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.

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.