weekend photos

spider dead tree

more yellow

weekend pics

goody. so finished.

even if this 75 piece magnetic roller kit hadn't been on my "buy-this-if-you-happen-to-find-it" list it still would have been worth $12.74 plus tax just for the way goody refers to this particular product: "so finished." word. that i happened to find the kit yesterday, the day after submitting my third-year review materials and mailing out the proofed manuscript, image files, and consent forms for a forthcoming publication was especially fitting. i wonder if goody has a product in their line called "what's next?" or (more appropriately still) "hey you--finish your book."

the "who cares?" aperture

before going back to taking the same ole, same ole kind of photos like the image to the left (i.e., vertically framed, f/2.7) i decided to try framing things horizontally and using what my book calls one of two of the "who cares?" apertures Since my camera only goes up to f/8, I wasn't able to try the other.

with an aperture befitting my attitude/mood after having spent the better part of yesterday standing in front of a copy machine making three more copies of my third-year dossier, i shot a couple photos around campus--the first two of which i've titled "huh?" since i'm quite sure how i feel about the horizontal framing or using an aperture that (more or less) keeps everything in sharp focus. the final shot is not, at least not to my eyes, all that bad, save for having framed the shot so as to capture the lovely townhomes in the background. then again, i like any photo that contains the plants i refer to as "weep."

yellow flower

seriously. not since i having had the occasion to photograph the blue flower (which c.z. tells me is not its proper name) have i been so crazy about photographing a particular kind of flower. and i'd insist again that i'm not even really a flower person.

but i am (or i at least i really want to be) an "aperture and specular highlights" kind of person. i was reading a couple nights ago about specular highlights and while i kinda sorta understood what they were, i couldn't recall having had them (or many of them) in the photos i had taken. according to my book, "the distance between the the main subject and background lights will determine how large the specular highlights (out-of-focus circles/spots or hexagons of color) will be."

the fun and puzzling part of photography for me, at least at this point, has to do with trying to reverse engineer the photos i've taken, to understand why they look the way they do in hopes of being more in control of what i do, how the shots look. i understand now, i think, why the fourth photo looks the way it does but i'm less sure why and how the first, second and sixth photos work. why, in other words, they look like they were shot in a studio situation, say, against a black background. clearly, light/lighting has a lot to do with what's happening in both kinds of shots, but i'm still not at the point of understanding how, if i want a black background or an entirely white one, what i need to do, what settings to choose, where the light needs to be in relation to the subject, etc.

blue flower

seriously. not since i purchased the sunflower plant for 7.99 at home depot this summer have i been so crazy about photographing a particular flower. unfortunately for me, i couldn't buy this one and bring it home.

so i'm on the side of the road (a fairly major road at that) hunched over and taking as many pics of the flower as i can both before and as the light changes. apparently, from the perspective of people driving up the road from behind, i appear to be in distress as they can't see the camera, can't see wildflower and (most importantly) i've not really moved much in awhile. a guy stops and asks if i'm okay . i say yeah but i guess i could use a photo intervention. seriously, i love this flower. and i'm not really even a flower person.

to my eye, it didn't look nearly that orange

i was getting ready to for bed last night when i noticed the shadows that the trees out back made against the side of one of the houses--the whole scene was really beautiful, a rich, buttery shade of yellow. cooler still, i thought, was the silhouette of the swing sitting in front of the house to the right. so i end up getting the tripod out, messed around trying to set it up knowing that there was no way that i could hold the camera still for the 15 second shutter speed setting i had to use. i think i took 8-9 shots in all--some portrait, some landscape. i would have been fine with the shots i took "as is" (save for the fact the photos were much, much more orange and halloween-y than i expected they would be) if it hadn't been for the fact that while i was taking, i don't know, the third photo someone suddenly ran around the side of the house. i wasn't sure what the camera caught, if anything, but i remember waiting (what seemed to me like forever) to see the finished pic on the screen. and then nothing. no trace of the person running past the side of the house. perhaps because i've not had many opportunities thus far to try and capture movement (save for perhaps the wind's impact on plants), i haven't a very good understanding of what i might have needed to do differently to have captured the figure. and because most of the photos I've taken thus far are of people or things that i can photograph again (and again and yet again) if i happen to mess up the first time around, this was the first time when i was really disappointed about a missed (or in this case, i think, botched) photo opportunity.

composing spaces

this is the week when i ask folks in my 407 class to represent visually (i.e., i recommend using something like the drawing tool at flash-gear.com) the processes they employed while composing a specific text and the space(s) where they composed that text. motivated, in part, by the desire to play along (thought i must admit, the light in my study the other morning was really appealing) i decided to represent three of the main (and of the many) spaces where i worked on the video portfolio--the most recent big-ish project i have completed. the first two photos were taken of the big desk in the study. it was here that i scripted and recorded (using the blue snowball mic sitting on its stand there) the voice overs for the portfolio.

