November 2022 Calendar

I have found on the days that I am completely overwhelmed that getting myself out of the house and into nature can change everything. This last week I took a trip to the Botanical Garden, here in Phoenix, and was amazed at how many of the cacti were in bloom in October! You know the saying, April showers bring May flowers, and in Arizona, the same can be said during the monsoon season, monsoon showers bring cactus flowers. Monsoon season is typically from June thru September when we have many rain storms. October was a surprise this year filled with rain and that brought on a whole new batch of flowers blooming from many cacti! I have enjoyed the extra rain and especially love the unexpected cacti blooms!

Fall Heirloom/Pointed Elegance

A photograph of a fish hook cactus.

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Botanical Garden in the Fall

There are some days that seem super heavy or overwhelming and for those days the best pick-me-up that I have found is to get out in nature. I have known it for a long time but really leaned into this when Bryce and I were in graduate school. It was just the two of us in a new place and I felt lost in a big city where I wasn’t spending any time in nature. Soon enough I was able to turn that around once I started photographing flowers. I know I have shared before that my studio was covered in fresh flowers, ones that had passed their prime, and of course the flowers I had hanging to dry. All of these flowers created a little oasis for me at that time.

Now we live in Phoenix and I am still always looking for that nature escape! Last week I took a morning trip to the Botanical Garden after I dropped the kids off at school. I like to go when they first open because there are times that it can feel like it is just me in the desert with no one around. As the morning goes on more and more people show up but you can always find those moments where it feels like the entire garden is yours alone.

These trips take me away and give me a moment to breathe and stop thinking about all the things that need to be done. I find inspiration in the cacti and gardens filled with flowers. As I walk around I find that the garden is filled with soooooooo many types of cacti that I have never seen, which inspire me to learn more about that type of cactus, and then I question if that would be a good cactus for my growing cactus garden.

They change up the art installations at the Botanical Garden, I’m guessing around every six months or so, which is an extra reason to go there. Earlier this year they had Chuluy in the Garden, check out this blog post from earlier this year to see Chuluy art, and now Playing in the Garden: Rotraut. Her art is large bold colorful sculptures that are both abstract and yet give you a feeling that you know what it is about at the same time. When I first walked in there was a little girl telling her mom, “That one looks like a G.” Her mom told the garden attendant that everything looks like a G because her name starts with a G and she associates everything with that right now. I loved overhearing that moment and knowing that these sculptures have a different meaning for every person.

A photograph of a Ferocactus glaucescens cactus.

Have you been to the Botanical Garden in Phoenix this fall? What was your favorite part? Is it the art, getting to walk around, the plants, or is it a little bit of all of it?

Digital Desktop Wallpaper

Over the last week, I was driving Myles, my son, across town over and over again for a virtual reality research study. I really want both kids to get great opportunities to earn money for themselves. This driving time gave me a lot of time to sit and think about things that bring joy into life, I’ll tell you that driving in Phoenix traffic is not one of them, and how I can bring joy into other people’s lives as well. Throughout this year I have created Facebook and Instagram stories that have little positive messages or thoughtful quotes alongside my photography. I have found that these serve as a positive reminder that I need in my own life and that someone else can benefit from them as well!

Well, I was thinking about that and how I would love to create a little reminder that I could see every day! So, now I get to show you the new desktop wallpapers that are available! There are even more in the shop so make sure to stop on by!

I am super excited to get to share these with you guys! I am starting off with images from Pointed Elegance and will be adding more from other series. Do you have a favorite image from a series that you would like to display on your desktop? Do you have a thought or a quote that you would like to be a gentle reminder for you every day? Send me a message and I can work on getting that added in!

October 2022 Calendar

Well, here we are, it is officially fall! October is that beautiful part of the year when the weather starts to cool down in Phoenix and when we can go back out and enjoy nature! When I can’t be out enjoying nature in all of its beauty I love to be editing the photos to share with you all! This month features the splendid glowing yellow flowers of an aloe vera bloom.

