photography

This Monday takes the cake.

Literally.

I planned to start this week out by meeting my friend Ashley at Starbucks. Little did I expect her and her parents to step out of the car and hand me a big white box with a beautiful leather-bound book inside.

An edible book.

Yes, folks, that is a Les Miserables CAKE. I devoured Victor Hugo’s famous work my senior year of high school, and it’s been one of my favorite books ever since, but I never expected to literally be able to EAT it.

Ashley and her mom Angie are amazing cake artisans (you can check out some of their other jaw-dropping creations here). Look at the incredible details!

Doesn’t the icing really look like leather? How cool is that?

And possibly my favorite detail: a big-eyed bookworm creeping around the corner 🙂

It even has my name on the spine! Thank you, Ashley and Angie, for kicking my week off to a great start.

So, did anybody else find a surprise planted in their Monday? Or want to come over for some cake?

Well, spring doesn’t officially start until tomorrow. But the plum tree in my backyard doesn’t know the difference. Every year, it bursts into a puffy cloud of fragile pink blossoms.

And every spring, it draws me irresistibly outside, camera in hand.

Macro (close-up) photography has been one of my interests for a long time. In this world, it’s often the biggest, flashiest, noisiest things that attract the most notice. But macro photography focuses in on the tiny, the delicate, the overlooked, perfectly-formed, miniature miracles hiding in plain view.

Like plum blossoms.

And to make things even more fun, this year my good friend Audry showed me some techniques with camera apertures. Oh boy.

Turns out smaller F-stops (lens apertures) focus on smaller depths of field. They draw your eye to just one tiny part of the image.

Instead of getting overwhelmed by the whole, you can focus the intricate beauty of one part–and maybe see something there you never noticed before. Look at the different textures of the pink petals and the red encasement–smooth and bumpy, frilled and veined. So much detail in such a small space!