Going Home

My belonging are completely packed into my roommates car and my room is barren and freshly vacuumed after a crazy morning cleaning. I'm moving out to day back to my parents house for the summer. There are always pros and cons to moving but its not the end of the world. I'm excited to see my family for more that just one weekend at a time and of course for the chocolate chip muffins my mom makes on Saturday mornings. I'll also be starting a new job and catching up with old friends. All the good things that outweigh the fact that i'm leaving all of my closest friends here at UTD.

About this photo. I loved the color of the sky but there was an ugly tree branch covering most of the left side in the original image. I'm not very familiar with Photoshop but I used it to replace the ugliness with the beautiful blue sky from the other side of the picture. View larger here!

Photoshop Secret Revealed

If you are interested in manipulated photography or just looking like you can levitate then you will want to read about this little trick. All you need is a camera, a model(can be yourself), and an object with a hard surface. To achieve this frozen in mid air photo you need to take two photos. The first should be a picture of just the background you want with nothing else in it. For the second one you will need to place your object with a hard surface into the frame and find a way to sit on it in a way that you have as little of your body as possible touching it. Once you find your balance and the pose you want snap the photo and upload both into Photoshop. Open both images and overlay the second image on top of the first one. Then you simply use the eraser tool to get rid of the object you used to sit on. When you do this the object will be replaced by the original background and give off the effect that you are floating! It's a pretty simple manipulation that I would recommend to anyone who has a camera and access to Photoshop. Don't be shy give it a try.

*The image above was a practice shot I did in my room while trying out this trick. To get a more finalized looking image use a tripod and cooler location.

Film: American Gothic

Here is the second image from the assignment I talked about in the post below. I decided to try and replicate the famous painting American Gothic by Grant Wood but with a modern twist. I used my roommate and her boyfriend as models and headed out to the field behind my apartment here at UTD. I had discovered these strange looking wheat stalks a few days before and thought it would be a cool location to shoot this replica. It turned out to be perfect as you can see the triangle point of the apartments just like the barn top in the original painting. Since I was going for a modern feel I had the models wear normal clothing and traded out the pitchfork for a broom. I love the fact that you can look at my image and see just enough similarities to the famous painting that you recognize it as such but not enough that it seems like a complete copy of the original. To view the photo larger simply click here :)

Film: Cinderella

This image was part of an assignment for my black and white photography class in which we were to tell a story or replicate a famous painting ect. in one single image. I wanted to try and encompass a fairytale in one shot because my sister has numerous dresses, play shoes, and tiaras and I thought it would be fun. I was visiting my family in Huntsville, TX at the time and decided to take advantage of the many beautiful locations on campus at Sam Houston State University. I knew there were several staircases and buildings with a colonial feel so I decided to try to tell the story of Cinderella. I chose the scene where Cinderella runs out of the ball trying to get away before the strike of midnight changes all of The Fairy Godmothers charms and in the process loses one of her glass slippers on the staircase. I had my little sister dress up for the part and then headed out to the university to the location in the photo. My poor sister had to run down the stairs about 50 times but she was a trooper and did an excellent job. I love the grace in both the hand holding up her dress and the one deciding whether or not she has time to pick up the lost slipper. If you would like to see these details up close view here!

Final Project: Part1/10: Bored In Class

For our final project in my black and white film photography class we had to print 10 images that all followed the theme of our choice. I decided to tell the story of a little girl who is bored in class so she starts daydreaming about all of the adventures she could be having instead. This first image sets up the story and shows my sister bored at her school. There are 8 images after this one that show her adventures and then the last one show her being woken up from her dreams by her teacher.

*Photo Info*

Location: Alpha Omega Academy

Outfit: School Uniform

Another View

This photo has a fun story to it :) It's 3 days before Christmas Day and my family is in the Uplander driving to the Houston airport. We pulled out of our driveway in Huntsville not as early as we should have but still in enough time to get there and have about an hour and a half before our flight. All is looking well until we get about 20 minutes down the road and have to brake to a complete stop. The seven letter word we all hate: traffic. Bumper to bumper traffic a good hour from the airport. We sit for awhile thinking surely it will clear up in a few minutes. We were wrong and ended up sitting/semi-crawling if you could call it that for 45 minutes. Needless to say my mom was speeding once we finally were able to move again and we screeched into the airport drop off with 30 minutes till departure, hastily said good bye to my dad and raced into the airport to check in. We were all sweating bullets in line just knowing we were going to miss our flight. Somehow we made it up to the counter checked in our baggage and got our tickets. I remember a weight being lifted off my shoulders and rushing with my mom and sister to the terminal and then turning the corner and having the weight thrown right back on. We were stopped by a line the length of a worthwhile amusement park ride of people waiting to pass through security. We had failed.

With absolutely no way to make our flight and being 3 days away from Christmas being at my grandmas house all we could do was sit down and stare at each other. My mom was distraught and went to talk to the women who had given us our tickets.

