Look at these People

This time next week, I will be done with school for the summer. This time this week, I’m floating on a cloud because I don’t have to take my math final. Oh happy, happy day.

My math teacher has this way- if you get an A average for the year, and do a bunch of other good stuff, you don’t have to take the final. This morning, I had an 89.4 average. But, after getting a 95 on an in-class assignment today, that bumped right on up to an 89.5, which rounds to a 90. Which means that I am home free home- at least, until I hunker down to start pre-calc homework… Though frankly, I still want to unschool.

I haven’t done any crafting this week, but I have done a bit of cooking, even though I’ve been very busy with school and final projects. Let’s just say I’m horrible at time management and procrastinate like tomorrow never comes.

Unfortunately, another thing I haven’t done much of this week is take pictures. I really just haven’t been feeling very motivated lately. Hopefully, all will change with the end of the school year.

That’s pretty much it for this week. Good thing I have some older pictures and more stuff to tell you…

So despite everything, I’ve had a fairly good two weeks. My journal gets more attention than my blog. I want to be busy this summer, so there are a few things that will hopefully be happening. One is senior photos- hopefully, maybe, just maybe I’ll get some people actually wanting to pay for my services. I printed out some flyers and passed them around to the junior homerooms at school. I don’t know if that will get actual results, though.

The other thing is tutoring a couple of grade-school-age girls (about 10 years old, that is) in math. Yes, yes, har har, irony- math is just about the thing I despise most in the entire world, yet here I am, teaching it to younger kids. But I tutored a second grader (about 7 years old) last year, and I actually enjoyed it quite a lot. And, that was for community service hours- this time it will be for money.

Then, come August, it will be off to Rockport with me, to the Maine Media Workshop to learn about film photography. Film is something I’ve worked with a bit on my own, but never quite as in-depth as digital. Still, I know my way around a darkroom, and I know my way around a camera, so I’ve got a couple of months to familiarize myself with this new SLR before I’m off. And, somewhere in that time, I still might be pulled into the digital workshop. I’m on the waitlist for June and August.

Food. Okay. So I like food. I don’t have one of those weird relationships with it where I want it but don’t eat it, or for some reason I don’t want to. I always get a little annoyed when I hear about that. But anyway, I do eat when I get hungry, and I love to cook. And bake. But also cook. You know, healthy things.

One thing that I always had a problem with when I cooked was that the light in my house (and most indoors, it seems) is simply not adequate, so my pictures always came out fuzzy due to shutterspeed compensation for low light. But this week, I made some cupcakes, and decided to take them outside to photograph them.

They’re mocha-chocolate, and they came out very delicious. Not very pretty, because I don’t have a frosting bag, but that part is only semi-important, anyway. They tasted fantastic. The recipe came from here. They’re pretty simple- I even used instant coffee heated in a microwave (we’re not coffee drinkers here).

Then last night, I needed to make a Turkish dinner to take to a party for our foreign exchange student this year. this was like.. a pasta in home-made tomato sauce. I was sort of disappointed by how not-exotic it turned out. It was literally just egg noodles with tomato sauce on them. What’s more, I used too many noodles for the amount of sauce, so it was actually very bland. But peppery. Bland but peppery. The Turkish like spicy food.

Still, I prettied it up and took some pictures.

That KitchenKarate site has this recipe for cookies that is probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s like two sugar cookies with chocolate inside them. I definitely want to try them- maybe tonight, if I have time after doing some more work on finals projects. If not, this weekend. I don’t know what’s going to happen this weekend.

Till next time,

Shutterbug

Sometimes Goodbye is a second chance

So titled because I’m just too tired to think of anything but this line in the song I’m listening to, and anything too tedious right now will discourage me from typing this post altogether.

My week? My week was tiring. I got accepted into this big media camp thing I was gunning for, with a full scholarship, and it was so cool. Then I found out that I wouldn’t be able to go to the digital workshop I wanted to go to- I’d have to go to the traditional film course. The only difference between those two is about $250.

Then I start getting emails with things I have to read, fill out, and send back by snail mail. Registration forms and billing forms… all very intimidating and irritating and with everything else? I just don’t want to deal with it.

“Everything else” is the end of school. Finals are coming up. Some of them are big scary tests- like in math, which continues to remind me that there is no reason for me to be happy in the world. English is going to be an in-class essay over Romeo and Juliet. But some of the teachers are deciding to do big scary projects as finals, which is refreshing until you don’t have time to think because you have two finals projects due on the same day AND hours upon hours of normal homework. Being a teenager is awful.

