Here’s an excerpt from our fall issue of Celebrate Home Magazine. “Capturing Fall,” written by photographer and educator Brian Loflin (featuring photographs by Brian, me, Ft Eyre, Chloe Sutcliffe, and Scott L Thomas). There’s also a list of tips I share about capturing photographs of people during this time of the most beautiful, golden light. Click on the link “CHM Fall Photography” below to download this excerpt.
© Cindy Dyer, Dyer Design and Barbara Kelley, Kelley Hospitality
Sunset over Wylie, Texas (iPhone 8Plus)
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved. iPhone 7plus / Snapseed app border
Here’s the info on my first smart phone nature photography workshop at Green Spring Gardens in Alexandria, VA (Saturday, May 5, 9:30 am – 12:30 pm). The class will cover smart phones in general (Android and iPhones welcome)!
Smart Phone Nature Photography
(Adults) Learn techniques to improve your smart phone nature photography with the help of professional photographer Cindy Dyer. Get a better understanding of composition, color and lighting and how to use your camera settings to capture what you intend. Practice what you learned with an in-class garden photography shoot, critique and lesson on editing. $52/person. Code 290 232 6001.
Register at www.fairfaxcounty.gov/parks/parktakes or call 703-642-5173.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved. iPhone photos / Snapseed app borders
South 281 near Harrisonburg, VA
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved. iPhone 7plus, Snapseed app border
Inspired by summer and the beach (Polaroid transfers created from my favorite 35mm Fuji slides)
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
I shot this photo on my recent road trip to Texas. This was somewhere in Tennessee.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
Last night’s sky was so painterly with a brilliant blue background, storm clouds, wispy cotton trails, and glowing gold patches of sunlight. I went a little nuts photographing it with my iPhone 6 (border added in Snapseed app) in a mall parking lot. Beauty is found in the most mundane places!
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
From the Iceland archives (June 2014), moss-covered lava rocks in south Iceland. This place was hauntingly beautiful—I felt like I was on another planet! I love the light in this shot—storm clouds in the distance, sunlight breaking through in the foreground.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
Originally posted 9.23.2008
En route to visit Barb and Dean in Spokane on Saturday, September 13, we drove past miles and miles of wheat fields and as the land became more golden in the late afternoon light, we noticed the makings of a harvest moon.
Whenever I hear the words, “harvest moon,” I always remember a very old Ruth Etting album (heaven only knows where I found it) that I eventually gave to a friend’s husband to add to his large music collection. I just did a search and I actually found the recording! The only words I could remember were “shine on, shine on harvest moon…for me and my guy.” (I sing it true to her old-fashioned vibrato, of course).
Etting revived the song in Ziegfield Follies in 1931. Click here to find it on youtube.com. And if you’re a Liza Minnelli fan, click here for her rendition of the song.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
I’ve picked one photo from each month of blogging in 2014 to recap the year visually (starting with December 2014 and working my way back to January 2014). Now here’s to 2015—hoping it is another year of immense creativity, staying connected to family, nurturing friendships both near and far and old and new, growing my graphic design and photography business in fresh and challenging directions, continuing to dust off my rusty sketching and painting skills, decluttering my physical space, communing with nature, photographing more flowers and bugs, updating my garden with quirky and photogenic new plants, hitting the road in search of adventure (and fresh photographs), honing my writing craft, acquiring new skills and learning something new every day.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
Originally posted November 7, 2009
Fairview Christian Church (Madison, VA), erected 1880…and nearby farms
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
This is the second rooftop terrace, photographed a few weeks ago for a client. This terrace has a view of both the Capitol building and the Washington Monument!
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
A few weeks ago, I photographed two beautiful new terraces on the top of an association client’s building. If I worked at this place, I’d find it awfully hard to come back inside after a lunch on the rooftop! This is the smaller of the two terraces…photos of the larger one to come…
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved. 
What’s this? Another waterfall? Yep…and I don’t know if this one even has a name on this one since it’s not a major attraction…you’ll find these every couple of miles on some parts of the roads running around the entire country!
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
This is a “record” shot” (meaning it won’t win any awards!) of a portion of the bird cliffs of Látrabjarg in the West fjords. I wanted to give you a sense of how steep these cliffs are. At the top of the photo, you can see a few little buildings and a lone man walking. There is a squiggly white line to the left of the man in the black jacket—this is the “safe zone” line they marked in the grass with paint. Before we went to Látrabjarg, I was doing some research and learned that in 2010, a 51-year-old German man and his wife were at Látrabjarg and the man fell to his death while photographing the birds. The cliffs are 1500 feet high and the ground at the cliff edges can become unstable because the puffins dig their burrows below the surface. I was a bit apprehensive about going after reading that, but once there, I felt safe since I was staying behind the safe line and using a long lens. I’d do most anything to get a good photograph, but I won’t risk life and limb!
You can’t see the birds in this photo, but there are hundreds of birds nestled in the nooks and crannies. I got most of my shots from one side, pointed toward the areas that jut out at an angle. I got the puffin shots easily because they nest close to the top of the cliff and my 80-400 lens was perfect for the task.
Látrabjarg is the westernmost point of Europe.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
I shot this image of Brúarfoss with my iPhone 4s and one of my favorite apps, 645Pro, in the 6×17 panoramic format. Not bad for an iPhone shot, eh?
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
Garðar BA 64, the oldest steel ship in Iceland, built in Norway in 1912 and beached in 1981 the Latrabjarg Peninsula in the West Fjords of Iceland
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
Beautiful beach en route to the bird cliffs of Látrabjarg in Iceland. Although I haven’t been to Hawaii (yet!), I felt like I was there when we came upon this vista!
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
Miniature waterfall by the side of the road not far from the Latrabjarg bird cliffs in Iceland
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
On the last night of our road trip, we stayed in Akranes, the 9th most populous town (6,623) in Iceland. This is the Akranes Lighthouse, built in 1918 and inactive since 1947. It is located at the extreme tip of the Skipaskagi (Ships’ Cape) peninsula. I saw the golden light on the lighthouse from our guesthouse owner’s dining room window. She suggested I borrow her bicycle and bike over to it to shoot some photos, so I did just that. I was only gone about a half hour, but I had such a great time—put my camera in the basket, hopped on, and pedaled over toward the lighthouse, wind in my hair. It was about 11:00 p.m., and I must admit that I’ve never been on a bike ride at that time of the night until then!
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
© Cindy Dyer.. All rights reserved.
Experimenting with motion blur with really slow shutter speeds and neutral density filters…there are a gazillion waterfalls in Iceland, so I had lots of places to practice this technique!
© Cindy Dyer. All rights reserved.
GIVE ‘EM SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT