National Equality March, October 11th 2009

This weekend I went to the National Equality March in Washington DC to march for LGBT(QQA...LMNOP) rights. Here I have my favorite shots I grabbed while marching:

A little New Hampshire pride; his shirt reads "Live free or die." I took this photo for a friend from New Hampshire. We're going to search for this shirt online, it's fantastic!

Putting down our signs and flags and listening to the speakers at the Capitol building where the march finished. The sign reads: "Homophobia. Now that is a choice."

Finding new and creative places to put rainbows!

The lawn was littered with signs when we got to the capitol building.

The boy holding his really cute sign is great ("Somone [sic] drew a circle to exclude me... So I drew one BIGGER to include them"), but my favorite part is his friend next to him. Really priceless expression on him!

This photo is the most powerful one I think I took all weekend, mostly due to the signs these men had ("38 years together/Too long a courtship!/Ready for right to marry" and "Beaten by cops in 1965/Still waiting for equal rights"), but also because I caught them in an interaction, which is hard when you're marching in a crowd. I felt really lucky that I noticed when the crowd parted at just the right moment, and got this shot. Here is a slightly bigger copy since I'm having trouble making the photos enlarge when you click them.

All in all it was an amazing weekend. One thing I didn't expect - Lady Gaga spoke! She said it was the most important moment of her career to date, which gained her a few points from me. My favorite speaker was Cleve Jones, a name you might recognize if you saw the film Milk (he was played by Emile Hirsch) or because he invented the AIDS memorial quilt. He was one of the first gay rights activists, and it was very inspiring to hear him speak about the progress that's being made, and the many things that need to still be done. I heard him both the day before the march at a coffee shop, and then again at the Capitol. I heard many inspiring people talk about their inspiring work, and I hope that equality will be completed in my lifetime. It would be nice to not be a second-class citizen under the law anymore.

A trip to Brazil

Here a a few photos I snapped while at the Animal Behavior meeting in Pirenopolis, Brazil at the end of last month. I was only there for a week, and most of that week was spent indoors, listening to talks, but on occasion we did manage to escape and get a small taste of the culture of Brazil. Not speaking Portuguese, I can't tell you how accurate that taste was, however!

Taken right on the grounds of the hotel, this one is great because of the spider laying in wait inside the flower! Very appropriate for the animal behavior meeting. Unfortunately I don't study spiders, so I can't tell you what it's doing in there...

This is a motorcycle taxi, which were crawling all over Pirenopolis. I wish I'd had the chance to take one!

These last two were taken at a nature preserve about 30 minutes away from the city we were staying in. We took a van there our first day and walked around in the Brazilian forest, looking at the flora and occasionally some fauna. The light was incredibly striking when the sun began to set - the bottom photo is basically as shot. I love the depth of field on the other, it makes it look like a dreamland.

Spring Break in Scotland

Some people go to the beach, some people go home, but for me the UK was the perfect place to spend Spring Break. I stayed with a Clarkie in London and then went to visit an old childhood friend, Kelsey, who moved to Edinburgh back when we were in high school.

This is me and Kelsey. I hadn't seen her for five years when I went to visit her. An Alaskan man (who was very impressed that I'd been to his home state!) took this for us at Edinburgh Castle.

Inside Edinburgh Castle.

I stayed at Kelsey's university for a few days. She goes to St. Andrews, and this is the view from the train station platform when we arrived. She said that when she first took the train to school, she thought she'd gotten off at the wrong stop because it looked like the middle of nowhere.

These are the ruins of the St. Andrews Cathedral, down the street from Kelsey's apartment.

Kelsey was really excited that there were blue skies. I definitely was, too!

This is what we arrived at when we left the ruins. This road next to the ocean is Kelsey's jogging route. Makes one a little jealous.

...I guess Scotland is kind of pretty.

And this is the beach right next to St. Andrews' Old Course. See the swans in the bottom left of the picture? So cool.

Me waiting for my train on my way back to London.

Adirondack Mountain Boonies

These images are from a trip to the Adirondack mountains earlier this winter. My aunt, her husband, and my grandmother on my mom's side of the family live out here, so we try to make the trip out there at least once or twice a year. I got some good shots when I went on a drive around the lake that they live on with Siblings no. 2 and 3.

Rolling hills and a frozen lake.

Sibling no. 3. The clouds made this lovely diffuse light.

Here the sun is trying to break out, leaving those great shadows on the snow. These old barns are just gorgeous. I managed to grab this one while hanging out the car window, telling my brother (sibling no. 2) to drive more slowly so I could frame it properly. Lo and behold, all I had to do was crop out the edge of the road. I've developed good reflexes for that after a lot of shooting from a car in Alaska two summers in a row, when we can't stop because we're late going to our next lake!

And the last one is an outtake - this is what happens when my sibs want to take a picture of me. They never get a good shot of me because I'm too busy telling them how to use (read: how not to break!) my camera.

Clark photos

So since I'm TAing Frank's Advanced Digital class this semester, I figured I should be a team player and start up my blog again, too! I'll be posting what I'm taking, or in the absence of shooting (I'm a busy girl!) I'll be posting old things that I haven't posted before - likely from my second trip to Alaska this past summer, just cause they're so purty.

For now, here's a few photos of our own Clark University in the snow that I shot for the admissions department last weekend. They told me to just go out in the snow whenever the next snowstorm was because their literature is too devoid of wintery pictures. So when I woke up and saw a blanket of snow outside, I threw on sweats over my PJs so I could beat the sand (pictures of muddy snow are far less attractive) and wandered campus for a few hours shooting.

This is a classic Clark shot of our most iconic building, Jonas Clark Hall. Hopefully this is a slightly new angle in terms of photos of this building - usually it's seen from head-on, but from this angle I thought it looked a little more secluded.


Freud, also classic. It takes a lot of snow for Freud to get snowy since he's got a very slick finish. I was mostly interested in getting people in the background - I didn't want it to look like campus is a deserted wasteland when it gets snowy.

More people - I was impressed that I did manage to get people walking around on campus as it was Sunday morning.

I think this one is one of the prettiest ones that I got, but it's probably a lot less usable for Clark's purposes since there are no students in it. I'll give it to them anyway - maybe they could use it in the school calendar or something.