Studio shots

Well, these are actually fake studio shots - I took a box and cut out the sides and covered them with white paper so that when I shined a lamp on the paper it would throw soft light all over the subjects - there's almost no shadow if I shine one light from one side and one light from the other side. I got the seamless background by taking a large white piece of drawing paper and taping it to the back so that it curved down onto the bottom. Now If I ever need a studio shot of something I don't even have to leave my room - so long as it's small enough to fit into my little box-studio! Pretty sweet, right? These are really just shots of anything that happened to be on my desk at the time, but they're pretty cute anyway. And they look nearly professional with not too much photoshop touching up, just a little dodging around the edges because I only had one lamp, and it wasn't quiiite bright enough for me to be making the kind of exposures I wanted to be.

More lab photos...

So I went back to the lab, this time with my camera in hand with more intention in my photography. I love the craziness of the lab, and the weird stuff lying around - especially in my lab, where everywhere you turn is some dead fish. Unfortunately I was unaware that my camera was shooting in JPEG so my photos can't go very large. I wanted to go back to shoot with a lens that goes wider (in terms of aperture) anyway, so it's not that big of a loss. This is more a preliminary sort of shoot, I guess.

Glowstick!

Ok, so I know Halloween is over, but there are still pumpkins out there, which basically means that we should still be carving them.

ESPECIALLY if we carve them into my study species, the three-spined stickleback! This pumpkin shall henceforth be known as the "glowstick." Obviously.

Here is the most amazing gourd carving I have ever witnessed, done by my friend Lauren Ackein, who's a grad student in the lab I work in. She came to the lab to do work, but instead found that the most amazing pumpkin carving tools were lying all around her (yay dissection kits!) and so clearly, this is the result. Well, after three hours of intense carving anyway.

I love these photos because I'm always a big fan of contrast but you usually can't go crazy so as not to loose detail in the extreme darks and lights - but not here! They're so graphic that the detail in the extreme darks and lights doesn't need to be seen, and the high contrast really adds to the mood. The middle two are my favorites because I love the weird lab stuff in the background - the huge Erlenmeyer flask full of brine shrimp is especially strange. I think I want to take more lab pictures, there's so much interesting stuff in there.

My blood likes to stay IN me.

Definitely not going to try to give blood again. It didn't work particularly well. I have horrendous veins, so they didn't even succeed in getting an entire pint or whatever amount it is they need. :(


How creepy, right? Sorry about this. I've always been kind of fascinated with the colors that bruises turn, so that's why I took this. It was that awesome phase where it's like three or four colors at once. Plus it's almost Halloween, so I guess if I'm going to post creepy pictures, might as well do it now, right?

So when I run out of other people to photograph, I take self-portraits

I almost NEVER EVER show my self-portraits to anyone else. I don't know why, I just... don't. So here is the world-premier of my self-portraits. Not the first of them, obviously, just the ones I took earlier this week. I don't know whether or not I'll print any of them out for class or not. Which is weird, since if I show them in class then about 15 people see them, whereas anyone could see them here. It's probably something weird and psychological about whether or not I see their reaction.




I made the backgrounds entirely black because I found the background of my dorm room really really incredibly distracting, so getting rid of it entirely seemed like a good idea. Right? They're taken using the light coming in through my window, which I love. I love using natural light, as silly as it may be. I'll probably be teased horribly if I actually do anything professionally with photography and tell anyone that. Anyway, I just liked that it made my skin look sort of luminous, especially after I obliterated the backgrounds using a combo of channel mixer, curves and burning. Good times.

The fam.

Some portraits... since that's what I like.


I like the interesting light on Child No. 4's face here. I think it's what drew me to take the image in the first place. This captures her pretty well, although I wish the top right corner was the same mottled green as the rest of the background and I'm not sure if I love or hate the shirt she's wearing... Is it slightly distracting or do the polka dots and touch of red add a nice extra element?


Ahh, Child No. 3. I love the look on her face here. It's so... thirteen? Very pouty. Not to mention the motion of putting on the sunglasses, which is like a shield against the morning to any teenager. This is on the way into the car as we left for our family road trip this summer. She was indeed very upset about being awake at the time, being that it was before noon, so clearly sunglasses were called for.


The first appearance of my mom! Here she is with Child No. 6, who's very very (did I mention very?) attached to my mom, despite (or perhaps due to) only being home since early this summer. This one's very typical of what you'd see if you happened to be in my house - my mom doing whatever (here I believe she was reading the newspaper), with Child No. 6 quite often just sort of attached to her. I also like the light here, raking in across them from the kitchen window and the fact that my mom is sort of oblivious to the camera while my little sister is looking straight at it, with a face that says "Yeah, that's right. This is MY mom." It's very sweet how much our adopted kids just adore having families. Of course, it's mutual.

My brother.