After an epic battle against time and crowds we finally could all relax. My mom was able to trade in our tickets for a new flight the next morning at 6:30 a.m. for no extra cost since we had redeemed our other tickets before the flight departed! We decided to play it safe and stay at a hotel close by that offered a shuttle ride to the airport in the morning. That next morning we got to our terminal in plenty of time to board the plane to Chicago, Illinois. Our adventure was not quite over here though. Since we had to change our flight around we had to fly to Chicago and then to Knoxville, TN and THEN drive the 2 & 1/2 hours to my grandparents house in Sylva, North Carolina. It was a crazy adventure trying to get there but of course worth it.

This photo is from the airplane window overlooking Chicago :)

Ballet Feet

A little background on this photo first. These are the dancer feet of my graceful roommate Samantha who has been taking dance classes in a studio since she was 3 years old. She has performed in numerous competitions, spring shows, and features of The Nutcracker and Alice In Wonderland performing lead roles in both. Unfortunately her dancing has come to a halt since we both came to college and she started her rigorous double degree plan of Biology and Business. Although she hadn't danced to her full potential in about a year and a half when I took this photo and a set of others she has still retained her poise and grace. I took these pictures for the Digital Photography and Design class I took last semester here at UTD. Our assignment was to tell a story through a set of 6 images. My story was that of a dancer and the steps they would take to warm-up, dance, and wind down during a typical practice. This particular photo above was not part of the 6 but I loved how it turned out and put it up on my flickr. It has since been and remained my number one rated most interesting photo on my photostream. Interestingness is calculated by the site based on who looks at your photo and how many times it has been viewed, number of favorites(if you like someones photo you can favorite it by clicking the star at the top left corner), and comments you receive. Interestingness is not only calculated just between your personal uploads but site wide as well. People whose photos rank high on the interestingness scale can become labeled the honorable title of explore. Explore, as a result, gathers the best pictures into one spot so you can easily find new inspiration and creative artists.

Here are a couple other photos from this shoot:

Samantha
Samantha #2

The City

For spring break I went home to Huntsville, TX to spend the week with my family. We spent one day at the Downtown Aquarium in Houston, TX. It's a fairly small aquarium but it covers all the basics plus a few oddities including a parrot and a white tiger exhibit. Why are there tigers at the aquarium? I have no idea. A better question is why they offer a sleepover deal called Wild Dreams Overnight where the first program activity listed is sleep within inches of the tigers. Now granted the tigers are obviously behind glass walls but still I don't know how you could sleep comfortably with tigers pacing back and forth behind this thin wall of separation. Besides this craziness we had a good time and ended the day with a ferris wheel ride where I took the picture of the city above.

Here is a picture of my dad at the tiger exhibit:

Film: Park

Film is my new obsession. I love shooting, developing and printing it. Below are my personal pros and cons to each of these three processes.

Shooting
Pros: 1. You can purchase film to be either color or black and white.
2. You get to load and unload the film into your camera yourself.

Cons: 1. You have no way of knowing what you actually captured until the film is developed.
2. If you loaded your film incorrectly into your camera then you could shoot a whole roll and have nothing show up as a result.


Developing
Pros: 1. Going through the process. From rolling the film onto the developing
reels to pouring the various chemicals to develop the film is a very
cool experience.
2. Getting to see the developed negatives after the processing and seeing
what you captured.

Cons: 1. If you develop your film with the wrong temperature developer you can ruin your entire roll. There's nothing like shooting and developing a whole roll only to see a blank stream of negatives.
2. Light. If your film is exposed to any light all of your images will be
ruined.

Printing
Pros: 1. You can determine the size of the image you want to print to take up the entire sheet of paper or to be smaller and leave a border in order to frame it.
2. Once you find the right settings on the enlarging machine to produce a
good print from your negative you can make as many copies as you want and
they will come out identical.

Cons: 1. Finding the right settings, how much light and how long that amount of light should be exposed to the light sensitive paper, is a pain. I always have to cut test strips of paper to find the right balance before I print
a full size image.
2. Again with the light, if you're paper is exposed to light it is ruined.

You can see more of my film prints on my flickr :)

Mad

I titled this photo Mad because of the look on my cat Daisy's face. It is priceless. You can tell she does not want to be wearing that hat but is too lazy to resist the charade. The little girl is my sister Jamie. She found the hat Daisy is wearing while we were shopping at Old Navy and just had to buy it as a birthday present for our cat. Sounds like a great gift right? What cat wouldn't want a hat made for dogs for their birthday? Anyway Daisy let my sister dress her up and although she was lethargic about it she was cooperative. My favorite part of this photo is the look on Daisy's face.

One of Five

I took this photo the other day while sitting at the pool! This momma duck and her 5 baby ducks were swimming in the pool! I was glad to see them here because I had actually seen them a couple weeks before crossing the road by the phase 8 apartments on campus. Two of my friends and I had just come back from a crazy day of shopping when we stopped at the stop sign about to turn into our apartments and this duck and her eight baby ducks crossed the street right in front of us. They were adorable! We let them cross safely and then followed behind them in the car to see where they were headed. We figured out they were trying to get to the pond behind where we live. By this time it is raining and we have been watching the ducks try to find the entrance to the pond for about 10 minutes. We got out of the car and tried to lead the ducks in the right direction. We finally did but it took 30 minutes! Needless to say we were excited to see the ducks again the other day safe and sound. My favorite part about this photo is that the baby duck is glaring straight at the camera.