Splendid Radiance/Pointed Elegance

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Metal Magnet

I am excited to share a new product with you! You have seen the metal prints that I offer now this 4x4 metal magnet can bring a pop of art can be added to your kitchen! Metal magnets are going to be just like the metal prints, which you can read more about here, in the way that they are taken care of but they are versatile because they can be displayed on magnetic surfaces.

Center of it All / Pointed Elegance
A photograph of a cactus.

Where would you put your new metal magnet? Currently, mine is brightening up my filing cabinet in the office.

Center of it All can be found here.

Getting to Know Me

Hello, my friends! I hope that I am not the only person singing “Getting to Know You” by Rogers and Hammerstein from The King and I. The chorus says, “Getting to know you, getting to know all about you."” If you don’t know that song I highly recommend you go listen to it! It was one of the classic movies that I grew up watching.

I love getting to know more about the person that I am following and thought you might enjoy that as well!

1. Do you have any nicknames?

I’m not really a nickname kinda girl. My favorite nickname is mom.

2. Are you named after anyone?

I am named after my great-aunt Anna. I love that about my name and I always thought that was so fun to have a relative with the same name.

3. Do you have any siblings?

Yes!! I have two older sisters. They are pillars in my life and are always there when I need them. I do remember them teasing me quite extensively but they also probably have memories of me teasing them! Throughout all of the thing in life, I feel very lucky to have had these two to grow up with and to have both of them living nearby. We have always had amazing times together with many more food times to come!

I am also blessed to have my chosen family - a sister-in-law and two brothers-in-law. They might not be related by blood but I feel so lucky to have them in my life and that I can call on them for help any time.

My sisters, Laurie and Mindy, and myself at my wedding.

4. Where did you grow up?

I have spent the majority of my life between California and Arizona. I spent my early years in California and from my teens until I met Bryce in Arizona. Once I met Bryce we moved to California for graduate school and then we had our son, Myles, and realized that we needed the village of family support so we moved back to Arizona. Around half of my life has been spent in Arizona, wowie!

5. What other countries have you been to?

I have spent time in Mexico, Costa Rica, and Canada. There is so much beauty in being in different countries in learning about places and cultures. There is so much art history in Mexico that I would love to experience.

When I was 23 I was able to go to Costa Rica for five weeks,  I was there to study Spanish, and I was there all on my own with the school that I had picked out, and that was a huge growing experience. I took many tours and saw both dormant and active volcanoes.

I also got to take a trip to Canada with my oldest sister. We took a tour of gardens in Vancouver and I have always wanted to go back again to photograph it, someday!

Me in 2003 at the Poás volcano in Costa Rica.

6. What do I remember from the early years of my life?

I grew up in Southern California and my extended family lived in Minnesota. Every summer we would drive across the country to spend time with all of them. We would stay at my Grandma’s house on those trips. She had a good-sized raspberry patch and whenever my middle sister and I were hungry we could just run outside and pick as many raspberries as we liked. To this day whenever I smell raspberries I think of my Grandma.

7. Who is the most interesting person you know?

Oh, wow, that is a hard one! The list is about as long as the number of people that I know! I will narrow that list down to both of my parents. My mom would tell us interesting stories and adventures that she had throughout her life. She was always an amazing person who could tell you about our family history without having to look any of it up! She would often tell us about the great-great (I’m not sure how many greats) grandpa who was left on a doorstep in Sweden. My mom was an amazing woman whom I miss every single day.

My dad tells the most interesting stories about how when he was young he decided he wanted to go Marti Gras and just hopped in his car, in Minnesota and started driving. He also worked in the mines in Minnesota and he has shared near-death experiences with us. You just never realize the amount of experiences that the people who raised you also went through. My dad has a new interesting story all the time!

Photographing cacti at the Botanical Garden in Phoenix.

