A little globe.

So I saw people doing this on flikr and decided to try it myself. It's a long and arduous process (as is anything fun in photoshop) but it's got a great result. I made maybe ten of these, but this one came out the best - probably due to the nice amount of grass that I could stand in the middle of. It doesn't work nearly as well with a lot of buildings or tall things, it's better if the any objects (trees, buildings etc.) are enclosed in the frame. Which is very difficult with the lens I have! So this is Crystal Pond, otherwise known (to all Clark students anyway) as Dead Hooker's Pond. Although I hear that the dead girl wasn't actually a hooker, so... call it that at your own risk, I guess!

Oh, the things we do for STIR...

This is what happens when I have to take the photos for the "Reproductive Health and Choice" section of the "Clarkies with a Cause" STIR article. No one could think of what to do for photographs for this section, so I went old school sex ed and, well... you can see for yourself.

I better get some kudos from the other photographers for being the one to finally break down and shoot this! :)

Elm Park

I took these on Friday for STIR magazine's spring issue, so the goal was to make the fact that it's winter and the ponds are entirely frozen as inconspicuous as it could possibly be. I didn't even have any blue sky on Friday to help me out so I could focus on that and try to avoid the ponds, so the writer of the article and I decided that the best way to go about this was to use sepia tone. That way they maybe look like they're historical photographs, and it's not as silly that it's clearly winter. It was actually fun to be able to take shots from the middle of the ponds since they were so frozen. I was a little nervous the ice would break and I'd fall in and destroy my camera (not to mention most likely get hypothermia!), but luckily I didn't and the shots came out pretty well. I guess if I want to recreate them after the ice melts I'll have to find a canoe somewhere!

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.

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.