Sunday Unusual

This image is not my usual style. It's dark, it's not completely sharp (as I may be a bit anal about having my images be), and it's not my usual subject matter.

Mouse over the image to see the color (and uncropped) original. 

But as I was walking home the other night in the thick fog, this kind of image was all I could think of. An indistinct figure at the end of a tunnel of trees and houses, walking into the light. But there were few other people out in the inclement weather and I doubted the image would present itself exactly as I imagined it. Then this man stepped out onto the street in front of me, and so I quickly got out my camera. I only had the time to take a few blurry frames - this was the sharpest one - and then he was gone again, into the mist. I've tried to process the image so that the lack of sharpness isn't such a detractor, but what this really is is a sketch, something I'll (hopefully) be able to reshoot later and better.

Until then, let me know what you think.

PS Thanks to Scott Law for teaching me how to do the mouse over technique on the blog. I've said it before, but Scott, you're awesome!

Lunch on the Grass

All right, maybe that's a bit pretentious as this doesn't hold a candle to the real thing. (Side note: Poor Manet. When I googled the name of the painting all the search suggestions made by Google included the name Monet. For the want of a letter . . . ) This version also includes a lot less nudity, though. Safe for work!

The farmer's market near my work on Wednesdays has been having awesome tomatoes at ridiculous prices, so naturally I've been taking advantage. I've been using them to make sauces, eating them fried with polenta . . . delicious! Nothing better than a really good tomato, and there is such a difference between those grown outside and those that start life in a hothouse. (And don't even get me started on sun-dried tomatoes . . . it's true love.)

So anyway, plunked these down in the grass and suddenly it was a photo opportunity!

Meet Danbo

He would like to offer you some grapes.

Fractured Reflections, and Interruptions in the Early AM

I was woken up this morning by Evan making a loud whoooshing sound. At 5:30 am, which, if you know me at all, is not my usual wakeup time. I'm much more a 7:30 kind of girl, 9:00 if I can finagle it.

So I gently said, "Evan?" Translation: what in heaven's name can have possessed you to make SUCH a noise at SUCH an hour? He said, "Shhh. I think something's eating the cat food."

Now internet, I may not have mentioned that our house is currently under major construction and there are huge holes to the outside in places. I don't mention it because I'd rather not, if you catch my drift. I like for my blog to be a construction-free zone. Anyway, turns out a band of merry raccoons (we surmise, as we never actually saw the perps), after having entered our house through one of the lovely construction-created holes, were gently unrolling our bag of cat food and bringing out handfuls to munch on quite carefully. It's the only explanation that accounts for the fact that there were no holes in the bag at all - just it had been unrolled to open it. And no mess around the bag either. Raccoons are notoriously clean eaters, I think.

So, anyway, raccoons, here's a message for you: we hid the cat food. It's gone, sorry. So no reason to pay another visit. But, uh, thanks for having such nice table manners?

On the Square

As a former Linguistics student I can definitely tell you that square is usually not a positive term. It's a synonym for dull, stodgy, boring. Conventional.

And most people will tell you that it's harder to make square photographs exciting. People prefer wider pictures to taller pictures. But I've been seeing a lot of beautiful square pictures recently and it's something I really want to start experimenting with. So consider this step one.

A note about this photo: I took it one evening in Yerba Buena park in San Francisco, while I was explaining a few photography concepts to a friend. I mostly just took this to show him the effect a long shutter speed has on moving water - makes it turn to silk - but then I got all into the composition and stuff, and ended up with a photo that I really like. Is that instant karma or what?

Looking for the Light

As photographers it's always hard to determine how much of the success of the photo is due to the person who pressed the shutter and how much in the subject matter. Certainly there are some things it's almost impossible to take a bad photo of. Flowers, for instance. Picturesque travel locations. Beautiful women.

And that's why a photo like this always pleases me when I find one. It's conceivable, of course, that someone else could see this office plant peeking through the blinds in this office building window and see the possibility, but I think it unlikely that many people would.

Here I appreciate the diagonals against the parallel verticals, the green against the white, and the curves against the lines. Plus the living against the lifeless. This is full of contrasts. Plus it kind of is reminiscent of a reaching hand.