Quick Silver

Posted on November 29, 2015 by marey mercy

As I mentioned in my last post, I finally got a chance to put on the full face and take some portraits while I was on vacation last week. So here they are:

That wig cost about $35 and is called Elveen, by Janet Collection. After a few hours of shooting, the synthetic fiber was starting to frizz and dry out noticeably; I have to comb through a wig every few shots when posing in them because they get thrown around and messed up so much, and brushing isn’t good for even a high-quality synthetic fiber, much less a cheaper one like this. On the plus side, though, the fiber here is heat-friendly so I could probably use a blow dryer or curling iron to smooth out some of the frizz. I wasn’t looking for longevity anyway; I was just so curious about this lovely color that I decided to try one. It is gorgeous; at least for photos. Although as a so-called “ethnic” wig, the lace front is way too dark for me. Moving on.

Many people who’ve seen these photos have commented on the interesting makeup choice I made here; truth be told I didn’t intend to take all my photos in this wig and had several other costume changes planned, involving far more colorful stuff that would work better with all that orange and gold. However, I got the wig on and started snapping, and everything was just working in it so well that I decided to stick with it; I didn’t end up shooting much in the other wigs and costumes I’d picked out at all.

This was one of the others I intended to use more – glad I didn’t

I was really surprised that even the makeup application process went smoothly; I found a stock photo online with makeup that inspired me and decided to copy, and even though i didn’t completely go in the direction of the photo, everything from contouring to shading and even applying false lashes went off without a hitch, turning out almost exactly as I planned and without any major screw-ups to correct.

The photoshoot went the same way; well, at least until I took off the silver Elveen and tried some other hair choices – nothing else worked as well, and I was starting to get tired and bored by that time so my heart wasn’t in it. I tried a few leaping and levitation shots, but I’ve only processed one so far because by the time I got to that point in the shoot (I always save the jumping and movement stuff for last, since it tends to mess up the makeup) I was way too sloppy in my execution for anything to look stellar. Plus, it was really the silver stuff I was interested in processing, and I knew that by that time, so I probably shouldn’t have bothered. I did process one though:

But back to the silver wig. After some straight up makeup and hair shots, I wanted to play around and create some holiday looks, so I dug out the Christmas stuff I bought last year at Pier One and decided to mess with it a bit:

When I processed this one, I was annoyed with all that orange and gold glaring at me – although it did really work visually, I wanted to compliment the silver hair and sweater more than all that bright color was able to do. So, I actually used a black and white filter to change the makeup and layered it on over the original shot. Notice I even managed to pull off the stripey eyebrows – yeah I told ya, the makeup all worked out well for some reason this time.

I was just goofing around here, obviously; I don’t think you can tell but I used Pixlr to add in a bunch of patterns to the ornament. If you look closely you can even see tiny birds flying around in there – those came compliments of a Pixlr filter. And yes, my nails were fabulous.

One thing I noticed when working with these photos was how nicely neutral the silver was; I could really manipulate color in all sorts of ways and create different looks entirely. The only issue that created was skin tone; I struggled in most of these to keep my skin from going too gray, and in some shots I don’t think I pulled it off very well, but hey, I tried. Skin tone is always a bitch in photos anyway. Here I obviously added a lot of blue, and I even stole the sparkle from the center of the magnolia in my hair and placed it over my real eyes.All that glittery-goodness was added to the sweater in Photoshop, although in real life it does have a bit of shimmer.

This one wasn’t working for me at all, mostly due to the skin tone issue, until I pulled it into Pixlr and attempted to cover it with some sort of overlay that might disguise the splotchy, odd-colored skin that was bothering me. I often do that with photos I can’t get quite right (I did the same with the one photo with the short blonde hair); I figure if Pixlr can’t save it for me, it probably isn’t worth saving. This overlay was from a very geometrically-shaped collection that I almost never use, but lo and behold this one gave me exactly what I was looking for. It added just the bit of interest I felt it needed, as well as covering up my skin a little and distracting the eye so perhaps no one will notice it’s weirdness.

I also struggled with lips in this set; mine are quite thin and dry (I often widen/thicken them in post) so this is nothing new, but I made matters worse by choosing to use gold glitter lip liner as lipstick and then outline it with orange – you can see it in the first shot above where I didn’t edit that mess out. For most of my other shots, I changed it in some way, because it looked pretty sloppy. In the photo directly above I just did my best to change the lip color to orange all over, and then soften it. This photo is my favorite, by the way – it’s a composite of three different shots of the wig since there’s no way it has near this much hair. And the wreath wrapped around me is a Pier One prop I used last year, too.

As always, there’s more from this set I want to edit, and it looks like my red dress from China is set to arrive today, so there will, of course, be more coming soon. Although I may not get to the red dress photos until Christmas break. We’ll see!

Cranksgiving

Posted on November 29, 2015 by marey mercy

It’s back to work on Monday, but only for two weeks and then mid-term exams kick in. For the most part, my vacation was lovely; the weather was perfection until Saturday afternoon, when the sky turned wet and gray and things have been gloomy ever since. A fairly apt wrap-up to the end of a vacation, but a bummer nonetheless.

My sis and her new grandbaby, Gabriella

I was asked to bring my camera to my sister’s house on Thursday, where we celebrate Thanksgiving each year (the day after Thanksgiving Doug and I go visit his father). I did so, but did not take many photos; my father wanted to get some of those look-at-all-the-generations-together photos that family always wants to take, so I did my part in orchestrating those but didn’t put much effort into processing any of them except the few that, in my opinion, had some artistic value. Not that I don’t care about the family pictures or anything – it’s just that I know by now that those sorts of photographs do not need a lot of fancy editing or lighting or anything like that. They’re for posterity only, so I just convert them to JPEG straight out of the camera, post them on Facebook, and email copies to whomever wants them and call it a day. Easier and faster, plus there’s no reason to go through all of that work when no one is even going to notice it’s been done. The ones I’m sharing here, though, are the ones I felt were nice enough to process and doctor up a bit.

My only grandparent still alive; she’s 92 now.

Thanksgiving is always a chaotic affair at my sister’s house; she’s an amazing cook and loves to spend days preparing for the event, but her house is quite small and our family, as you can see in the photo below, is quite large (that wasn’t even everyone who was at the house that day in the picture) – we took it before some people showed up). This year in particular several relatives came in from out of town, which is unusual, so there were even more folks crammed into the house than usual. On top of that, my family likes to drink. A lot. In fact, there were twenty-nine people total at my sister’s house, and there were TWENTY-SEVEN bottles of wine on-hand for the festivities. Not to mention the beer and mixers. You take that much booze, that many people, and that small of a space and put it all together and you end up with barely-contained chaos. And that chaos – is INCREDIBLY LOUD.

Can you tell? This isn’t even nearly everyone who was there that day.

When you’re one of the only people not drinking amidst all of that madness, it gets old quickly. I ended up sitting on that leather sofa watching football with the die-hard fans just to get away from it. Not to mention my typical screw-up the title of this post refers to – here’s how it went down: I knew we needed to be at my sister’s house around 1:00, so at noon my husband and I crated up the pups and took off. When we got to her house, we weren’t too surprised to find we were the first ones there, as my family is terrible about following directions relating to start and end times of celebratory events. In fact, the usual response to the question “What time should we get there?” is whenever. But I really didn’t want to be one of the late ones, so I made sure we were prompt, and, as I am afflicted with the same can’t-get-there-on-time-itis that the rest of my family has, I was quite proud of myself for pulling this off.

Except that after we’d been there about 30 minutes I started to notice things, like how my sister wasn’t dressed for company yet, and there were foil-covered pans laid out all over the kitchen counters, but none of them had made it into the oven. I finally pulled her aside and asked what time we were supposed to arrive, and she said she’d told everyone 3 PM, not 1 as I’d imagined. For the life of me, I do not know where I got the one o’clock arrival time, as after she told me this I actually went and looked at the Facebook event she created at the beginning of November and, sure enough, it clearly said 3 PM. So okay, we showed up two hours early – it’s further evidence of how bad my family is about time that neither my sister nor her husband were phased by us showing up when we did in the least. They just kept on trucking and set out a cheese ball for us to snack on without another word about it.

Happy Thanksgiving

But that whole “bad about showing up at the right time” thing ended up getting us in the end, even if no one was ticked off about us showing up so early, because when my sister requested people show up at three everyone else knew that to mean “show up sometime after three,” which is exactly what everyone else did. At five-thirty, new faces were still appearing, and the turkey had not even been carved. Since Doug and I are quite conscientious fur-parents (we have no kids, so our pets are our babies), we started to worry around four when they’d already been in their kennels for four hours – we really don’t like to crate them for more than that, and five hours is pretty much our limit for it, even if the dogs could survive for longer. By 5:30 we were resigned to the fact that we’d be doing no eating this Thanksgiving, and we ended up leaving at 5:45 without eating anything other than a cheese ball to show for it. It sucked, but it had to be done – my sister lives about 45 minutes away, and we knew if we sat down to eat at 6 PM it would just be way too late by the time we got home (sitting down to eat is laughable, though – my family Thanksgivings are more of a grab-a-paper-plate-and-find-a-space-to-gobble-it-down affair than a formal sit-down one with the good china. People even eat standing up).

Oh well – This was really the main course anyway.

So yeah – no food on Thanksgiving day. We came home, fed the dogs and took them out, then ate frozen chicken nuggets for dinner. The end. But on the plus side, I did take pictures on Tuesday, with full-face makeup and everything. I’ll share some of those photos later.

Camera Nostalgia

Posted on November 23, 2015 by marey mercy

This is a picture dump post for the most part – but it’s also one long ramble, so I think the title will make sense in a minute.

I’m one day into the Thanksgiving break, and I am going to try and take portrait photos tomorrow. I have not done so since school started, because things at work are very busy and very strange. I won’t discuss it here, but suffice it to say that it’s taken a lot of time and mental energy, and I haven’t been up much for full-on photoshoot sessions in quite awhile. While I babble on here, though, I’ll go ahead and upload some older portraits I’ve edited over the past few months since I’ve had nothing new to work with, as well as some flower macros I shot quickly yesterday. Let’s get to it.

I actually have a jumping/movement/levitation session planned out in my head, but I have to put it off since a shipping snafu means I am not going to get the outfit in time to work with it this week (tomorrow is pretty much the only full day I have to myself). I bought this dress off eBay and it ships from China; I ordered it in plenty of time but the company forgot to ship it for several days which means I won’t get it until the end of the week, when family visits will prevent me from taking any photos. This is the dress in question:

I’m not even sure it’s going to work; it may not be as flowy as I’d like it to be, but I love the drape-y simplicity of it and that neckline is aces in my opinion. I pictured wearing it with this short, spiky red wig I have and shooting against my gray backdrop, but once I realized it was not going to arrive in time I decided to hang my black backdrop instead, so I could do tomorrow’s shoot with another dress I ordered recently that’s gray (I don’t want to shoot against a gray backdrop while wearing a gray dress). Then I tried on the gray dress and it didn’t fit at all, which made me wish I’d stuck with my original plan and hung the gray one, but it was too late as I’d put the black up already – and hanging backdrops is one of my least favorite things ever, so no way I’m taking it down anytime soon.

I generally leave a backdrop hanging against my photoshoot wall at all times, but every once in awhile I get the desire to have an office that actually looks like an office and take it down – something I regret doing almost immediately. I forget how often I actually use them until I remove them – as I did a few months ago, which is why you’ve seen so many jumping photos and Stitch Fix shots of me lately set against a bare white wall and my oh-so-unfashionable carpeted floor. I’m glad to get something back up there, even though hanging it was a pain, as always (first you gotta wash and dry it and then yank it out of the dryer when it’s done RIGHT AWAY or else the dreaded wrinkles set in, then you have to get a ladder, a bunch of push pins, and a hammer, and tack that thing up there by first mashing the push pins enough to get them to stick while you grab the hammer – which is hell on your fingers – and then you have to hope the stupid thing stays up with just one pushpin while you move the ladder to the other corner, then hammer the pins in about 30 times to get enough in there to be sure it stays up…but I digress), but I do wish I’d tried the stupid dress on before deciding to hang the black one as I’d much rather have the gray up there. Moving on.

I admit the new pool has also cut into my photo-time, since I sit in the spa every day for at least 30 minutes to an hour every evening after work. We just had our first cold front come through a few days ago, and it was heavenly to slip into the 102-degree water with steam wafting up all around, feeling toasty warm while the faint smell of chimney smoke is in the air.

