

This was actually my first time making freshly squeezed lemonade, and it was easier than I expected. It does take quite a few (6-8) fresh lemons to get one cup of lemon juice, but I’ve got a good citrus squeezer, so that helps!

I made a version of the lemonade with sparkling water, as the recipe calls for, and one without, and found it tastes better without.

Ingrid Barrentine is a wife, mother to a beautiful baby girl named Rosie, coffee addict (and quite possibly snob, she thinks), lover of the outdoors, traveler, and a photographer.

Most recently, Ingrid worked as an award-winning photojournalist at the Northwest Guardian on Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Prior to that she spent time in Eastern Washington at the Spokesman-Review and interned at her hometown newspaper, the Yakima Herald-Republic. She has freelanced for notable organizations including The New York Times, Wired magazine, and the Associated Press. Ingrid believes in the power of a single image and works hard to look for and capture moments that might otherwise go unnoticed.

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Roxanne: When did you become interested in photography?
Ingrid: In 1995, my father gave me one of his cameras to use while on a family vacation in the American southwest. After wandering about the desert with the little point-and-shoot for several hours, I was hooked. It wasn’t until two years later that I acquired my first film SLR and began experimenting with different techniques. After I graduated from high school, I bought a good lens and film body to document a six-week-long bike trip through England. Ultimately, photography during a two-year-long trip to Romania showed me I could overcome my introversion and fear of people. I could get close to and observe them through the lens. The camera became my crutch and eventually my career.

Who or what influenced you to become a photographer?
My father is a hobbyist and when I was growing up, he always had a camera loaded with transparency film lying around. We would have real slideshows (yes, slides and projector) in our living room and reminisce about our family vacations. I remember some of my favorite childhood memories to be making images on our summer vacations and then viewing them on the big screen during the cold of winter. Later on in college, a photojournalism teacher helped me narrow my photographic focus to photographing people in everyday life. That fact combined with my experiences overseas convinced me that photography was what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing.

Why is photography important to you?
Photography motivates me to see things that I’d otherwise overlook. It also helps me document a moment. Cliché as that might sound, it is so true. Even in this digital age where everyone has a camera phone and posts images at an almost nonstop pace to the Internet, a good moment captured will still cause one to stop and pause and reflect and hopefully feel something and learn. That is my goal with the camera.

What motivates you?
I love to see and experience new things. Some people call it wanderlust. I think new environments and challenges better my photography and so I almost always try to incorporate them into my work. Having a 4-month-old has slowed me down a bit, but has also opened up a new realm of photo possibilities … BABY!

What’s your favorite lens or other piece of photography gear?
I love my 50mm 1.4. I’m not a fan of cluttered backgrounds and focus that runs from here to infinity, so the prime lens is perfect for me. I love the way it isolates focus and blurs imperfections. I hope to add a 24mm 1.4 lens to my gear closet later this year. Perhaps it will be my new favorite?

What advice would you give someone just starting out in photography?
Becoming a photographer is like stepping out on a long journey. There are lots of highs and lows. You will probably realize five years from now that your work from now wasn’t quite as good as you originally thought. You will change styles as you refine things. And you will find that the more you shoot, the more you will fall in love with your craft. Enjoy the ride!

Here’s what my kitchen counter looks like as I’m preparing one of my favorite recipes, tempeh tacos. It’s one of the few recipes I know that is easy, fast, and reliable all at once. We have yet to tire of it (and we’re picky eaters).

Side note: I don’t make the pickled radish slaw included with the recipe, but maybe someday I’ll try it. We actually put Spanish rice in these tacos, and along with tomato, avocado, lettuce, cheese, and taco sauce, they’re tasty and filling. The tempeh and rice keep well for a couple days, so I have delicious leftovers to look forward to.

Giving a Good Photo Critique
Here’s a step-by-step guide from Haje Jan Kamps (also known as Photocritic) on critiquing photos. It’s helpful if you want to learn to critique, of course, but also if you want to look at photos with a keener eye. Haje offers an example critique, which I actually don’t agree with, but there’s your proof that everyone sees things differently, and you shouldn’t let critiques discourage you.

Stop Whining about Your Equipment, Get out There and Shoot!
This is a good reminder to both new and experienced photographers: it’s not about the equipment. I used to obsess over gear and ask “What camera do you use?” all the time. I’ve since learned that it really doesn’t matter. Many different kinds of cameras and lenses produce good-quality images (including cell phones!), but it’s the photographer who makes the images.

But wait, there’s more! Thanks to hipsterfood, I’ve come across a few more posts about food photography to add to the list in my food photography tips post.

Enjoy!

V.K.Rees Photography: Food Photography Tips
6 Bittersweets: My Take on Food Styling and Photography

I love food. It is as simple as that. Enjoying good food in a restaurant or turning a bunch of ingredients into a delicious meal (or rich dessert, which is what I prefer) is extremely satisfying. So it’s only natural that it’s one of my favorite subjects to photograph.

Wedding Cupcakes
These cupcakes are from Patsy’s Angel Cakes and were a tasty highlight of my sister’s recent wedding reception. I spent a lot of time hovering over them, taking pictures—all the while practically drooling from the delicious smell of freshly baked goods. Later, I tried all three (pineapple right-side-up, tiramisu, and red velvet) and they were all very flavorful and moist.

Food Blogging Tweetup
On April 10, Social Media Club Tacoma hosted a tweetup focused on food and food blogging. I was a panelist, along with Dawn of Vegan Moxie, Adrienne of A Big Mouthful, and Marisa of Clearance Cuisine. We all brought goodies: chocolate chip cookies, caramel corn, banana walnut bread, and Grocery Outlet treats. You can check out the caramel corn recipe here.

