I’ve posted photos with painting potential from my camera roll for each of the last 7 years. Once I get back further than that, photos become few and far between, due to my inconsistent keeping of them, poor photo quality, and my own lack of knowledge about photography. Still, there are a few that I have kept.
A view from the top of the hill in Boston’s Harbor Islands.
I now know that these purple flowers are purple loosestrife, which is invasive. Still, it’s a pretty wetland scene where the trees frame the view into a yellow field. Very summery! I don’t remember where this was.
A classic view of Jamaica Pond!
This is how I imagine Robert Frost’s “a yellow wood.” I think this could make a good background for something. I posted this on Unsplash.
I found something very idyllic about these low, colorful boughs.
A selection of colorful trees across a field of reed is a common fall sight in New England. (Somewhat unfortunately, since the common reed is invasive.) To hear this photo, imagine a bunch of red-winged blackbirds.
This is a classic “bad photo, but might make good painting” snap. The photo is a little slanted and soft-focus, but the darker, cooler color context makes the orange tree pop.
This would be complex to paint with all the leaf highlights. But I think there is something lovely an nostalgic about the light rays through the trees.
This photo is blown out, but it’s accurate to how I experienced this scene!
An absolutely shimmering oak in Boston Common. I actually painted this in September 2023:
2016
I have even fewer photos for earlier years, so I thought I would just dump them at the end here instead of doing a full post. Mostly, they are from October, since Octobers seem to bring out the photographer in me, even before I had taken a photography class, gotten Instagram, or had any particular use for these photos.
This one isn’t so much for picture quality as nostalgia. Most of the willows in the Public Garden are gone or severely cut back now due to disease.
2015
It was slim pickings for 2015.
Included for novelty: it happens to be similar to a view I sketched nearly 10 years later.
2014
This is way better than the typical photo quality I took at the time and I used it as my banner on socials for like a decade.
Conclusion
And that concludes my camera roll posts! I really can’t go back any further than that; any photos I have from earlier years are more pictures of people, I didn’t tend to save (or take) nature photos. Which, honestly, fine – I’ve saved you from hundreds of very similar, crooked, out-of-focus shots from the Bad Cameraphone days.
To reiterate the point of all this, my quest was to find photos from my own back camera roll that I might like to paint. I welcome you to paint any that strike your fancy, too! I’ve posted as many as I can on Paint My Photo (links in captions go there). This allows me to easily see the reference on the page for the painting and vice versa, including being able to see paintings other people have done for my references, which is always extremely gratifying.