Hello - About photographing irises ...

My name is Anastasia and I love to paint dramatic portraits of irises in 
oils and pastels, so I can capture strong and deep colors and beautiful 
shapes.

I rely mostly on photographs for my paintings because a single work may 
take more than 30 hours of painting time spread over several weeks (also, 
because I like to paint year-round).

My husband Roger is my photographer and we love to go to the local iris 
gardens (Scheiners and Cooleys) to capture the beauties in early 
spring.

For the paintings I prefer sharp contrasts of lights and shadows, and 
out-of-focus backgrounds to add dimension and sharpness to the flower in 
focus.

Roger uses a Canon EOS Elan camera with a 70-300 mm telephoto lens. For 
photographing irises he uses a manual meter to measure the light  because 
the sharp colors and light contrasts of the flower tend to confuse the 
cameras internal meter. The most dramatic shots are those taken on sunny 
days (sometimes difficult to find in Oregon), in mid-afternoon. The 
colors are brighter and the shapes more clearly outlined when captured 
with slide film (as opposed to prints). He usually uses a Fuji Sensia 100 
film (carried by Costco), which captures natural colors well

I paint from the developed slide by projecting it onto a Mylar screen in 
my studio.

After a painting is completed, I photograph it with 100 speed print film, 
using a special filter and under special lighting conditions (that you 
probably do not care about). Those photographs are scanned, digitized, 
manipulated, and compressed for my Web page. You can see the results at 

	http://www.teleport.com/~painting (follow the flowers link).

Im getting Roger to write a couple of mini-articles about the scanning 
and manipulation of photographs, the use of Snappy, and building Web 
sites. Ill post them as soon as he is finished.

Nice meeting you all.

-- 
Paintings@Anastasia.com
Anastasia Czerniakiewicz
503-292-1476
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