Thanks!

Can you find the self portrait?

Made-up and ready to go for an afternoon of errands plus a group interview with a commercial photography studio.

I have never been any good at writing ridiculously long and photo-ful cooking blog posts.  I usually only photograph the end result because I don’t remember to take pictures of the intermediate steps (I am an Intuitive, after all) and because I am extremely finicky about my hands being dirty and getting the camera all buttery/tomato-ey/chocolate-y, etc.  I really wonder how people like The Pioneer Woman do it.  I am certainly not dextrous enough to balance my camera and stir/fry/cream things together.  Then again, I’m sure most cookbloggers have lots of fancy things that I don’t, like stand mixers or maybe just lots of helpful minions.  I just set up my tripod and hoped for the best.

I discovered that if I stop up to f/5.6 range, the focus of the gear-driven lens improves tremendously.  Good to keep in mind.

Just before Christmas, I got see my friend Celia who was visiting from South Carolina and staying with her friend Karen here in town.  Over dinner at La Chatelaine, we caught up on life and Celia invited me over to try my hand at animal portraiture with her dog, Brogan.

If there’s anything harder to photograph than small children, it is animals, since you really can’t tell them what to do beyond a few tricks. So you kind of take whatever you can get.

This is actually Karen's dog Brahms.

I’m always so touched by the bonds between animals and their humans, especially since I will never get to really experience it firsthand barring some sort of basophil mutiny. [le sigh]

Bring on the puppy dog eyes!

3/365; 1/3/2012

Already this 365 project is making me a better (read: less lazy) photographer! Against all laws of nature, I bumbled outside this morning in 15-degree chill because the sky was just so pretty and because I was inspired while journaling this morning. (Not surprisingly, my original concept led to something completely different.) It is EXTREMELY difficult to work the camera’s fiddlybits when it’s cold, so I kind of just half-focused and hoped for the best. Then I ran back inside and crawled under my five-layer blanket taco with my hands under my armpits.

I was also more adventurous in editing. Usually I am not a fan of wispy-de-doodah effects in photos, favoring instead bold, dramatic, mildly obnoxious colors that match my personality better. It also doesn’t help that everyone and their mother seems to be doing the ethereal Hallmark card look, especially in wedding photography, and of course I have to be different from everyone else because Mr. Rogers told me I’m special. But they may be on to something here, so I took down the clarity in Camera Raw and ran Pioneer Woman’s Sunshine action over it.

Again, not at all what I had in mind at first, but it was really too cold to stand outside for long.