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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.