i remember vividly the dread i'd feel when it came time to compose and record another chunk of the voice over. i'd climb the stairs to the study thinking, "i don't want to do this--i feel stupid--i hate this project--my voice will sound stupid." (as a point of fact, when my mom watched one of the videos she was like, "is that really you? it sounds good but is that you?") i was also anxious about the scripts being too long, too wordy. and many of them are. my goal was to keep the videos as short as possible and i worried that whatever i was thinking of doing with the videos, text, and images would be thrown off once i had the scripted parts written and recorded. to this end, it was helpful, at least in terms of overall process, to do one chunk of one video (without having written or recorded the voice over) on the laptop downstairs, working on that small piece till i had a better sense of what i'd need to say or do in the script. i go upstairs and write and record that piece and decide where to go next with the rest of that individual video. it tended to work out that each segment was done in three steps: video/voice over; video/voice over, etc.

this second space is also a study space and it's one of my favorite places to write. scratch that--i might say instead that the writing i do here tends to be more enjoyable than the writing i do elsewhere. it is also a necessary place--a place that keeps me sane when it comes to writing matters. almost without exception, my days start here. i make coffee, feed the cats and then i go up to the small table in the study, check my email, check the horoscopes, etc. and i begin a daily working/writing log entry. i picked up this habit while i was working on my dissertation. i was so afraid of writing, so doubtful that i could actually complete what to my mind seemed such a huge, impossible task that i needed to kind of trick myself into doing it. instead of working directly on/in a chapter file, i would create another dated file where i could, if need be, talk about what i hoped to do, what i was afraid i couldn't do, what i was planning on doing, etc. i realized after a while that i was--in these daily log entries--writing the diss (or coming up with ideas/plans to use in the diss) and that i could often cut and paste things from one file to another. the one thing i know as a writer is that if i don't keep with it everyday it gets big and scary. so the daily log is a way for me to keep writing, to not let writing seem too big and scary. i tend not to do much article writing in this space anymore--the computer is old so i mainly use it for email, web surfacing and writing in the daily log. also, the computer is not currently hooked up to a printer so there's less incentive to do work that i would need/want to print up here. as much as i'd love to have more space in the study--to get rid of this table, to take down this writing station, i can't seem to part with the space and the writing i do there. part of this has to do with being sentimentally/superstitiously tied to this particular computer. i wrote parts of my diss on it as well as the first ccc article and the c & c article. as far as the production of the video portfolio was concerned, i didn't do any scripting or recording of the voice overs here. instead, i tended to write about the portfolio. that is, just as i did with the diss (and just as i do with other things i am working on--articles, classes, self-assessments, etc.)


and now for bad habits. i promised myself when i moved in here that i would not let this happen. that is, since i had an upstairs study, i would make sure that i would do any/all text inputting up there and keep the downstairs clutter free and a space for, well, reading, taking notes (i.e., by hand) on things i wanted to do, to write about, etc. i tend to do so much writing over the course of a day (particularly when it comes to emailing, making entries in the daily work log), part of me wanted to make sure that i had to continue to run up and down the stairs all day. i also wanted to associate different areas of the house with different kinds of works. when i got the second laptop there wasn't really space for it in the study so i ended up putting it on a small side table next to the couch. (also, being sentimentally tied to the other laptop, i really wanted to avoid having them in the same room in case the old laptop would feel unwanted, undervalued and simply stop working.) big mistake as it became easier to work on certain things downstairs, sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table. since i hate how the computer looks sitting on the coffee table i tend to spend most of the day shuffling the computer from the side table to the coffee table--hence the reason why representation of this space has movement associated with it. bottom line, i ended up doing all the work for the portfolio on this computer, save for the voice overs. part of this had to do with wanting to print up scripts before i recorded them and it was just easier to do that upstairs. i also didn't want to bring a printer, the mic and whatnot down here (i guess i was trying to save myself from cluttering the space still further), so it became a fairly cumbersome process to write and record the voice overs, put them on a portable drive and bring them downstairs to add them to the video.

is it dew. . .or is it cz?

when i got up this morning, i was thinking about how much my mom liked c.z.'s dew shots and i thought it might be nice to take some dew shots of my own that she might like as well. so i was in the process of taking many, many dew shots this morning when it finally occurred to me that maybe it was never about her liking dew or photographs of things with dew on them so much as a matter of her seeming to like and/or greatly admire anything c.z. does. it could be that she doesn't like dew at all unless c.z. is taking photos of it, talking about it, etc.





























































since i've apparently slipped back into the macro mode (after promising myself i'd practice landscapes in prep for the upcoming throwdown with a.k.), i figured that i should at least push myself a bit on the color and texture front and tried to find something that i would normally never, ever think (or want) to photograph. i am calling this one "play" but it seems a more fitting file name would be "primary play." (blech)