My Summer Office

My Summer Office
My Summer Office © 2012 Bo Mackison

What is the good of the stars and trees, the sunrise and the wind, if they do not enter into your daily lives. ~ E. M. Forster

Welcome to the office space I set up on my screened porch in my home in Wisconsin.

We’ve never had a table on the porch overlooking our back yard and our perennial gardens, our lilacs and our special trees – white birch, sugar maples, mountain ashes, towering pines – all planted for special occasions. (When we moved into this house over 25 years ago, there were two trees on the property – a straggly silver maple and a city tree near the street that was wilting and browning in August.) Each year we have added, replaced, cared for all the plants and trees in our space, and each time I look out into our yards I am filled with gratefulness for the nearness of nature.

Prior to my make-over, the back porch was used as an evening haven, a sitting down space after the work of the day was completed, a place to share stories, plans, ideas with family and friends. There were plenty of sitting spots, though if we ate dinner on the porch it was always a lap affair.

Last week I stood on the porch, and thought about the “winter office” I had arranged in Arizona – a table and chairs on a covered patio, a hook up for internet, a pitcher of iced tea or water. I had loved working in the outdoors. Then I realized that I could, with a little scrounging and re-arranging, have the same sense of working in the outdoors in Madison.

I found a Bistro table and chairs on clearance at Target. Perfect. I’d recently read a study about the benefits of standing for at least part of the work day. With this height table I could alternate sitting in the higher chair or standing. I  prefer standing, so I was pleased how simply I could accommodate both choices.

I removed all the chairs except for a glider that I fancy — nothing like sitting in the dark, listening to the night sounds, swaying back and forth in a gentling, readying-for-sleep rhythm. I added a cloth basket on small table near the door so I could store all the cords that are required for computer, phone, photo transfer, etc. That allows me to bring my office supplies inside when threatening weather approaches.

I don’t do photo processing on the porch — way too bright –but I can get a lot of the business part of my art done and I write and read on the porch. And the screen protects me from the many wasps and other stinging insects that make my home their home, too.

A grand solution, so far. We’ll see how things progress as summer moves through July and August…

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She creates with the camera and the computer, and finagles a way to spend as much time outside as possible!

 

A Re-invention of Giant Allium

Eighteen Giant Allium

The Re-Invention of Allium © 2012 Bo Mackison

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larvae, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? . . . We are all shape-shifters and magical re-inventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.  ~ Diane Ackerman

Shape-shifters? Re-inventors? A caravan of selves?

We are not trapped inside one identity. One brand. We are always undergoing changes, some subtle, some life-altering. Sometimes we choose to change, though that seems to be a harder task. When I think of the many resolutions of change I have made and then discarded, I realize it is much easier to want the change than to live the change.

But I find it thrilling, addicting, fascinating to be a shape shifter, a re-inventor when it comes to photography. I focus on true to life landscape one day, then the next day I seem only able to create a garden of flowers seen only in my imagination until I shape shift them with the help of computer software. Perhaps tomorrow I will be discovering the macro world of a drop of water or the architectural intricacies of a barely standing centuries-old barn.

The garden filled with purple Allium that I photographed in the morning becomes a garden of pinks and yellows, drifting in the wind of change, in the afternoon, and the next morning these same Allium are just a whisper of their original selves, composed upon a background field of yellow and green stripes. I so love to examine a single type of flower, and then change it, following my whims and what-if’s, until the altered photograph appears and I know that is how it must look.

When I see a photograph, and I explode with a whoop of joy, then I know I am creating from deep within. Shape shifting. Re-inventing.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She creates with the camera and the computer.

Vintage Allium

Vintage Allium

Vintage Allium © 2012 Bo Mackison

Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray. ~ Rumi

Oh, this was fun! I took a stroll through the Experimental Gardens associated with the University of Wisconsin this morning. There were mostly empty beds awaiting flowers from the greenhouses, and bunches of day lily foliage , but no day lilies yet — too early. But there were quite a few stands of the Giant Allium.

Gotta love a flower whose name is Latin for Onion!

I did quite a bit of post processing on these flowers – purple in the garden, but after I was finished playing — well, you can see they are now a mixture of spring colors. I loved the bokeh and the background, and so I worked on the photo until the main flower was the focal point, but the background was as interesting. Hope you enjoy this one!

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. She is finally getting up to speed in her warm season home of Wisconsin, and greatly enjoying her explores into the blooming gardens with her camera gear in tow.

Monarch Butterfly on Lilac Bush

Monarch and Lilac Flowers

Monarch and Lilac Flowers © 2012 Bo Mackison

Every man takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

As I was working in my new office set-up – my screened in porch off the back of my house, plus a Bistro table that I can either sit at or stand at while using my computer or writing – I looked up and saw several Monarchs fluttering around the Lilac bush only a few feet from where I was working. I had earlier been enjoying the fragrance of the Lilac, a French hybrid, deep purple Lilac that Sherpa and I planted on our 25th wedding anniversary in 2001. I stopped my work, readied my camera, and went out a took a few dozen photos.

But when I opened my computer to fetch the files I had downloaded this morning, the photos were nowhere to be found. I’ve been having problems with some of my storage drives, and I have my main external hard drive at the computer magician’s place at this very moment. He just moments ago informed me that most of my files are intact and retrievable. I’m missing 9 Gigabytes of data, and I’m not sure what those specific files were yet. But since the computer magician recovered nearly 300 Gigabytes of photo files, I am more than happy. (I do have another back-up, but it is inconveniently in Arizona at this moment. Poor planning on my part.)

Now back to the lovely purple lilac photo. Well, the above photo is not of my Lilac. This photo is of a bush I photographed at the Allen Centennial Gardens on the University of Wisconsin’s main campus a few days ago. It will have to stand in for the other photograph for now.

Once the thunderstorm that is directly above my house moves east, I’ll see if I can take another photograph of another Monarch on my Lilac.

Maybe, maybe not…

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC.

Ant, Conqueror of Peony

Ant Conquering the Peony World

Ant Conquering the Peony © 2012 Bo Mackison

There are more things to alarm us than to harm us, and we suffer more often in apprehension than in reality. ~ Seneca

No, this is not my usual kind of photograph. But I sure had a lot of fun getting the ant just so, so that it looked as if it was crawling over the edge of the giant peony world!

I used the infrared filter from Nik Color Effex Pro 4 to change this pink and green garden photo into a sci-fi garden shot.

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Bo Mackison is a photographer and owner of Seeded Earth Studio LLC. Sometimes a girl (photog) just has to have fun! 🙂