Last weekend was Emma and Brittany’s one-year. Last weekend was very nice, refreshing and relaxing and fun. Emma and I spent the day making a cake based on this concept I came up with forever ago, and decorating it to be beautiful. Because the light in our kitchen is terrible and everything came out blurry, this is the only good picture I have of it.

It was a triple-layer chocolate cake. The middle layer was actually a layer of brownies. The frosting was cream-cheese, decorated with blue food coloring and mini chocolate chips. It was very impressive. The day involved one large-scale breakdown.

As the sun was about to escape us, I forced Emma and Brittany outside for some pictures.

Dear God, I swear I’m not a foot fetishist.

But some people might wonder.

Then came the week. Not worth mentioning. Then the weekend again. Yay, right?

Not quite.

For some reason yesterday, my step mother was determined to pick fights. I’m not going to go into detail, I’ve told my story to four different people already. The important thing to know is that I did not say anything intentionally malicious to her, and I did not mock her. She refuses to believe either of those claims. This resulted in Emma and I retreating back to my mom’s house at midday Saturday, two large breakdowns, and the rest of the day spend in a rather teary mood.

Watched a movie called Dakota Skye. If you haven’t seen it, well…. go see it. It was very good.

I took out my stress making things. I made that headband last night while watching the movie. It’s very frustrating; sure Emma and I are twins, so how come that band looks great on her, but shit on me? Here I was hoping I had actually found a way to tame my hair. Everyone’s like, Put it in a ponytail and tuck it into a hat! No. hats don’t work for me, and ponytails are boring. I LIKE accessories, I just can’t really do anything with them. They don’t agree with my face.

Not a fantastic picture, but take my word for it; she’s the pretty one. And she’s just lost a ton of weight.

Moving on.

I also made these.

They’re pillows. Check me out, a teenager sewing pillows and headbands by hand.

Right now, I desperately want to get out of the house. And I want to talk to my dad. Ideally, I would like to go to my dad’s house, but well…

Random picture of some of my friends.

Until next time.

Shutterbug

This Mortal Coil

What a dramatic title. It isn’t followed by an incredibly amount of epicness, unfortunately.

If I had any other readers besides V, I’ve lost them all due to laziness and unpredictable posting. And long postless periods of time. But I have nothing interesting to say anyway, soo..

Yeah, it’s been one of those weeks.

I have a lot of nature photos this week because I literally didn’t touch my camera for the two weeks following the New York trip. And then some. So I grabbed my camera and went into the yard and forced myself to take pictures of anything I could find. And I did.

I think I’m doing more dramatic things with my pictures lately; less of my nature pictures are black and white (most of my portraits maintain monochromacity, though) and I’m trying different ways to get the colors deeper and richer, and set new moods. What do you think of the above picture, besides… mundacity? (check me out, making up words…)

And frankly, my yard isn’t that interesting. But I tried to be creative, and I really love this dandelion picture- I’ve just been keeping it to myself because I don’t know what popular reception will be. But I think it’s one of my more intriguing compositions.

Well, I haven’t completely eliminated the black and whites… A macro lens would have made that picture and several others much easier to achieve.

So I do a lot of thinking on my spare time, and most of the people I talk to about my radical thoughts are… well, a little sick of me. Which I guess is understandable; it doesn’t take an expert to see that I’m denying reason because I don’t want to face the hard truth. But it’s more than that- it’s that I don’t think the truth should BE the truth, and I’m finding it very difficult to just… let it happen. And people have told me that I’m trying to make a point and it’s not happening, that I’m wasting energy and making myself miserable (yes, it’s been said by more than one person…) but I think I’m not complete without a point.

Here’s what they say:

*I complain too much (I’m not going to argue this one, I do complain a LOT)

*Complaining won’t change anything, I’m wasting energy and making myself ill and doing things like blogging at 1:50 am on a Thursday night when I still need to take a shower and go to school in four hours

*I’m sixteen and like it or not, I’m powerless

Here’s what I say (pigheadedly, and repeatedly):

Don’t talk to me about wasting energy.  Sure, life would probably be easier and less exhausting if I sat back and did what I had to do without bitching, but it makes me incredibly angry that everything I’m being made to do is such a waste of time! I mean, I love learning and I value knowledge, but I can’t say that school is the right way to go about accomplishing that. And here’s where I lose a large portion of my audience, because 90 percent of American children go to school. (With an estimated 9 percent being homeschooled and one percent other.) But look at school: a seven hour day, cut into eight blocks of alloted time for thinking about eight different subjects. From the tender age of five you learn to be shifted around by the tone of a bell, and that your thoughts and opinions (even five year-olds have them!) don’t matter as long as you can figure out what the teacher wants to hear and regurgitate it back.