I haven’t been very active on the blog lately for the same reasons I’m not shooting a lot of photos – work takes a lot out of me mentally this year, and life takes up more of my weekends than it used to. My father-in-law needs at least twice-weekly visits, and I go with my husband when I can; my mother has also had two surgeries lately (to replace a knee and then a hip) so I’ve been driving out to visit her as well. My father also just got forced into an early retirement (early for him, anyway – he’s already 71 but had planned to work a few more years) so it is strange having such milestones pass and finally realize that one’s parents truly are getting old. Hearing my perpetually busy father – who always worked at least two jobs when I was growing up and even after I left home, not because he had to, but because he wanted to – and my fairly materialistic mother (not in a bad way, she just always wanted nice things) discussing cutting back and figuring out how to live on their reduced income makes me feel less secure about my own future, for some reason. Ultimately it makes me feel old as well, which is scary, but still a blessing, if I consider all the people I’ve known who died young and did not get the privilege.

I guess I’ve been a bit melancholy lately in general; I’ve cut myself loose from some negative people and have been trying to make a better stand for myself when I need to do so (both at home and at work); while speaking up for myself is a good thing, it’s also a little frightening when one is not used to it. I get very paranoid after the fact, thinking that speaking up is ultimately going to lead to loneliness and rejection. In some cases having a voice has led to the end of friendships or work partnerships, but each time the relationships in question were not serving me in a positive way anyway and probably needed to end. It’s all a bit uncomfortable and unfamiliar, but ultimately worthwhile, as I become more accustomed to standing up and speaking out when the situation requires it. All part of getting older, I guess.

One thing I’d started to notice about my friendships in the past year or so was how much younger most of my close friends were – a good 10 to 15 years younger, in fact – and just wondering why that was the case. Now, I’m not talking about my dear internet friends who might be of any age, but my In Real Life friends I’d go shopping with or talk to on the phone. When the school year started, my program was able to hire two more teachers, both of whom are within a few years of me age-wise, and I immediately found their company so fulfilling and validating in all the ways my younger friends were not. Primarily, there was a lot less drama and a much calmer atmosphere around them as opposed to the fairly competitive, perpetually dissatisfied, and socially hyper-active others I’d associated with for many years.

Don’t get me wrong – I’ve been as competitive, hyper-active, and dissatisfied as they are in my time. I don’t mean that as judgment of them, or as in any way a generalization of women in their thirties overall – it is more a reflection of who I’ve become in the past year than it is of who they still are. I came to realize that even with the women whom I believed I had a sort of “best friend” connection I was not all that close; my friendships were more about convenience and the safety of staying at surface-level with other people rather than establishing a true connection, if that makes sense. We all kept each other busy and amused and entertained, but we never really got too deep, and in a way, we never really knew each other. I hope none of them read this, though, because it’s not something I ever shared with any of them (and unless you’re at least 15 years younger and live in the same city as me, you’re not one of them).

On another note, sometimes I wonder if my passion for photography is waning, and if that is part of the reason I’ve not been shooting as much lately. But then I look back at my blog or my Flickr page and realize that even during this period I’m describing as a “not shooting much” sort of time I’ve taken hundreds upon hundreds of photos and realize that is probably not the case. I just don’t have full days to spend hours putting on makeup and getting into costume and doing the sort of shoots that used to be a weekly occurrence for me, and that’s ultimately okay. There’s only so many ways I can apply my face and pose for photos, so the longer breaks from that are probably a good thing; when doing it all the time I would find myself getting bored every once in awhile anyway.

My passion for wigs and filming reviews died just as suddenly as it came to life last summer; I’ve been so into buying Lagenlook clothes that I’ve not been able to justify spending money on wigs that I’m really not wearing anyway, plus there’s obviously no time to make reviews. Who knows if I’ll go through another wig phase this summer or not – I can say that with the prices for synthetics going sky-high lately I’m less inclined to go there again, plus by the end of things this summer I found myself reverting to my old Rene of Paris standbys again anyway (Laine, Robin, Angelica). I just cannot with those Jon Renau prices right now, as pretty as some of their new styles are.

