The Tongue: A Triptych

It's not how I take a bath, lord knows. (And sometimes it's not how she takes one either. Yes, we wash our cat. Feel free to laugh - but it keeps her cleaner, and our mild cat allergies don't flare up at all.) I don't think I could have the patience for so much licking and swiping, and then repeat, repeat, repeat. Last week I just stood above her as she washed on my gray office chair (more hers than mine, honestly) and held the camera shutter button down.

I think it's safe to say that my cat is pretty cute. And that pink tongue is just the icing on the cake.

Available Light

Who doesn't love available light? It's available (unavailable light is so frustrating!), and it's the lightest light around. Nothing to carry but you and your camera. And sometimes it's a bit flat and dull, yes. Or at worst it's harsh and too contrasty to capture. But sometimes it's pure magic.

Hard as it might be to believe, it's blossom season in San Francisco again. I may have gone a little hog wild with blossom photos last year at this time. I'll try to keep it to a minimum if I can stand it this year. But here's the first one. Gorgeous.

Self-Portrait: January

Sometime in the last week I remembered my resolution to post a self portrait every month this year. What was I thinking?? I realized that self-portraits are actually pretty hard. For a while I had visions of toting my tripod somewhere beautiful, setting it all up, prefocusing, using my remote trigger (which, by the way, where is it? does it still work? who knows). Gosh that seemed like a lot of work.

So I took the easy way out and found a reflective surface. And not even a very faithful one, there are really two reflections of me there, kind of merging together. I propose that we think of this as a practice self-portrait and remember that there are still 11 more to come. Fortunately fore me, I've left a lot of room for improvement!

(Oh, and you should check out this video about a roll of film left in Prospect Park. Interesting stuff. Especially if, like Mike Johnson, you think it might be a fake.)

Right Now I'm Loving . . . January

Honeycrisp Apples. I've always been an apple lover, but man! Honeycrisps are even better than my old go-to favorite, Braeburn. And I'm a picky apple eater. But these are perfect: crisp, juicy, sweet but not too sweet. Love at first bite. Incredible that they've only existed for about 19 years. Science is amazing, isn't it?

JetPens Ohhh I wish I had never discovered this site. it all started when I picked up a pen someone had left behind, fell in love with it and then discovered it wasn't available in any stores. Then I found out it was from Japan (as all good stationery supplies are) and googled it, just for fun. Well, if you've ever wanted to buy some Japanese pens but didn't know where to look, your wait is over! Just be careful, it's addictive. The pen I fell in love with, Pentel's Hi-Tec-C, is right here.

Behance Action Journal A related tale of stationery addiction began at SFMoMA where I was innocently browsing the museum store and chanced upon the Behance Action Cahier. I thought it would be a cute, portable way to carry around my endless to-do lists. And it was, it's awesome. Plus the paper is 100% post-consumer recycled. And I do actually feel a lot more productive. (Is that the placebo effect?) These are hard to find it stores, but you can order them online. And in person, they're gorgeous. Especially the Action Journal which I recently graduated to. Now I just need some Action Stickers to round it all out.

And last but certainly not least, my Fresh Sugarplum Lip Treatment. Makes chapped lips good as new almost immediately, plus it smells and feels amazing, and it has an awesome color (probably only for the ladies, though, sorry gents!).

*Full disclosure: the only relationship I have with these companies is that I waste my hard-earned money on their nefariously attractive products.*

Photoblogs I Love

Last week I talked about my favorite photography blogs, here are my favorite photo blogs. Light on text, heavy on pictures, these are generally a visual feast.

Accessible by Uwe Eischens Incredibly well processed, often surreally beautiful landscape and intimate landscape shots. His pictures often seem to glow.

Cornforth Images Some of the best landscape and nature photography around, in my opinion.

Darwin Wiggett A cross between a photography blog and a photoblog, but still more space given to images than text. Great work from Darwin himself as well as many other featured photographers.

Eli Reinholdtsen GREAT reflection images, that's her specialty, but also some wonderful street work. I find her blog a good reminder that everything doesn't have to be perfect or straight to be interesting and beautiful.

Tafari's Mindspill Sometimes controversial, always entertaining, and some good photos as well. I particularly enjoy his work with flowers.

The Still Image With Crash Taylor I really like the premise of this blog, which is to take great photos from all kinds of photographers and have the photographers themselves speak about the process of making the image. My only beef with it is that Crash always has one of his images in the post as well, and frankly they're usually not as good or as interesting. But that's probably being a bit picky.

Anyway, please feel free to leave your favorite photo blogs in the comments! (Not that my Google Reader needs to subscribe to anything else, quite the opposite!)

Old School

Can you remember the last time you made a call on one of these?