There are two furnaces full of molten glass at 2400 degrees F., and a couple of ovens almost that hot where the pieces are rewarmed while they’re being worked on.  You can feel the heat from the ovens 30 feet away, even with the gigantic ventilation system in place trying to keep things cool.

While the work itself is done on the floor of the hot shop, the ovens create a dramatic visual effect.  The camera compensates for their intense light by making the rest of the area appear dark — although it’s perfectly light in real life.  As a result, not only is it possible to pull some shapes out of the darkness, there’s also more detail in the bright parts of the image.  I love the concentric circles of different shades of orange that you can see in this picture.  (Click on the photo for a larger image and you’ll be able to see them even better.)

“Motion/Stillness,” which I’ve posted elsewhere on this blog, will be in the show Nature, Undisturbed in Tyrone, Georgia.

The photo below was accepted for a show called Nostalgia at PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont. (I also submitted the image in the previous post, which I personally thought was a stronger contender.)

Submitting this photo gave me a chance to focus on the processing rather than the composition.  The bones of this photo are good — a strong diagonal and shallow depth of field.  But the original (below) seemed a little too bright for the “nostalgia” theme.

I tried turning this into a sepia print but I wasn’t happy about how it looked.  (Maybe I need a little more practice?)  So instead I desaturated the color, leaving a little hint of green in the background.

On the other hand, I occasionally get so focused on one aspect of a thing that I miss other pieces of it entirely.  To be fair, sometimes processing brings out parts of an image that were hard to see in “real life.”  Both of those were the case with this picture.

There’s a house at the entrance to Ballston Beach in Truro.  The weather has played havoc with its shingles, creating a bit of chaos where surely all was once highly ordered.  The rectangular panes of the window made a nice counterpoint to the mess of shingles.  But it wasn’t until I started processing the image that I realized there was something just behind the glass: an old toy horse and rider.  It turned this image into something entirely different than what I’d originally intended.

The trick has been getting sunlight and raindrops and the right angle…

Here’s my first attempt.  It all seemed pretty straightforward ’til I actually got out there with my camera and tried to frame a shot — and realized all those little tiny branches make for a cluttered image.

Still, it’s a nice reminder that spring is in the air.

There was one part of the cliffs that reminded me of the hoodoos we saw in Bryce Canyon last spring.  So I thought I’d see what would happen if I put photos of each back to back, as it were.  (Disclosure: I had to flip the lithified cliffs photo so it faced the right direction.)

I’m not quite sure whether this works — and would love to hear your thoughts on it.  Do I, as the viewer, bring something to this because I saw both these formations in the same calendar year?  Is it just that I like saying “hoodoo/Poipu”?  Or is there really something good happening in this image?  Comment away…

(As always, clicking on the image below will take you to a larger version of the photo.)

This puddle couldn’t have been more than a couple inches deep, but it felt like you could dive right into the reflection.

Consider this a work in progress.  There’s something going on in this picture; it’s just not quite done yet…

This is another shot taken on our last day on Kauai, the last day of 2009.  The day started out sunny and warm: at lunchtime, it was 86 degrees at Hanalei Bay.  (oh, yeah.)  The waves were big (12-18 ft.) and the surfers were out in force.

Two hours later, at Ke’e Beach in Ha’ena, a storm blew in from the west and we were drenched and cold.  (OK, so it was 70 degrees, but there was a serious wind chill…)  Back to Anini Beach in Princeville, where the weather lifted a little bit and we could dry out and warm up.

The surfers were gone so it’s hard to tell the scale of the waves here.  Trust me, they’re still big.

And beachside it really is: the back wall (all windows) rolls up like a garage door for an unobstructed view of the beach and the water.

And — on this particular once-in-a-blue-moon opportunity — a full moon shining down through the palm trees.

This would have been an easier shot if I’d had a tripod, because this exposure took 2.5 seconds (at ISO 1000).  But I don’t have one, and even if I did it would have been packed away in my luggage by then.  Fortunately there were some large boulders lining a path along the beach that more or less served the purpose — although since the top of the boulder wasn’t level, the pictures I took from there were all cattywampus.  This is when some surgical cropping and straightening really saves the day.

One of the things that always surprises me about Kauai is that it’s not all palm trees, hibiscus, and bougainvillea.  Yes, there are some near the coast, but the plant life is much more varied than I expect on a tropical island.  There are giant fir trees, especially as you go to higher elevations.  And lots of ferns.

There are also those lovely tropical breezes, all day long.  Which makes it challenging to shoot leafy plants and get a clear shot.  (Unless you use a plamp, which seems like cheating to me and probably wouldn’t have worked here anyway.)  Instead, I went for as short an exposure as I could, with a wide-open aperture which gives a nice dreamy shallow depth of field.