8. What do I do to unwind?

I have always loved to sit and read a good book, so I try to do that often! Almost daily after dropping off the kids at school, I go for a run. It gives me a bit of time to focus on myself and it gives me great exercise. Where I go running is near the edge of a desert area and there are many wildflowers that grow there. So not only do I get the daily exercise I crave but I get to see flowers and see what new flower is going to come along every season. Oh, and of course, I am always planning when I can come out and photograph them!

9. Who am I?

I am a fine art photographer who loves to photograph nature, especially flowers. I am a sister, a daughter, a friend, a wife, and a mother of two. I am a person who loves to be at home and work in my garden. I am someone who has big dreams of traveling all around. I am a mom who doesn’t get enough sleep and uses coffee as a crutch to get me through the day. 

10. Do you prefer country or city living?

I have lived in Phoenix for the majority of my life, so I am very used to city living. I dream of living in a smaller town and having a bit of land to plant a giant garden, can you imagine how many flowers would be in my garden?! I would love to live with nature all around me. I like to think I could be happy in both places.

And now, my friends, I would love to know more about you as well! Feel free to either email me or drop a comment in the comments area. Also if you have more questions about me feel free to ask them there as well!

My Influences - Harold Feinstein

“You must photograph where you are involved; where you are overwhelmed by what you see before you; where you hold your breath while releasing the shutter, not because you are afraid of jarring the camera, but because you are seeing with your guts wide open to the sweet pain of an image that is part of your life.”

— Harold Feinstein

© Harold Feinstein Photography

Have you heard of Harold Feinstein? He was an American photographer, born in 1931, he started his photography career at 15 years old in New York! I can’t imagine picking up anything at 15 and having that be THE thing that I get to do for the rest of my life. He has a very broad range of subjects from Coney Island, portraits, nature, and of course the ones that speak to me the most, flowers and butterflies. 

Of course, you can see that his style of photographing butterflies is different than how I photograph butterflies. His work is beautiful studio lighting with preserved butterflies and I go out in nature, and to places like Butterfly Wonderland, to photograph the butterflies as they fly all around. These photographs of Harold’s are an inspiration to me because his work is ALWAYS fantastic, the details of the butterflies show off their brilliant colors and patterns, and they are just so real that I expect them to fly off the page.

© Harold Feinstein Photography

One of the things that I appreciate so much in finding an artist that inspires you is you find someone who does work that you love and you think, how can I make something from this that inspires me!? His photos often show the inside of the wings but think it is so interesting when the work shows the beauty of the wings from the inside, where we always think about the exquisite beauty and shows the outside of the wings as well. It is fascinating to see some butterflies, like a Blue Morpho butterfly, that has spots on the outsides of its wings and a vivid blue on the inside.

I don’t remember exactly when I discovered Harold’s work but I believe it was after he passed away in 2015. I was struck by his work and started to collect the different books that he published. My two favorite books are The Infinite Tulip and the Infinite Rose because I love to see the very wide variety of both these types of flowers.

Now that you have had a brief introduction to Harold Feinstein take a bit of time to check out some of his other work as well. Click here to go to his website. Let me know what some of your favorite work is of his!

September 2022 Calendar

The month of fall is officially here! We have had our summer fun, now as we get back fully into a routine, we say goodbye to the carefree days of summer. The next thing you know everything will be pumpkin flavored and pumpkin decor.

Around here, I just want to keep your computer desktop beautiful for you each and every month! This month we have a beautiful gymnocalycium cactus flower. This cactus has never bloomed for me before and recently I walked through the door and there was this flower that was about to bloom! I was so excited and ran back into the house yelling for everyone to come and see.

I hope that this little bloom will light up your day, just like it did mine when I first saw it!

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Still Becoming

As we all have, I have spent my whole life becoming who I am, and I will continue to spend the rest of my life becoming who I am as I grow even more. I wanted to share with you how I became who I am as an artist.

