A Week in Normandy with Paula Neumann

Paula’s interest in photography has developed over time. Paula was definitely more comfortable with a point and shoot camera until relatively recently. Her first experience with an SLR was as team photographer for her daughter’s summer and high school swim teams. From 2000-2010 she took 10’s of 1000’s of photos at meets. She learned some basic Photoshop skills and posted images on team websites and provided images for end of season slideshows. When her daughter headed off to college in 2010, Paula decided that she needed to develop a serious hobby to fill the void at home. She took three photography classes at the art league in Alexandria over the next 2 years and has been hooked on photography ever since.

Paula joined the NVPS in 2013 after she retired from her 26 year career as a pathologist at Inova Alexandria Hospital. Her years behind the microscope have trained her to look at things carefully and critically, to notice patterns and details. Her love of the outdoors and travel have provided her with ample photographic opportunities. She enjoys photographing flowers, landscapes, and architecture. She has become more adept at post-processing and primarily does this in Lightroom. She is currently using a Canon 7D Mark II camera. She uses her images to make travel books, calendars and photo cards and shares them online. NVPS continues to be a valuable resource for education and growth. She enters the monthly competitions with regularity and has received a variety of awards, but mostly she enjoys learning from the critiques of both her own and other members’ images. Paula’s goals in photography include branching out into portraiture and abstract imaging, learning to be more patient with bird photography and learning to be more creative in post-processing.

Her digital presentation is titled “A Week in Normandy” and is a collection of images from a recent trip to Normandy, France. Normandy is a photographer’s delight with its long and varied history, quaint villages and half-timbered buildings, its beautiful countryside with apple orchards, pastures, fields and farms, and its spectacular coastline and beaches.

Under the Tuscan Sky with Georgette Grossman

Take a tour of Tuscany through my photographs. The scenery is remarkable. Light and shadows play on the wheat-field landscapes giving them velvety contours. Clouds billow against the blue skies. Colorful laundry hangs out windows to dry. Poppies and olive trees mingle in the fields. Cypress trees line the driveways.

These images were taken in May 2018 while I was on a landscape workshop with John Barclay and Rad Drew.

Georgette’s journey in photography began 12 years ago when her granddaughter, Ava, was born. Not capturing the cute smiles she wanted, she switched from a point’n’shoot to a DSLR (Nikon D80). She attended her first Nature Visions show at Meadowlark in 2007 and discovered there were camera clubs in the area! She joined NVPS in January 2008 and was hooked on photography as a hobby. She was the president of the Northern Virginia Photographic Society (NVPS) from 2014 to 2015.

Georgette advanced her photography skills by taking hands-on classes. Some of her instructors included John Gonsalves, Eliot Cohen, Corey Hilz, Nikhil Bahr, Josh Taylor, Mike Moats, Don Rosenberger, and Denise Silva. By attending NVPS lectures, workshops, and field trips she believes her photography has evolved to a higher level. Participation in competition has helped to give her a critical eye when capturing and post-processing her images. She reads online columns daily to keep “up to date” on new camera equipment and software tips. Recently Georgette switched from a Nikon D7200 camera to a Fuji X-Pro2 and a Fuji X-T3 to lighten her load.

Georgette captures moments she wants to remember. Her subjects include abstracts, people, places, and nature, but her favorite subject is flower close-ups and macros. Lately she is dabbling more with B/W images.

Seeing her images in print completes the photography journey. Georgette has shown her images at

• The Art League in Alexandria, VA,
• the Glen Echo Annual Labor Day Art Show,
• the ArtSpace Herndon Fine Art Photography Exhibit,
• Nature Visions annual exhibit, and
• the Annual Joseph Miller Abstract Photography Exhibit.

From August–October, 2018 she had a solo exhibit at Beanetics Coffee Roasters coffee shop in Annandale, VA. It was entitled Under the Tuscan Sun.

Georgette’s images can be seen at http://pixels.com/profiles/georgette-grossman