The American school system (which I will refer to as “conventional schooling”) wasn’t made with the goal of educating individuals- it was made with the goal of turning out hundreds of thousands of mindless, obedient individuals who will work in corporate government jobs without complaining or dreaming big. School, from kindergarten on, seeds out ambition. Not to mention that the stuff we really put stress on, the subjects that are put on a pedestal as the important ones, the if you don’t learn this you will live in a garbage can ones, really aren’t that important at all! That said, don’t get me started on higher math. For an artist, someone who is as right-brained as it gets, there is nothing more pointless than the 3600 hours spent sitting in math classrooms from kindergarten through 12th grade. Those are the hours in the classroom. As in, not including all the backbreaking homework we do on top of it.

I don’t know a single person- math teachers excepted- who actually remembers, let alone uses any math above Algebra II.

And no, I’m not just complaining to complain- I actually have a solution in mind, though it wouldn’t work for the entire United States, unfortunately. Unschooling. Sudbury schooling. In fact, I’ll just speak for myself- I’ve done so much reading on the subject, and THIS is the way I want to learn.

Unschooling is a type of homeschooling- so it’s not dropping out of high school. It is, however, abandoning curriculum in favor of learning by living, widely known as student-driven learning, where the student decides what they learn, when, and how, based on their interests. Oh, and wait for it- kids actually enjoy learning! Even math. When they aren’t being forced to learn it at the same pace, in the same way, in the same stuffy classroom, kids learn addition, subtraction, multiplication, and fractions all on their own. And they love it!

There have been so many studies on this subject. Children who unschool are shown to become more mature earlier, because they feel like they actually have a say in what happens to them, unlike conventionally schooled children, who learn that they can go through life passively by letting teachers and parents move them about. Unschooled children also are much less likely to fall victim to depression.

It’s  not slacking off, either. Children actually do learn this way. And there are many children shoved into conventional school systems who really don’t work there, and I’m one of them. I would give my left pinky to unschool, because I look ahead of my at two more years of what I’m going through now and… it’s all so very gray.

Why, just because I’m sixteen, can’t I have a little color in my life?

And I’m not a quick thinker, so off the cuff I can’t say much more without repeating myself. In fact I can’t even wrap that all up into a neat conclusion. Moving on.

I have other goals as well. People scoff at them, too. I won’t mention them here, because as far as I know I’ve got one reader and one reader alone and she’s already heard it, and she gave me a reality check. A very harsh one. That’s the thing: I don’t need reality checks. I understand that this isn’t my reality right now, but I see no reason why I can’t damn well make it my reality.

There are other things happening this week, but their much less philosophical. Wrong word. Oh well. I’m tired, okay? Effort isn’t going to be expended on exactly proper word choice.

Until next time, whenever that may be.

~Shutterbug

The Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day

Title there is a reference to a children’s book that I don’t own, by the way.

So generally I try to make updates on here when I’m in a fairly good mood so there’s not too much bitching or moaning or hating, which is probably why I’m so late on this week’s post. (or rather, missed entirely and am adding a gratuitous extra post before THIS week’s post is due.) In fact, I’m still in a pretty awful mood. This week has been one of the worst I’ve ever experienced. The forces of nature have been against me.

But I really don’t want to complain because I know I have readers (do I?) who are in worse shape than I am. I just have ridiculous anger problems.

Instead, let’s go back in time two weeks to the very best vacation I’ve ever had with my dad, in the Big Apple. Three days in New York, 14 hours in the city, it was amazing. That day, we took a train from Scarsdale (that’s pretty much Snob Hill- I have wealthy relatives) to Grand Central, then walked from there to the International Center of Photography (where I was ironically not allowed to have my camera) and then we grabbed a taxi to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

My first view of the city

(All of the portraits you’ll see here are of complete strangers- NYC unleashed the Street Photographer in me.)

I loved riding the taxi. My dad and I both have problems with our feet, but the day was warm, so a few minutes in a car between sights, with the window open, to rest was very cozy. Not to mention, some of my best pictures were taken from the window of the various taxis we rode.

(this girl was posing for the guy all the way across the frame, yet I caught it from the taxi.)

