Today we welcome Barb Brookbank, an Albertan photographer who elevates her photos into works of art!

Hi! I’m Barb Brookbank, and I’m thrilled to be a guest blogger at Canadian Scrapbooker. I’m a wife, mom, and grandma, living in the beautiful province of Alberta. I’m the blogger behind Keeping With the Times where I share my love of food, photography, and life. You can also find me on Instagram @keepingwiththetimes.

I started scrapbooking in 2003 after my first grandson was born and scrapped traditionally for many years. It was a great fit since I had been making greeting cards and loved working with paper and glue.

However, life changes and evolves, and I became interested in digital scrapping after purchasing a copy of Photoshop Elements 4. The box included “Learn Digital Scrapbooking” by Linda Sattgast of Digital Scrapper. Learning Photoshop took time, and a lot of work, but when it finally “clicked” I found myself on another exciting journey. As well as being on several creative teams, I began to write Digi Scrap Tutorials for Digital Scrapper, which eventually led to my becoming a Premier Video Instructor. My style is clean and I tend to use a lot of white space on my layouts. You can visit my gallery here.

Today, my passion is photography. I’m a natural light photographer, working and manipulating available light with a simple white foam core deflector. I shoot in Raw, with a Nikon D7100, then organize and process all images in Lightroom.

Although I love landscape and nature photography, most of my work today revolves around still life, with an emphasis on flowers and food:

For the following shot I used a 40mm lens with an aperture of f/2.8. I focused closely on the teacup which resulted in the teacup being sharp, and the background softly blurring away:

One of my favourite styles of shooting is “from above”. I think it’s directly related to my scrapbooking roots where everything is carefully laid out across a page:

I love to press flowers, and when I saw how well these two Queen Anne’s Lace were preserved, I had to create a layout! I layered handmade paper on top of the flower press, added the Queen Anne’s Lace, a ribbon and the wing nuts from the press. Then I photographed it and added the script in Photoshop:

Food is a large part of my photography, and I love to explore many different styles. A huge trend right now is to create moody, desaturated vignettes. For these images, I set my scene close to a window, taking advantage of the beautiful side-light which creates a wonderful play of light and shadow. I used Lightroom presets by Kim Klassen to achieve the moody looks you see here:

The best advice I can give about photography is to do what you love! It doesn’t matter whether it’s a DSLR, a point and shoot, or a phone. Beautiful art can be achieved using any of these cameras, as demonstrated by the following images taken with an iPhone 5:

To see more of my work, please visit me at Keeping With the Times.com

Well, Barb, we definitely want to see more of your work! Your photography is breathtaking!