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Bees and Sunflowers

George and I are sharecroppers.  We pay to rent someone else's land, then do what we will with the produce... at our local community garden.  I put our name on a list and a year later we got accepted.  At first, it was very exciting.  And then we realized that the weeds never, ever stop coming.  Our garden is now a horrific mess of a place.  We never work on it.  It always needs water.  It certainly didn't help that our enormous cherokee purple tomato plant only gave us two usable tomatoes.  The other two were eaten by birds and the plant hasn't seen fit to set any more fruit. But sometimes, when you're visiting in the morning, before the heat of the day makes the trip unbearable, you come across about a million bees hanging out on the sunflowers, dancing around in the beautiful morning light, and you have to take a picture (or two).
Permanent link to this post (157 words, 1 image)
by Amber Categories: Life

Attempted Sexiness

Around 10pm last night, I realized I hadn't taken a picture yet.  For the second year, I'm working on a Project 365, a surprisingly ambitious venture that requires at least one image each day.  Many times, it forces creativity.  Other times, I'm pretty sure I'm gaining nothing at all by picking up the camera and snapping what's for dinner.  Maybe it's working on me in ways I don't understand. In any case, George is out of town and that means it won't annoy him to take about 100 flash photos at 1opm.  Enter the "sexy" self-portrait. Sexy, right? Well, my husband will tell me it's sexy just as soon as he gets home, I'm sure.  In fact, I'll have you know that I took some other photos that you will never see.  I don't think the Internet can handle "full sexy" from me.  Plus, I'm a married woman!  How dare you suggest I expose myself online! I do lots of self-portraits.  I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I am always around and people are inherently interesting as subjects.  I also think it has something to do with the fact that I purchased a remote release when I bought my SLR.  If I was doing this on timer, I'd never do SPs. For the two images above, I mainly just adjusted the contrast some and removed a pesky light switch above my head.  For this one, I used some MCP Actions to bump the drama, big time.  A closer crop makes the image a bit more intimate, in my opinion. More space might have improved this quite a bit.  I've got a single SB-600 pointed at the wall to my right here.  It's resting on the table, which is pushed against the corner (so the wall to my right is maybe 5 feet away).  My tripod was in the car and I was too lazy to go downstairs and get it, so I rigged some table-ottoman-dish towel contraption to rest my camera on.  It mostly worked, I have to say. At the end of the day, though, I really prefer images that convey how I see myself.  I can feign all the sexiness in the world but this is how I really am: A little bit awkward, perhaps a bit unsure, certainly not full-on sexy.  If you see me doing that, I'm faking it.  (But it's okay to tell me I fake it really well.) For a while during this "shoot", I busted out some killer black heels that I have never worn.  But there's something about sexy with shoes off that speaks to being at home, being with a long-term lover, being unconcerned, vulnerable.  There's something inherently sexy about vulnerability.  So I tossed the heel shots. My sexy is for my man... and, well, my blog.
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by Amber Categories: Self-Portraits

Trivia Night – Super Grain

My friends are dorks, what can I say?  Some of us are dorky in the socially awkward sense (hand up) and others of us are dorky in the huge-repository-of-random-knowledge sense.  The Random Knowledge guys destroy trivia nights all over this town.  The rest of us have a few beers and struggle to fill in the gaps. Last night we came in third at 51st State, which did not earn us any bar credit.  It's a very dark bar so I've jacked up the exposure, on top of ISO800.  I kind of like the grain - gives it a good gritty feel. On the street, the colors were really weird but kind of neat also. And because I love you (and me), here's a self-portrait I took while waiting for George to do some stuff at his work.  I'm not allowed in because he has one of those no-guests-allowed government jobs.  So I sat in the car and took pictures of myself.  It's a pretty standard situation. Also, you see those glasses there?  I bought them online.  They're supposed to be these nifty new "transitions" lenses.  Only they seem to have permanently transitioned.  They get darker in the sun and lighter indoors but they never seem to go all the way back to clear.  It really emphasizes the dorkiness.
Permanent link to this post (218 words, 3 images)
by Amber Categories: Life, Self-Portraits