The Met was amazing. It was huge. We were there for close to two hours, and we didn’t see everything, and we didn’t have time to ruminate on the areas we did see.  And our feet killed. (No, honestly, I have this extra bone in each of my feet, and my dad has gout. We were downing Ibuprofen by the hour.)  But it was amazing.

This guy was an amazing sketch artist.

My Dad, 100% the amazing companion I knew he would be.

Oh, and that little family behind him in that last picture?

It was an amazing vacation. Makes it all the worse than school was waiting to mess it up come Monday, and it turned out to be one of the worst school weeks ever.

Then came the weekend, and I got to cook, and bike, and read, and watch movies, and THINK about things that I wanted to think of, and spend time with my sister, and spend a day- just one, just Saturday- without getting angry at all! Oh god, I love days like that.

Then came today.

Until next week.

Shutterbug

Analyzing Poetry: Why I Hate It

Hello, post that is a day late. Is anyone keeping track? I’ve been doing pretty steadily at way-too-late-on-Tuesday for the past few weeks. Oh well. No one cares. Anyway.

And now is really not the ideal time to choose to update spaces no one reads anyway, but I’ve learned that it is never the ideal time to spend hours analyzing poetry using crazy English teacher’s crazy rules. In other words, yes, I am avoiding my homework. But you would, too, if you were me. Yeah…

A lot of homework I have, too. I have to write a ballad about Kristallnacht. How do you write a ballad? What are the rules?  ABBA? ABCC? I should know this, since poetry is all we’ve been doing in school, in English and Creative Writing. I don’t even mind poetry- I really enjoy it most of the time. I am, however, loathe to go through every line picking out the assonance, alliteration, consonance, synecdoche, refrains, shifts…. It dullifies poetry.

Alright, that’s uninteresting. What would be interesting to hear me go on about? I have nothing to write; I’m on vacation and I’ve been horrible at managing my time.  I haven’t even cooked anything but a batch of cookies, nor sewn anything but a button on my jeans, nor drawn anything but a shaded glass object that turned out rather horrendous.

But you know what I have done. (Think hard, this might just surprise you.) I’ve taken some rather nice pictures. (Who’da thunk it?) This year I hope to do senior portraits for some of the junior class, at least, so I talked to one girl in particular who I know talks to a lot of other people (and talks a lot in general) to let me take her pictures for free. In return, she tells all the junior class how amazing I am. Yes!

This is the first real shoot I’ve done where I met up with someone in a remote but beautiful place just to take their picture, for three hours- including one memorable costume change behind an overhang of rock. Much fun.

Vanessa was actually a very good model- a very willing model. She let me be very bossy about my pictures.

On one hand, it was an incredibly successful shoot- I took 180 pictures, of which about 30 were decent enough to put on a CD, and maybe 5 or 6 would make good senior photos. And Vanessa is very happy with them, and very willing to gloat to the Juniors about my skills. Personally, though, I think they could have been much better. Look at the above picture- her face is blurry, but her hands are in focus.  That hand must have been about six inches closer to me than her face, and I was standing about seven feet back, with full zoom. That sort of minute difference left her face blurry! I guess next time I’ll have to open up the aperture a bit… But I love that small number… Also, the background is not blurry enough for my satisfaction. Am I picky?

That one above is one of my personal favorites.

It wasn’t just the two of us, though. My dad, brother, two of my sisters, and our boston terrier decided to join us for the ride.

Tomorrow I’m off to New York with my dad for a Transatlantic concert. Progressive rock is not for everyone (I like it, but I don’t love it) but I can’t wait to go! We’re going to stay with my aunt, and on Friday we’re going to go to the Metropolitan Museum and Art and a photography museum I don’t remember the name of, and we’ll be leaving again on Saturday. In two days I love my concert virginity, almost exactly a month after V lost hers.

So now I must pack (I actually finished that poetry analysis around writing this post) and consider doing more homework, or just reading fic for a while. Ta-ta for now.

~Shutterbug

A 176-Photo Weekend

Unfortunately, I can’t share all 176 pictures with you (hello, my two faithful readers), but it was a fun shutter-happy weekend. I went on three photo-walks, one with my little sister and her friend, and one when a younger friend of mine spontaneously showed up at my house and asked me along.

Actually, it was a pretty uneventful weekend, and it’s been an uneventful first two days of the week as well. (Oh, and last week post-Tuesday was also boring.) Now I’m sitting here at close-to-midnight with nothing to say and a complete inability to gather my thoughts well enough to think of something to say.

