Photographic portion of my attempt to add 200 pieces to my portfolio

I am in the process of making 200 pieces for my portfolio.  A portion of these will be photographs.  Through this series I realized the lack of subject extraction in my photos.  Literally ripping items, taking prunings, pulling books, plucking insects, and placing them on a white background.   I found that this uniform approach to looking at the world helped me appreciate the essence of the things we so quickly consume.  If I could eat the way I see, I would eat so little and write volumes on the trace amounts consumed. 

This blackberry differs vastly from the black raspberry (next image)visually and in the time to harvest.  Black raspberries harvest quickly in my garden, and the blackberries take their sweet time.  Flavor-wise the blackberry wins as it tastes more like wine than fruit.

 

Taken on a family trip to the Museum of Science from the parking garage.

These are all coffee beans roasted for different lengths of time.  The left-most bean is a unroasted green coffee bean.  The right-most bean is a coffee roasted to what most roasters would call a french roast.  I took up this hobby after a friend of a friend (from Eugene, OR) told me he roasted coffee beans with a bowl and a blow torch.  Up to this point, my wife and I had done tons of research to find the best coffee roasting machine.  It turns out we already had the means to roast, we just needed to get inexpensive green beans (sweetmarias.com) and put in 45 minutes a week to have the fresh french press coffee and slammin' espresso shots.  We used to spend about 16 cents a cup buying roasted whole beans.  Now we spend about 8 cents a cup and I've read green beans can be stored for 6 months.  

 This is an oldie but goody from a few years ago.  I was unemployed and had tons of time.  So I naturally started taking pictures of reflected light.  The best results came from water filled wine glasses.  I did some processing on the computer for color and to bring out the more ghostly shapes.

I wanted to reproduce a photo I had taken a few years ago showing how tomatoes ripen on the vine.  I had seen this several times in my garden and I found an excellent example last week.  I pruned the vine a bit before taking this.

These are used watercolor wells.  The photo was taken with a macro lens at +4 magnification.  I was trying to paint some plastic pieces I had around the house and I thought to take a picture of the wells instead.

All of these photograph prints are for sale at my etsy shop for $20 a print.  Each print size ranges from 7" x 10" to 8" x 10".  There are 100 copies available for all images shown here.