This is the brother who always refuses to let me take his picture. SUCCESS!!! This is at the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows release this summer, and I took it while aiming up at my brother while sitting on the floor in Barnes and Nobles when he got up to stretch. He didn't notice till after the picture was taken, and he hates it when I take his picture with no warning. Or with warning. In fact, if I warn him he usually covers his face. However, this time I managed to catch him (although he yelled at me afterwards and has now taken to calling me "paparazzi" which is a really attractive nickname) and refused to delete the picture because I loved the way the light falls on his face and arm. I also like the X that his arm/shirt crease forms with the strong line in the ceiling, and how it's echoed by the tiles in the ceiling above that.

Monterey Bay Aquarium

I know, everyone and their mother has pictures like this from Monterey Bay... But jelly fish are just so awesome!!!




So I guess I was going for more portraits of the individual jellyfish rather than lots of jellyfish pattern-y pictures. I'm a big fan of portraits, I don't know if you've noticed. :) I also really enjoyed the blue background with the particular color of these jelly fish - they're so calming, white and pale red, compared to other more electric-colored jelly fish.

In the lab.

I know, I'm the only one really interested in molecular genetics, but here's something you can all hopefully enjoy about it.



How pretty! This is showing Matt Arnegard writing himself notes about microinjection into fish embryos. I love the light coming in through the windows here. If only my lab had floor-length windows, I'm very jealous of the Kingsley Lab. This is where I spent a week this summer learning various molecular techniques (like microinjection into fish embryos!), and honestly it was one of the most amazing experiences I've ever had. I also in general love lab-setting photographs because it seems like such a different world than the one that most of the planet usually occupies. Giant microscopes everywhere, bottles filled with random solutions scattered on desktops, everyone is wearing latex gloves... I find it strangely beautiful. But maybe that's because I'm just a huge nerd who loves science.

Family Reunion!

This is one of the few photos I took at the family reunion I went to in early August. There were more than fifty people there, and I only really knew three of them - my aunt, uncle and cousin who we always see at Christmas. I was told I had met some of the others previously, at a wedding, but I was eight at the time and all I remember about it is hiding under a table to avoid my picture being taken, and what they remembered about me was probably mostly related to how much wedding cake frosting I had smeared on my face at the time. This time however I got to meet them properly, and they were all a lot of fun, though quirky as families are required to be. (This side of the family has a particular affinity for crazy nicknames. For example, I have a lovely cousin named Elizabeth but always called Buff, a second cousin called "Scrip," and another cousin told me my dad's nickname till he was about five was "Chimmie." His given name was Alexander!)

So I took this image during the bus tour that we all took through Pittsburgh, PA which is the city that the family is historically from, and also where I was born. My Great-Aunt Libby is the woman standing at the front of the bus, she narrated the tour of significant family locations with stories from her childhood which were really priceless. Standing next to her is her son, and they are both wearing their Garland-McLain Reunion teeshirts, which have the clan tartans on them. Mine is in the laundry right now, but I feel so Scottish when I wear it. Och, aye!


This is kind of a weird shot, mostly because of the inside of the greyhound bus we were riding on. I don't know who is in charge of choosing upholstery for these vehicles, but they definitely have questionable taste.

An example of how far behind I am!

Here are three pictures of the 4th of July this summer. I actually did get these edited a while ago, I just didn't post them, mostly because I left for California the 7th and then was busy doing molecular genetics. Infinitely fascinating, I know. Sadly... it was to me. But! The images:

We walked from my friend's apartment to the Ford St. Bridge to watch the fireworks.



These are (from left to right) my friends Beth, Kate and Max standing with me on the other side of the bridge. About two minutes prior I was probably telling them off for destroying lung tissue.



And here is everyone leaving after the fireworks are done. The only woman who'd climbed up to sit on top of the bridge (she's standing here) turned out, upon closer inspection, to actually be a man in impeccable drag. Rochester is a great city.


This was my first time trying night photography, digital or film, so I just put my camera on Tv mode at 1/15 of a second (which seems to be the longest shutter speed I can handhold pretty consistently, although I think the last one has a little camera shake), and hoped the images would turn out. It worked out pretty well, I think - I really like it when some of my subjects are moving and others aren't, particularly in the middle image.

More siblings!

At Frank's request. Or rather, Frank had to remind me to update at all because I'm a horrible, horrible blogger. For serious. Hopefully come August 27th, when I begin seeing Frank at least 3 times a week, I'll remember more - or at least he'll have more opportunities to remind me! I'm looking forward to actually taking a CLASS in digital photography (especially with Frank!), so that hopefully I can learn better and faster ways to make my stuff look good. I think I have a tendency to underexpose every picture when I shoot in an attempt to get detail in the highlights... Which I never did with film, strangely. Or maybe it's just the way the screen makes them look to me, but I always think the ones that I shoot on Av or Tv mode look overexposed, so then I manually underexpose. I should try looking at some blown up and out of the camera, though.

