Vickie Hallmark

Time is flying, and soon we'll be flying...on our way to Hawaii!! My husband, Keenan, is presenting a short talk at the meeting of the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research in Honolulu, so my homeschooled son, Joren, and I will tag along on an extended field trip to learn about Polynesian culture, Pearl Harbor, volcanoes and ocean life. This is why we homeschool! Watch for lots of Hawaiian flora and fauna photos.

Today I'm working on bead images to submit to glass magazines -- one of the goals that I set for myself after attending the Gathering. I have spent the entire afternoon with the camera and Photoshop. Whew!

Photographing glass is hard! It's almost the opposite of photographing quilts. Quilts tend to be large, giving flat field and extended lighting problems, plus they are light absorbing and make showing the tiny relief that the stitching adds difficult. Beads are small, need a tight focus and more depth of field, and they give hard reflections from the lights. With thousands of dollars previously invested in photographic equipment, I'm probably going to break down and buy a small light tent to make this easier.

Surprise, surprise! I did actually pull out fabric and start working on a small piece yesterday in the Leaf Mosaic Series. I really love the last piece I made in this series and I'm crazy about ginkgo leaves, so that's what I'm working on. For some reason I don't understand, there's a huge amount of red in the new piece. What's up with that?? I never use red.