So last Friday I got to skip school (honestly, it’s been weeks since I’ve actually suffered a five-day school week and I still bitch all. The time.) in turn for waking up twenty minutes early, holing up at my mom’s office with a movie (Real Women Have Curves- fantastic film!) and then going to a foot-and-ankle specialist to pick up an orthodics prescription to fix my Very Messed-Up Foot. Despite that, and having to buy new shoes, and the prospect of never being barefoot again ever (I live the summer in flip flops because they’re the sorriest excuse for shoes on the planet, but NOT ANYMORE) I was in a pretty good mood on Friday, and it did carry through mooost of the weekend, most of the time. There were some dips, but there always are. I’m young, it happens.

So I still want to talk because… well, what the hell, right? You should all see me in Creative Writing, I’m practically riding a high of hyperness.

So on Saturday, my little sister’s adorable little friend came over, and five minutes later I burst into Sister’s room and declared that, “It’s that time! Let’s go, let’s go!” No time later, we were out the door.

I would also like to add that, next to myself, Sister knows my camera better than anyone. She can navigate the menu and focus pretty sharply using manual. (By the way, I recently switched to Aperture Priority mode, and I’m having a harder time getting a sharp focus with it. Why is that? I like AV, more than I expected to- it generally does really well with the shutter speed to get me a good exposure.)

photo by Sister

photo by Sister's Friend

Ah… I love my girls. Aren’t they good? (That last one’s by me.) 🙂

So then we got home- this was about a two hour walk, with all the time spent phototaking, in the process of breaking in new orthodics, just so you’re all keeping track- and about the instant we did, Step Mom told the girls it was time to go to the arboretum (I didn’t even know Gardiner had an arboretum) and invited me along to take pictures. Well, I was still on a shutter-high, so yes, I wanted to go photograph MORE flowers.

Unfortunately, by this time it was getting dark and AV mode wanted to use the light REALLY well, and slow shutter speeds + apparent lack of ability to focus = no good flower pictures. I did, however, snap two very nice portraits of Sister.

(Sister likes being in front of the lens, but when she's there her face goes blank. You have to say something very funny to get a genuine smile out of her. I find "underwear!" usually works.)

Okay, going to stop staring at that picture now (I love it, people. Ridiculously.) and scoot along. Sunday was aimless. Homework was avoided. Until out of the blue, one of my best little buddies showed up and asked me to go with him and his mom to the waterfront. And it’s really been way too long since I’ve seen this kid. He’s such a sweetheart, really.

I couldn’t take my camera to the waterfront, because I ended up bringing Flora along for a walk, and I couldn’t handle them both (that puppy tugs like crazy… I was worried about choking her!) but as we were packing up, we decided that a trip to Vaughn’s Woods, where I haven’t been since last autumn, and my camera was definitely coming along for that ride.

It’s honestly one of the most beautiful places I know. And yes, I think tried for my plant shots, because… well, I like them, okay? Not as much as portraits, but their nice. Besides, Buddy doesn’t stay still long enough to compensate for the long shutter due to the, again, fading light.

I honestly had two pictures of this peeling birch bark, and I couldn’t decide which one to use.

And after that it’s been, well, school. Waking up early. Getting too-little sleep. Being moody. Doing homework. Despising math and loving art. Weekdays are just vessels that carry us to the weekends. THIS weekend, though, begins on Friday the 16th and lasts until Monday the 26th. I am SO ready for this vacation! And for probably the first time in my life, I actually have exciting plans to GO someplace: New York, to see Transatlantic in concert. With my dad. I can’t wait!

So, on a final note, I think I should share with you some advice. Unless you have a tripod, do not try to take a picture of a lit house at night. The windows + lights from your car are not bright enough to illuminate a photo, and your camera, if set in AV mode, will assign the scene a 25 second exposure. After about 18 seconds, I got tired of standing there waiting and started to move. You know what? The results are pretty interesting.

I love the pool of red under the car.

-Shutterbug

Are you ready?

This is going to be one of this massively boring posts that details exactly what I did this weekend. I’m sorry, I wish it wasn’t, but alas, you’re the one who’s chosen to read.

So the reason I’m rather eager to talk about my weekend is that it was really good. Better than any weekend I’ve had for quite a while, which is saying something, because weekends are the highlight of my existence. My hate of the week exceeds the word “passion.”

At the same time, I don’t want to just tell you what I did this weekend, because it would become “well on Friday I did this and then this and then this and then I slept, then on Saturday this happened.” What a drag that would be to read.

Instead, I’m going to unleash a slew of pictures on you and tell my stories around them. Hooray!…..?