But on to the images! These are not of Alaska, instead they are much closer to home. These are Children No.s 4 and 5 at a friend's pool. Child No. 5 discovered that when he wears goggles he loves to swim underwater, so he wore them constantly. Child No. 4 on the other hand was more afraid of water getting in her ears, so the goggles didn't help her very much. This worked out pretty well since we only had one pair, and they didn't fight over them!

Moose!

I was very upset when I missed seeing my first moose because I was singing along to "Like A Prayer" too loudly to hear the grad student in our lab tell me from the backseat when we drove past one. Luckily a few days later I was in the car when these three burst out of the woods and ran right past the car, and I finally saw my first moose. And three at once! I couldn't be mad at Madonna for long anyway. In this one you can see the trees in the background are still all burned from the huge forest fire they had there a few years ago. There were actually several forest fires when we were there, too, but they weren't as bad.

Kashwitna Lake

This is Kashwitna Lake, which we stopped at on the way back from Talkeetna. This is just about the darkest I ever saw it get in Alaska, it was about 12:30am when I took this. Plus I was underexposing to get more cloud detail, so it was lighter out than it looks in these images, especially the first one. It was just such a striking lighting condition! I can't wait to print out the panoramic image really huge when I get back to the printer that can handle doing it for me. It was my first time trying to stitch images together, and it was a lot easier than I thought it would be, although it did take a little bit of fixing afterwards. Hopefully the trouble areas aren't too apparent!

Talkeetna

This is in Talkeetna, a small town we drove to for a day trip, stopping off at a bunch of lakes on the way there and back to make collections and do a little observation. There was almost nothing there except a few shops, a few restaurants, and a place where you could take horseback rides. None of us rode the horses, but being fresh out of other things to do we spent some time with these two. They were the only ones free in their little paddock, and not saddled up. Maybe they were particularly temperamental? In any case, Jana had had very little contact with horses before and clearly had no idea what to do when this one reached out and blew in her face!

All manner of sea creatures!

Well, lake creatures, really. This is a just a snail that Jighnasha found at Pup lake and held out for me to take a picture of. This one was sort of a happy surprise, it was just a point-and-shoot-without-much-thinking moment. She wanted me to take a pictures of the snail so I did, and then when I was scrolling through all the pictures it just jumped out at me. Maybe it's the colors I like so much.

Morvro Lake

There's no public access to Morvro Lake, so we were looking over our shoulders for the owners of this property the entire time we did water quality. Luckily they didn't show up while we were carefully tiptoeing through their yard to get to the lake! Of course we did knock on the door first to ask them if they minded, but no one answered. It was very nervewracking to be watching over my shoulder while pipetting water from the lake into tubes in the back of our van, which we'd parked next to their two old pickups in their huge gravel driveway which bordered on parking-lot size. They probably would have thought we were crazy if they'd come home! It didn't help thinking about what a rural place we were in; one of my professors has had a couple guns pulled on him before in Alaska while trying to get to one lake or another. Funny, a bunch of fish scientists doesn't seem very threatening to me!

Lazy Lake

Ironically, if you're actually lazy, you'd never get to Lazy Lake. To take these pictures I was struggling to hold two jars of fish and the plankton tow in one hand while
grabbing my Rebel with the other from around my neck. I couldn't zoom with only one hand, but I managed ok. Jana is carrying her macroinvertibrate net to catch bugs and Lauren is carrying ten quarter-inch minnow traps, which is what we use to trap the fish we then collect and study. She and Jana are wearing waders because Lazy Lake is so swampy that if you don't wear them you can't get close enough to the bank to throw the traps, let alone collect. I was wearing regular boots and barely made it without getting my boots full of water.

South Rolly

Wow, I'm really awful at this every-day thing! I think it's because I'm not on a regular schedule up here, so it's hard to remember to do much of anything except eat. And even that I sometimes forget to do!

Anyway, this is at South Rolly lake, which has a campground on it, so there are people everywhere. It was actually kind of awkward pulling out the water quality stuff, test tubes and pipettes, because everyone looked at us like we were insane. We did the algae tow off of this dock which (as you can see) had kids crawling all over it - Jana had a hard time not hitting them swinging the tow! It was really gorgeous, as you can see, although Lauren told me I was creepy to take pictures of other people's children. :)

The dock.

These are also at Camp Lasda, on Kelly Lake. In the first image Jana is filling bottles of water so we can do our water quality tests on them. We actually have a cooler full of pipettes and test tubes and even a portable suction unit in the back of our car to do the water quality, it's really pretty cool. Well, cool in a horribly nerdy sort of way, as we sit at the edges of these lakes and squirt water into test tubes and erlenmeyer flasks with our pipettes! In the second one, she's collecting algae in her tow, which requires her to swing the tow around her head before throwing it out into the water and then dragging it back to shore (or in this case, dock) to collect the algae in the tow's net.