Supper Club
Some friends and I recently started a supper club of sorts, and had our first dinner a few weeks ago. The premise is that a few of us will prepare the dinner and another will make the drinks, and we’ll all benefit. That’s a Denny Triangle cocktail below. The meal: pasta e fagioli, prepared by Dawn, and root vegetable soup with kale, made by Adrienne. Adrienne also made the appetizer, rosemary and white bean dip served with pita chips, and my contribution was dessert: blueberry brownies.

New Veg-Friendly Restaurant
Earlier this month I attended the TEDx Tacoma conference at the Museum of Glass, which recently opened a new restaurant, Choripan. Ian and I had the quinoa bowl with tofu, below. Can you believe that’s tofu? It looked and tasted amazing. I’m looking forward to trying their tofu sandwich next time.

Homemade Dinner
Because I attended both days of RMSP’s Photo Weekend in Bellevue, I stayed with a friend in Seattle for the weekend. She took advantage of the opportunity and made me a delicious dinner, then dessert. Unfortunately (for you), I was too impatient to get a good shot of the strawberry shortcake before I devoured it. Dinner, below: bok choy with tofu in garlic sauce and scrambled eggs with tomato. I love having friends who share my passion for good food and cooking!

Good Eats in Olympia
Last week, I was invited to join Dawn and Adrienne (we’re apparently becoming a trio!) to try Old School Pizzeria down in Olympia. We all had the vegan pizza, with eggplant, red onion, and cashews. My lovely friend Grace of Duda Photography joined us, and inspired us to visit Bearded Lady, where we tried an assortment of cupcakes, brownies, and ice cream. It was a big nerdfest, with all of us snapping photos of our food before we’d allow ourselves to eat, and pretty much live-tweeting the whole thing. It’s so great to be surrounded by like-minded people.

It may seem like it was a dream, now that we’ve returned to our regularly scheduled rainy April weather, but it was indeed sunny and warm earlier this week. So warm, in fact, that I took this photo barefoot! I’m not even wearing a cardigan! The sunlight was so pretty, I knew it wasn’t going to last, and I was feeling inspired from RMSP’s Photo Weekend, so I took advantage of the opportunity.

To continue my recap of Rocky Mountain School of Photography’s Photo Weekend in Seattle (well, Bellevue), I’ll share some highlights from Sunday’s sessions as well as the anonymous critique.

Session I: Composition

When shooting a photo, Tim Cooper encouraged attendees to go beyond aesthetics. Why are you taking this picture? What is it that you are attracted to in the scene? Put words to it. Your photo should convey a feeling, theme, or idea, and not need explaining.

To help compose a photo, keep these “distractions and attractions” in mind or use them to your advantage: bright areas, high contrast, color contrast, sharpness, and leading lines. Tim also talked about what each kind of line conveys: horizontal lines are calm, vertical lines are stable, diagonal lines are energizing, and curved lines are graceful and elegant.

Subject placement and lens choice were the two other major areas Tim focused on. He covered the rule of thirds, golden mean, proper balance, framing, symmetry, and the decisive moment. He stressed that lens choice—wide angle, normal, or long—is extremely important, and showed us examples of the same scene shot with three different lenses. It’s amazing the difference your focal length can make!

Some tips and tricks: watch your corners and borders to avoid including anything distracting or unnecessary. Avoid “tight merges” or overlapping elements. Move your tripod to explore many different positions and angles. And always go deeper than “I’m taking this picture because it’s pretty.” You’re shooting a feeling or an idea, just be clear what it is before you shoot; it will improve your work.

Session II: Landscape Photography

I took the most notes in this class, probably because it tied everything together nicely. Tim talked equipment, camera settings, composition, and light.

When it comes to lenses, there are seemingly endless options. Just keep in mind primes, or fixed focal length lenses, are sharper than long lenses. If you prefer a long lens, choose one with a shorter range (e.g., 70–200 instead of 70–300). It may seem counterintuitive, but it will be sharper.

For settings, choose as low an ISO as possible. Shoot in RAW. Use the correct white balance. Stop down your lens to get as much of the image in focus as possible, and focus one-third or one-half the way into the picture to achieve sharpness in both background and foreground.

Other equipment Tim covered: tripod legs and heads, carrying cases and backpacks, circular polarizing filters, and split neutral density filters. Circular polarizing filters cut through haze, reduce reflection and glare, darken blue sky, and increase saturation, so Tim deemed them the most useful filter for landscape photography.

For landscape photography, you must work with the light available. Bright sun may be nice, but in photography it produces broad, flat scenes that lack drama and depth. Cloudy skies provide the best lighting but the least appealing sky, so omit the sky in your shots on a cloudy day. Finally, there’s “magic light” or the golden hour, sunrise and sunset, which produces a lovely warm light.

Session III: Critique

Attendees had the option to submit a photo to be critiqued anonymously in this session. There were about 40 images submitted for this conference, so Tim and Doug were able to get through all of them in less than two hours. I submitted a photo I snapped back in February at Chambers Bay.

I liked this photo okay, but there was something off about it that I couldn’t quite put my finger on—that’s why I chose it to be critiqued. Doug and Tim took turns critiquing images, and Tim wound up with mine. He liked the light in the photo, and the placement of the sun’s reflection on the water, but suggested a tighter crop to remove the distracting silhouetted tree on the right, and some of the shadow area at the bottom. I’m really happy with the crop:

The critique was beneficial for my own work, but it was also interesting to hear what the instructors thought about other images, and what they suggested changing. Ultimately, Tim said, there’s no right or wrong way to compose a photo, but rather it’s about what you want out of a scene, what you want to show.

Thanks, RMSP, for a great photo weekend!