On Friday my good friend B came over. This was pretty exciting, since B never really comes over, ever. To celebrate this momentous occasion, I cooked dinner AND cake, and then we watched musicals for the rest of the night. (My dinner and cake kicked ass, by the way. I made this.)

Saturday was fun and I made an epic conquest into the land of domesticity (which many argue is the opposite of epic. I tell those people to go eat a pincushion and continue right on sewing.) I visited a friend who very awesomely showed me how to, and let me, use her sewing machine. I’ve never used a sewing machine before, and it was awesome! I made a neato little bag with sweet fabric and no strap. And I don’t have a picture of it, because I’m lazy. But I can also just say that it doesn’t photograph well because it’s a little square bag. Still fun.

The rest of Saturday was calm, quiet, and warm. I spent a good amount of time reading.

I read a lot. I can see your interest dwindling. Feel free to click away anytime, nothing is keeping you here.

Yesterday we did the whole “Easter” thing, complete with dinner (lamb plus huge assortment of vegetables I don’t like, including asparagus, shallots, and some other French onion.) My eldest three siblings and I don’t receive Easter baskets, but Sarah is a lass of but eight years, and is still allowed to observe this tradition. I went with her into the sun to enjoy her gifts.

When I got home that night, I had homework to face, and was forced to acknowledge that even wonderful weekends only last so long. I really hate those forced realizations.

I’ve been shooting in a new mode- Aperture Priority, as opposed to full manual. I’m having difficulty focusing (probably because I’m REALLY closing the aperture, should think about altering that) but for the most part the exposures are coming out really nice, so it’s something I’ll continue to play around with.

Happy shooting.

-Shutterbug

I want it to be well-known that I am blogging under protest

Ello, Ello.

So maybe that’s a little unfair. “Protest.”  I was, however, forced by beings outside of myself to turn the concept of “wonder if I could start a blog…” into an actual blog. The biggest thing keeping me from actualizing this thought on my own was the fact that I didn’t (don’t) have anything interesting to say.

And yet, at the hands of my dear friend V, I am made to try, and try I shall. (I say as I stare at a computer screen at almost-midnight, at a loss for what to say…)

No, you have to believe me here. The life of a teenager- in little rural Maine, no less- isn’t much to go on. Most of (all of) the interesting things I do are completed by sheer, strict non-conformity. I think I’ve developed I nice little identity for myself as a teenage girl who photographs, crafts, cooks, loves books, hates math, dresses like a boy even though I’m more girly than I’ve even been before in my life, and can not wait to get to the part of life known as “living.”

I would say the most important thing to know about me is that I am so liberal-minded that most people who call themselves liberal call me “crazy.” Don’t worry, I know the rules- but all that means is that I know exactly how to break them. Doing something “weird” on a whim gives me a wonderful high, like shooting a gun (which I’ve never done). Like clicking a shutter. (Oh, yes…)

I am a photographer. It is one of the key ways I define myself. This blog will always, always feature, at the very least, a couple of pictures unless there is absolutely no way to get them. You’ll soon see; even in my way of shooting, I am driven to do something new and interesting. I love everything about photography- the camera (I have five, in various states of disrepair), the sound the shutter makes, post processing (I use Picasa, because hello, I’m broke), and nothing more than the final image.

Yet a photog is not all I am. It’s a huge part of who I am, but there is more. I am very crafty, or at least I wish I was. I sew (entirely by hand, because I don’t have a machine, can’t afford one, and can’t buy one anyway until I find someone to teach me how to use it), scrapbook (fifty-two cards in thirty days, baby), and cook. A lot of this blog will probably read like the memoirs of a housewife, because I am almost shamefully domestic. But it’s all so much fun!

Hey look… a picture? I dunno I get a little box with a picture of a camera in it. Anyway, these two lovely photos are evidence of my domesticity. I sew. I make radically misshapen dolls. But I love them! And I’m getting better. Little Small Flowery Dude is not nearly as lopsided as Pointette (the one who smiles).

Alright. Sidetracky-ness, maybe. At least I saw what the photo uploading thing looks like on here… this is all new to me.

I think I’ll turn you away with a few photos I took yesterday and which, after some *decent* post processing, I quite liked.

On a final note, I’ve no idea how regularly or sporadically I’ll actually be updating this crazy thing here. V updates hers once a week like clockwork, every Castiel day. Me, well… who needs structure?

Yes… I think that’s a nice way to sign off.

Happy shooting!

-Shutterbug

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