Camp Lasda

Not trapped in a petri dish yesterday! :) This was actually at a seemingly abandoned camp that has lake access. We had to cross these tracks to get to the lake front from the main bit of the camp, which made me a little nervous. Visions of campers scampering across railroad tracks to get to the beach... It's probably better that it's been abandoned!

Been a bit lacking lately...

Sorry I've been so bad lately about posting! I've been sort of in a photographical rut, by which I mean I've been trapped in the lab for the past few days. BUT tomorrow I'm going out to trap a few lakes, so I should have some more material to go on than test tubes and petri dishes. So I give you this one to last till then - This is how we've been amusing ourselves in the evenings. Lauren (the one in the baseball hat) is the reigning champion thus far, being beaten only by Matt, who's since left for Massachusetts.

Hope you're not weak stomached...

So a few days ago two of the people I'm working with got to go fly in a small airplane and get to some lakes inaccessible by road. Cool, right? Cool until they dropped their traps and came back with leeches as well as fish. They brought two of them back to the lab, too. I was and continue to be disgusted that we have two leeches, two GIANT leeches in a tupperware tub in one corner of the lab. Of course, being somewhat of a science geek (heh), I can't help but be weirdly fascinated as well. Mostly because they just disgust me so much, but... you know. Sometimes you're just drawn to the things that make you the most queasy. And so I give you, Portrait of Leeches. I shudder to think how close I was to make this image, it's barely cropped. It's funny how being behind a lens can feel like protection even when it's not at all, especially when it comes to something like leeches! As if they wouldn't latch onto me either way. Looking at my images, I definitely got closer and closer as I was taking the images. Maybe it seemed so much less real through the lens, or I forgot all about their blood-sucking tendencies while focusing more on how their little bodies were contorting and moving and waving in the weirdest ways. It's really amazing how invertebrates can contort themselves.

Anchor Point continued

I got around to editing the other Anchor Point photos while in the lab today. In the second image you should be able to see three bald eagles. We think we saw at least seven there at once, all circling around. Of course the two guys that worked there thought nothing of it while we all freaked out. One eagle actually swooped right in front of our van while we were all eating lunch, and its wingspan was looked longer than the van was wide. It was incredible. The third image is a tractor backing into the ocean to pull out a boat, which is what the two guys that work there do. I guess there's no way for the little fishing boats to get out of the water without being pulled out by these tractors that wait by the ocean with a radio for calls from the boats. They have these hitches, two of which can be seen (sans tractor) in the last image, that the boats drive straight into once the tractors are in the water. It's really an amazing sight, the tractors just drive straight into the ocean until you'd swear the engine must be submerged and completely destroyed, but then they manage to come back out again, while towing a boat.

Anchor Point

This is the westernmost highway point in the United States! Unfortunately (note the ominous clouds) the weather was a bit nasty, so we didn't stay overnight like we'd planned so I'm back in Anchorage. We went, we collected the fish, and we came back. Ten hours of driving in one day is a little exhausting, but luckily the driver, a post-doc named Matt, was a fellow photographer, so he kept stopping the car and we'd all get out and photograph the scenery. He and I have matching rebels, but he's got several lenses and I only have the kit lens, so I developed a bit of lens envy every time I couldn't get a shot as wide or telephoto as I'd like. Once I'm actually making money I'll be able to trick out my camera, too! Anyway, I have a lot more images from the trip, but I don't have the energy to edit them all, so this is all you get for today. It's definitely my favorite of the day, though.

Back in the lab.

I guess the lab side of things doesn't produce such bad images, either. These are all of Justin's petri dishes full of embryos. They were stacked on top of one of the lab benches, and I placed the camera on the bench aiming at the dishes and snapped this without even looking through the viewfinder. I couldn't decide whether to crop out the foreground, and eventually exhaustion won out and I did nothing to it!

And now it's off to bed because we're leaving for Anchor River at 5am tomorrow, and I'd love to squeeze in a shower before we do so, which means I have to get up at like 4:15. Which is in four hours. Ahhh!

The field!

Today I was in the field. The field that scientists are always talking about, yet I had never been to. It was great fun! I clambered around three different lakes and pulled in traps and then sorted and collected stickleback. Then we took them back to the lab to run trials on, some of which I also did today, but still. NATURE! It was fun. I even got to see Anna Lake, which was lovely. Here are three that I feel are sort of a series. The second two are Justin, a grad student, wading into Lynne lake to fill a cooler full of fish with more water for transportation back to our University of Anchorage lab. See all the little stickleback fish in the closeup of the cooler? I love the way they huddle together. And I love the reflections of the sky in the water.