The Beginning of February

I hope everyone had a grand weekend. It’s starting to get really hot here, but you’ll hear no complaints for me. I am prepared this year. Flip flops, spaghetti straps, shorts, cold showers- BRING IT ON, SUMMER.

Here are some of my photographs from the Spurred project from early February. Enjoy!

“Faith”

Just before Christmas we visited Goodwill on half off day and found an enormous selection of old genesis games. Tom still has the Sega Genesis from his childhood days (my sister and I had a Sega CD combo) so we picked up a bunch of games without hesitation, having complete faith they would work. (They do.)

“Right”

Normally I shoot in “Av” (Aperture Priority) mode. This gives me control over the f stop and the exposure. It’s my favorite mode to shoot in. However, after shooting a panorama in Manual, I forgot to switch it back, so the entire day I was shooting in “M” (Manual) mode by mistake. It’s a wonder any of my photos turned out right at all.

(I did this one in B&W because I really wanted to do my Wednesday photo in color, but I still wanted to end up with 52 B&W photos at the end of the year. I hope you’ll forgive me!)

“Fragile”

This thing is actually a beast. The box it came in, marked “fragile”, is half my size. We picked it up because so many of our healthy recipe books or food blogs call for them. It honestly seems you can’t be vegan (or a health nut) without one! I’ve tried doing it on my own, or in pieces using the Magic Bullet, but it takes so much longer. I’m looking forward to using this.

“Community”

Depending on how long you’ve been reading this blog, you may or may not know that I met Tom when I was fifteen in the writing section of a forum for a TV show we both liked at the time. We wrote several stories together with our friends. Back in high school my friends and I would pass around notebooks with stories in the pages. We each would add a little, and then hand it off to the next person in line. It was a ridiculous amount of fun. As I grew older I found myself yearning for the flexability to write more than just G rated stories (Nobody likes having a grown man in their story say, “Shoot” when the nuclear reactor has just exploded.) and I knew there to be an easier way to write with friends than passing around notebooks; so I created a forum all my own called Minus the Papercuts.

For several years it thrived, but a vicious hack took us offline in 05. I spent a lot of time staring at code way over my head, (I’m no professional, I just love to write) and trying to retrieve all the information everyone had spent ages working on. After a few years of trying to reboot the site, but never being satisfied with the layout, or functionalities, and becoming frustrated with my shortcomings as a coder- I sort of gave up. It was always in the back of my mind, something I wished was working, or fixed, or available.

After I came back from Ireland I began working on it again and I finally had the courage to write it down as a goal/resolution for 2011. After lots of hard (and mostly secret, in case I failed) work, I relaunched it with the New Year. I was (am) hell bent on achieving the goals I set for 2011- so far so good!

“Shadow”

“Old News”

This is old news, but one year for my birthday my mom bought me a really neat set of studio lights. I couldn’t bring them with me when I came over to Canada the first time, but I picked them up when we were in Frankenmuth visiting them this past December.