Unsure

If I stop doing photography, what would I do???

Crazy Lady on the Boat

Was in Chicago last weekend and went on one of those crazy speedboat adventure thingies in Lake Michigan.  Which was fun but needed way more 360s to be worth it.

This was the crazy drunk old lady who was screaming random things.  Notice her mardi gras beads collection.  In September. In Chicago.

Spot Boy

A friend of ours wants me to do an “engagement shoot” prior to their wedding.  So Hubz offered the following:

Hubz: Ill be your spot boy if you do it
Me: oh yay! 🙂
Hubz: wipe sweat off your face, get you water, hold mirror to reflect the light, etc
Me: hahahahahahaha
i love it
i have to put that on my blog
😛
Hubz: haha
yay i get to be on your blog
i finally said something worthy
Me: *rolls eyes *

This better be worth it!

So it’s 5:20 in the morning on a Sunday in late September.  Do people actually function at this hour?  Ugh.

I’m up to go shoot some photos and it better be worth it!  I missed the opportunity yesterday due to some horrendous nonsense, which is why I’m sacrificing my sleep (and hopefully not my judgment) for this.  If it is worth it, I’ll be back to post some pics.

Maybe. 😉

The Heart

 
 
Me: “What a sucker!”
Vbunny: “Who?”
Me: “The heart.”
Vbunny: “Sure is. Give it a good smack, I say.”

Fragile

This image calmed me after a crazy day filled with wedding planning stuffs. My first interpretation of it was “soft,” because that’s a new kind of shot that I’ve been experimenting with. (Love it, btw!) Then I came across the current week’s Photo Friday challenge, themed “fragile” and I think this fits perfectly into that theme.

I’m really digging this new style, as I mentioned to my friend yesterday, because I feel that it really leaves the image open to interpretation. To me, it inspires emotions and thoughts, and peace. Well, peace is an interpretation of the image. 🙂

And I think it has helped spark some creativity as well. For a long time, I’ve been feeling that that creativity that I used to feel coursing through me, allowing me to write random stories and just spew off on topics, has shriveled up and left. Or gone into Super Hideout Mode. I’ve been doing photography for fun for the past 3 years, and sure that’s creative, but at the same time I feel, how creative is it really to take a photo of something that’s just there? You look at it and you say, oh that’s a blahblah and that’s that. But with something like this, you can look at it and say, oh that makes me feel <insert>.

Maybe I’m selling myself short. Or maybe I’m just in a phase. I think both. But I’m really happy with the latest shots. And see, they made me write all this stuff too! 😀

California Dreamin’

Yay! 🙂

Can I Upgrade Ya

If you insist.

🙂

Feast For the Senses: Chinese New Year ’07

The past few days – hell, even the past few weeks – but in particular, this past week has been such a sensory overload. I love it. I have gone through a lot, seen a lot of new/interesting stuff, read all kinds of things, experienced stuff – it has been quite a feast for my senses. And so many moments have occurred that, as in my last post, I think to myself, I should blog this! Alas, I never do. But let’s try this time, shall we?

This past weekend I was in NYC, thanks to a friend, because she was in the Chinese New Year celebrations taking place in Chinatown. My fiance and I went, and it was really our first time in Chinatown (kinda sad, I know), though we’ve walked through it before. The streets were ablaze in color, from the confetti strewn everywhere to the various lion dances that were taking place. It was a lot of fun! I brought along my new DSLR for its second trip out into the real world (the first being an outing to take pics of the NYC skyline). I was a bit hesitant to bust it out at first, taking pictures with my trusty Canon, but then I saw another fellow photographer snapping away with his bigger-than-mine DSLR and it was all over from then. A couple of hours and 500 pictures later, we emerged from the milieu to partake in some dinner at the Green Tea Cafe.

It was a lot of fun watching the little kids running around whenever a confetti popper went off. Confetti poppers were tubes of pressurized air and confetti. Whenever you turned them, the top would pop off, releasing the confetti into the air. For most of the day, we were standing by one shop where the man would keep popping them every so often – particularly when things were getting quiet. Just when the excitement was dying down, he would release more of these and the kids would go crazy yet again. I wish I had my “mad photo-taking skills” because I could have gotten some great pictures; alas, I am still working on them. My favorite photo though, and my current desktop background, was of this little girl who I was able to capture as she ran around trying to catch a piece of confetti from the air. Adorable! 🙂

Another great moment was when we were walking around and encountered an older man who was trying to use one of the poppers. My fiance was walking around with his two empty tubes, so the man came over to us thinking we would know how to get one of those things to work. My fiance showed him, and I took pictures of the guy freeing the confetti. Very cute.

And then, after standing in the cold for hours, eating dinner in the front of the restaurant where the door was constantly opening and closing with people coming and going, doing a tiny bit of probably-overinflated-prices-because-it’s-the-new-year-and-everyone-and-their-mother-is-in-Chinatown shopping, and it being the first day of my period, I whined and complained and we took a taxi back to Penn Station to catch the train back home. 🙂

Good times!

[Part I of the Feast for the Senses series.]

The Joys of Editing

So instead of preparing today, I’ve been having great fun picniking instead! I’ve spent a good portion of the day going through my pics – mainly my newer ones, but some of the older ones, and refining and adjusting them.

It’s something I’ve never really done before. Sure there was a photo or two I changed up for saturation’s sake (I love bright, vibrant colors!), but nothing beyond that, and definitely not on a regular basis.

And then, last week Photojojo busted out with this awesome online app, that you could edit your pics with, from flickr or straight from the computer. And it allows you to send them right back to flickr, either replacing them or adding a new shot. Overall, it’s pretty simple, only allowing for minor postprocessing, such as exposure (contrast and brightness), saturation, sharpness, cropping, etc. But my goal wasn’t to heavily edit my shots, at least not yet. So this tool is perfect for me and it’s completely online – nothing to download!

Till I get my Photoshop (*ahem* 🙂 ), I’m happy with this. And even then, I’d probably use this for minor corrections.

Here is the difference between an original shot (straight from camera), and some minor postprocessing:

It’s also important to keep in mind, as a commenter noted on the 2nd photo, “cameras do process images but they’re not always 100% correct.”

I’m in love! 🙂