I officially started to study photography in 2001 when I went to Arizona State University. I had finally picked a major, for my bachelor's degree, that I thought would really hold my interest. Photography was something that I had always been interested in and hoped to really hone in on skills that I had never learned before. I can still remember the shopping trip with my mom to pick out my first SLR film camera, which I still have, and then getting to learn all about how cameras worked, working with film and in the darkroom, and most of all how to be in control of the camera. Those early days were lots and lots of learning all about the camera and how I could use it to shape the art that I was creating.

I tested out many paths along the way in discovering what type of photographer I wanted to be. For a while, I wanted to be a newborn baby photographer, and with supplies and courses purchased, I have tried my hand at wedding photography, and family photography. Each and every idea has taken me one step closer to photographing the things that I enjoy most, flowers!

It was at the Academy of Art that I discovered my love of photographing flowers abstractly. This gave me permission, from myself mainly, to push photography in a different way than what I had always thought was the proper way or been taught. It allowed me to play and discover things about myself. I guess I always looked up to different masters of photography, like Imogen Cunningham, Ansel Adams, and Edward Weston, who always had everything in focus in their work.

Spending time creating, exploring, reading, and figuring out who you are and what you love. You may find that as you grow that one thing you once loved isn’t for you any longer or something you never saw beauty in before suddenly holds a great beauty for you! That is how it was for me with cacti, I never saw the beauty in many of them, and then last year and this year I have become obsessed with them and now have cacti growing in my backyard! This was a journey that I didn’t expect to be on, especially after living in Arizona for around 30 years!

What does this journey to becoming you look like? I write down my thoughts and ideas, sometimes multiple times, so that I have that idea someplace and then I can always come back to it again if right now is not the right time. I am excited that I get to be on the journey of becoming over and over for my whole life. Things change and things change us, rather than resisting this change I want to lean into it.

Tell me about your journey, was it a straight path, a winding path, or one with a lot of pit stops along the way?

My Favorite Equipment

Quite often you see my face and you know who I am. So, today I wanted to introduce you to the equipment that I take with me on my photographing flowers sessions.

My camera, I have a Canon 5D Mark ii and I have used this camera for many years now. I got this camera when we, Bryce and I graduated at the same time, were just about to graduate from graduate school at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. So this camera has been on many adventures with me. I have a few different lenses that I use often but these are the three that go with me on every flower photographing trip. My trusty 100mm macro lens, pictured on the camera, has been my go-to lens for photographing flowers since I first laid my hands on it. I was able to check out lenses at school and after a few times of using it, I was hooked and purchased my own knowing that it would be used a lot! I love this lens because it gives a life-size 1:1 magnification, it also has a very wide range of f-stops, which tell you how shallow the depth of field is, blurry, and how deep the depth of field is, sharp, from f-2.8 all the way to f-32. I love to photograph at f-2.8 which creates a beautiful shallow depth of field and allows me to pick the area that I want to have sharp in my images.

The next lens I love to use is my 85mm, f-1.8, this isn’t a run-of-the-mill lens that you would want to use in any and all situations. This is a portrait lens and that is just what I love to use it for, both with people and flowers. Again, I love to photograph with my lens wide open at the lowest f-stop so that my background creates a bokeh effect.  The last lens I like to take with me is my 50mm, f-1.4, it is a nice “must-have” lens that is so lightweight and of course, it has the artsy shallow depth of field. I use this one for images that I am taking just a little further back from my subject.

The last couple of items are my diffuser and my monopod. I have a few different diffusers and reflectors but this is a nice pocket-sized diffuser that I can take with me just about anywhere. I use the diffuser when I am evening out the sun, blocking the sun if there is too much of it, creating even light, and sometimes blocking the sun from getting in my eyes while photographing. Last but not least is the monopod. Now not always do I have my monopod with me on day trips around town but when I am away from home I like to make sure that I have that extra bit to make sure I am steady and going to get the photograph.

Not pictured but often I bring along a kneeling mat to give my knees a bit of cushion and also for the times that I am photographing cacti. On more than one occasion I have gone home with a spine or two in my hands or my pants, so I have learned!

This is the equipment that I most often take with me and what I would call my favorite, for sure!