And anyway, blog and Pinterest follower Betzie introduced me to another Lagenlook label that I’m totally focused on right now, just as my Oh My Gauze fixation was calming down (but only because they’ve not introduced any new pieces lately, not because I’m bored with their clothes, which are still fabulous). So I’m sure I’ll be spending more and talking about that in the future – it’s the place from China where I bought the red dress in the photo above, and that outfit is a good representation of what they offer. But unlike OMG they also have SHOES! So far I’ve only bought two pair, but they are amazing. But more about that later.

To close this out, allow me to share a photo that goes WAY into the past – when I was 12 years old, in fact. The blog I follow that documents the history of the neighborhood where I grew up has slowly been working its way into the years when I and my friends might have appeared in the local newspaper (that is still in business) that regularly reported on the goings-on in our neck of the woods. As such, I knew this next photo was coming soon, and one morning in my email there it was:

As progress on the blog neared the end of 1982 I knew this photo would show up; in case you can’t tell, I’m the one on the left there with the trendy striped Izod and what appear to be Jordache jeans. Yes, I was a cheerleader, for one year, and I was pretty much awful. I was not popular, or athletic, or into sports at all, and in fact I only made the team because I definitely could yell, and as it may not surprise you to hear, I was a pretty good jumper. I was no acrobat, though, and never could even pull off a decent cartwheel, and every single boy on our eighth grade football team terrified me as I was horribly shy, so while it was a real thrill to hear my name called over the afternoon announcements as one of the winners (we had try out in front of the whole school, a process I somehow survived but to this day I have no idea how) the actual experience of being a cheerleader was pretty unpleasant. It was just not for me – I only tried out in the first place because as a seventh-grader I befriended one of that year’s cheerleaders, and she insisted I do it and then spent two solid months training me. But I was never one to go to football games as a spectator in the first place, much less stand in front of people on the field and cheer, so as a cheerleading role model I was pretty much a bust. And no, those were not our uniforms. I think they took that picture the same day we got nominated, so we didn’t have anything else to wear.

I don’t know any of those women now, although one of them tried recently to friend me on Facebook; as with most of my old school pals, her FB page consisted mostly of Fox News-type political posts and video links to country-western songs, so I declined. But she was a pretty good gal, back in the day. I guess we all were.

Wigs Over Houston

Posted on November 16, 2015 by marey mercy

OK, not really – it’s WINGS Over Houston, but I figured, with the wigs on the site and all…you get the idea.

B-25 – The Yellow Rose

Going back to October, this year’s Wings Over Houston Airshow was Oct. 17th, and I went with my dad (as usual) and my boss/friend from work. She’s a former employee of US Airways (now part of another airline, can’t remember the name right now) and loves airplanes, too, so it was fun to share the experience with someone else.

MK959 Spitfire

I told myself that since I wasn’t very satisfied with my aerial pics last time, I’d focus on shooting the planes during the viewing hours of the show, when you can get up close with them before they take off. However, once the planes got in the air I couldn’t help myself, and since I knew a bit more this time about what settings to use on the camera for decent shots, I managed to get some really nice ones this year. I also made sure to try for shots that would be more unique or interesting than the typical stuff everyone else snaps – the two above were taken during a war simulation, and I particularly liked the effect the smoke from the faux-bombs created.

The Breitling Jet Team – from France

The Thunderbirds were there this year (instead of the Blue Angels who performed in 2014) but my friend and I were wise enough to leave before the final show; my father and I spent over an hour in the shuttle line the year before since we left with everyone else, and since there were two performance jet teams this year, I still got to see some high flyers before we took off. It was a good idea, since it meant we walked right onto a shuttle instead of waiting in line forever.

In 2014 I saved my camera strictly for photos of planes in the air and didn’t even take it out when we were wandering around viewing the planes, but since this year I wasn’t planning to take any aerial stuff anyway I took my camera with me to the touring area earlier in the day, and got some nice shots there too:

Standing beneath the wing of a C-17; one of my favorite shots of the day

I took my telephoto lens again this year, but am considering taking the wide-angle next year; it was hard to get all of the planes in my shots while we were walking around with the zoom lens, and it wasn’t the most convenient lens for these types of shots. We stood in line to tour the inside of the C-17 and my lens was pretty much useless inside it; I could not even get a shot of the cockpit once we got in there because it was so small – and we stood in line for over an hour to get up there! I did get a shot of the stairs leading up to it, though:

I also got a few shots of one of the servicemen standing in the cockpit and looking out the little round window that overlooks the huge cargo area where we were all waiting in line, but with the lack of indoor light and my inability to get my settings right, all the shots of him looking through it were crappy and blurry. I processed one of the shots, though, and just edited the hell out of it to disguise the fact that it’s a bad photo – I had to process it, because the dude was looking right at me in the shot.

