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.

Senior Photos

My brother will KILL ME if he finds these online, so let's pray he doesn't google my name, shall we? He won't let "professional" photographers anywhere near him, so I took his senior picture for his yearbook. They had to be black and white for the yearbook, so I worked them up that way. I really like the way they turned out, especially the horizontals.




And this last image is an example of something I had to deal with often while shooting him. Most of the photos I took were him making very... un-Senior Photo-like faces! To get him to smile naturally I cracked a lot of jokes, which is actually a technique I've started using when shooting other people, too. It works really well once you figure out the right kind of joke for the person you're shooting.

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.

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.

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!

The baby.

So yesterday I spent the day running anti-predator behavior trials (otherwise known as scaring the crap out of little fish by propelling model trout at them) and "preserving" fish (otherwise known as anesthetizing them, killing them, and slicing off some fins for later genetic testing - it's a really glamorous job, this!), which meant that unfortunately I was stuck in the lab all day and didn't get a chance for much photography. Hopefully today I'll be venturing into the field. We shall see! Till then, here's another one of the new baby. Or rather... child. You know what I mean. And I think I finally got the colors right - thanks, Frank!

A bit knackered...

Gotta admit, this is the only picture I managed to save as a jpeg aside from the others I've posted, so this is what you get for today! Tomorrow? I don't know. Here it's 11:40pm, but I've been awake for 21+ hours due to my flying to Alaska. Did I mention I'm in Alaska? I think it's roughly 3:40am my time, which is why I'm not being at all coherent, and why I'm not giving you a "real" photo. More dress-up, too, not to mention the awful state of the family room. I apologize. My mother was in China. Actual photos of Alaska to come... :)

The arrival of Child No. Six

I think the picture says better than I could what an exhausting day it was yesterday. Yesterday my mom came home from picking up Child No. Six in China (Children No.'s Four, Five and Six, are all adopted). They were both exhausted, as was my step-dad from taking care of the house (and all the children) by himself for the past week. I was also exhausted from telling my step-dad how he ought to be running the house and from my week of parenting during his week-long stint in China. So a quarter the people in the house were pretty jetlagged and the other three quarters were angry at the jetlagged quarter for being jetlagged, and tensions were running high. Luckily for all our sakes, after a few hours everyone fell asleep wherever they happened to be, which is when I took this one. The shutter didn't even make them stir.

So in case you were wondering why Child No. Six's right leg looks kind of odd, she's actually "special needs" and has a problem with that leg that the doctors in China tried to repair but didn't really fix adequately. She's reasonably mobile, albeit with a very significant limp. The only thing she really can't manage is stairs, so we might ramp the house, but we'll see what she needs and go from there. All the kids that were adopted were classified as "special needs" actually, which is why my mother took them, because they each had only a very small chance of finding homes. But as of now Children No.'s Four and Five are both in perfect health, so I have a lot of hope that we'll be able to make Child No. Six just as healthy and happy as they are. In conclusion, adoption is fun. You get lots of cute little subjects for photography.

In her backyard domain.

This would be Child. No. Four, who always loves to play dress-up. It's a really great distraction - grab the box of dress-up clothes and Children No.'s Four and Five will be occupied for at least an hour before they start to fight over the tiaras, which lets me get a little something done. Or at least I get a television show under my belt which is always nice when I'm completely exhausted from their antics. So the two of them were swinging on the swing set in costume and I was photographing them, as I am wont to do, and just kept shooting (rather blindly, actually) as they were called inside for dinner. One after the other, they jumped off the swings and ran into the house, which is when I captured this one. I always love photos of them when they're in their dress-up clothes, it just makes everything a little less normal. Plus it probably says something really deep about childhood innocence or something, I don't know.

After being uploaded, my images seem to look a lot less saturated so maybe I'll try to counteract that in the future, and I hope the color balance doesn't make you all wince. I've been using photoshop for a few years now, but only recently with the goal of making my work look life-like!

Day one.

My first day with my Rebel, I couldn't help but photograph pretty much anything I laid eyes on. Being that my parents were both in China at the time, and had left me in charge of my four younger siblings till they returned with Child No. Six, that mostly included the little ones that I was attempting to keep safe and sound for the return of those who are far more competent at childcare than I.

In any case, this is Child No. Five playing in the driveway. I'm still having trouble not taking way too many pictures of the same exact thing with the burst setting. I just don't want to miss anything! And as a result I have about twenty different versions of this picture with my brother doing slightly different things with his hands. Not very space-efficient when having three or four would probably have been enough to choose from, especially with my slightly compulsive reluctance to delete any image I've taken.