There was also a nice big United 737 that I took some snaps of; I tried to keep all the crowds of people out of these shots so it might appear that I was actually just getting super-close access to a plane on a runway instead of at an exhibition; for the most part I think I pulled it off:

Another thing I wanted to try this year was taking pictures of interesting people, as well. There certainly are a lot of them:

Yes, “interesting” is one way to describe these guys

I love it when I get to piggyback off someone else’s staged shot; this veteran was posing for someone else so I snuck up behind them and snapped the same photo:

That’s actually a composite of two shots I took of him; in one, a woman walked into the frame right as I snapped the shot, and her body covered up half the flag. In the other, she wasn’t in the frame, but his features were not as clear and the shot wasn’t quite as focused, so I layered that less-focused shot over the better one and erased the woman’s body out of the frame. And there you go.

Last shot for now – I snapped this one quickly while we were waiting in that hour-long line for the cockpit of the C-17; I snapped a bunch of one-offs through the open cargo doors since there wasn’t much else to do and nothing I could get decent photos of inside, and right after I took this one I looked at it on my LCD screen and realized it was a nice one. How much more alike could these two look anyway?

Yep, definitely related

I processed this one in black and white because the color just didn’t add anything to it. I especially like the young guy’s shadow on his dad’s (I assume) shirt. They were probably looking up into the cargo hold at all the people standing in line inside and thinking to themselves, why on earth would those idiots stand in line so long just to spend two minutes inside a stuffy cockpit? Well, because we can, dude. That’s why.

I edited most of these shots over the past two days; that’s how busy I’ve been and have just now gotten around to really editing these photos. I’ve decided I need to start dedicating myself to editing at least one photo a night since I’ve got such a backlog of stuff and what I’m really craving is a good old portrait-and-jumping photo session. I don’t want all this other stuff to get completely forgotten, though, so I’m trying to work through it all now. Still lots I’d like to edit from this set, as well as my trip out to IAH back in September, so more planes to come.

Next week – vacation! I can’t believe it’s Thanksgiving already. A whole week off, and I’m going to try and take my portrait shots then.

Too Cool for Pool

Posted on November 8, 2015 by marey mercy

Well, folks, we’re almost there:

Pardon the canopy swing sitting awkwardly next to the house, and the pool floats piled on a chair. We’re still getting things tidied up a bit, and we have some more work to do on our new covered patio (staining, mostly) but for the most part, things are done. It’s gotten a touch too cool to swim regularly, but I do fire up the spa every evening and sit in it for at about an hour.

All in all, we started this project right around August 1st, and finally got the grass replaced (which is what finally made things feel ‘done’) the first week of November. It took WAY longer than I thought it would to get from start to finish, but I must say it has been worth it.

A lot of people have seen photos and commented on the relative lack of landscaping we now have in the backyard; we took out all the beds that run along the back fence and just left a single small one in the far right corner, so we could keep out bottlebrush tree that the hummingbirds love so much. I guess it does look a little bare back there now, but we needed to create enough space for our dogs to roam around in and do their business, lest they end up having too small space that was too close to the pool for them to relieve themselves. See, when I put it that way, it doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all to keep things sparse in the backyard.

Besides, I rather like the lack of foliage back there; our yard was a decent size before the pool, but not huge, and it definitely felt a little cramped once the pool was put in and before those overgrown beds were taken out. We had one sago palm that we really liked back there that we did save and move to the flowerbed we kept that’s up against the house, but aside from that and the bottlebrush tree in the corner we yanked the rest of it out. There are plants added to that corner bed that will eventually fill out and eliminate some of the sparse feeling, but overall I like the changes.

This new pergola was built for us last week; it still needs to be stained and will be much darker, and we’re having a gutter company come out to move that drainpipe over to the end of the garage. We’ve also ordered some lovely new furniture that should be in by the end of the week, and believe it or not my husband wants to get an outdoor flat-screen television to hang on the garage wall – but I kinda doubt that will happen. I believe those things are ridiculously expensive.