Penny says hello

The past few weeks have been a bit of a stressful blur – I went from having 4 clients to 11 in three weeks’ time, and adjusting to the added workload took a while. Once I had a chance to step back and look at my schedule, though, I found some ways to make things flow more easily from day to day, and that helped. I went through a period of time where I was getting phone calls from interested parents daily (after a round of report cards went out, apparently, and people started to panic), and I ended up just slapping them onto my schedule wherever I could fit them. Going from tutoring two kids per day to three doesn’t sound like a big adjustment, but when you factor in drive time between sessions (I don’t have an office and meeting at libraries isn’t my first choice because they get so crowded out here) I went from working between 3:30 and 6:30 each day to not getting home until around 8:30 PM, which is a pretty big change. Add to that the fact that daylight savings time ended right as my schedule was starting to fill, and I ended up feeling pretty tired and out of sorts while I tried to manage all the new students.

Simon is not bothered, though.

One thing I was able to do after the dust settled was look at my new schedule and find ways to maximize my time. For example, I’d ended up tutoring two kids who lived just a few blocks from each other, but I wasn’t seeing them on the same day. And somehow I ended up scheduling myself an hour break between two of my sessions, which, when you don’t have an office, ends up being just enough time to get restless and irritable between sessions, but not enough time to do anything about it other than sit in your car and check your phone. So, I moved some students around and re-arranged some of my session times to make my schedule more manageable. I’m still getting used to driving around for my last two sessions of the day in the dark, which still feels odd, but the days will start lengthening out soon enough, and it’s starting to feel more normal now than it did when all of the this started up a few weeks ago.

A few weeks ago I got in two new photography tools that I was excited to work with: one was a pink popup backdrop that was rather pricey – pink isn’t a very popular color for these backdrops, so I did end up paying quite a bit for this one – and the other was a fairly inexpensive ring light for portraits. Unfortunately, the ring light turned out to be more challenging than I remembered it being  -I had a cheaper one years ago that could only be used when attached to my camera, and it broke after a few months of use – and my first pics with the pink backdrop didn’t turn out as good as I’d hoped they would because I was also trying to figure out the best way to use the ring light at the same time. But, I did manage to get a few good ones, which I’ve shared above.

A REALLY RARE decent selfie I took with my phone

I’ve been trying to be active on Instagram again since leaving Facebook, but I completely SUCK at phone selfies, and I was hoping the ring light would help with that. Here, it worked out great, and this was a real one-off, barely-planned photo, so I had high hopes it would always be this easy to use. But so far, that’s not how it’s going. Yes, it creates a lovely catchlight in the eyes, which is one of the main reasons it is used for portraits, and if you get it just right it can also create a lovely halo of light on the face, BUT for me that’s turned out to be trickier than I imagined, and I’m still not sure how best to use it to get this effect every time. Another issue seems to be that to get this effect you have to be VERY close to it (and therefore, the camera) and I don’t do a lot of super close-up photos since I like to show the hair/wigs and usually the head and shoulders to show off an outfit. You can see in the pink backdrop collage above how the shots where I’m closer to the camera worked better than those where I wasn’t, and even then, the ring light blasts out a lot of the nice soft shadows I like my portraits to have. So, I’m still working on how to use this thing best, and it may not end up being a big part of my normal shooting gear. Fortunately this one wasn’t expensive either, although I did spend more on it than on the previous one (around $80).

So anyway, about those Instagram selfies. What I’ve done so far is use one of my DSLRs to take the selfies, then use Instagram’s filters to edit them before uploading. It’s not totally in the spirit of IG, but my iPhone selfies are literally the worst I’ve even seen and I just don’t have the skill to improve them – they have always been horrible with the exception of that ONE ring light photo. For the most part, though, even though I am still taking these shots with a DSLR, I do them quickly, with whatever amount of makeup  I have on at the moment, and wearing my own hair and pretty regular clothes and standing wherever I happen to be standing at the time. So, they are still way more ‘candid’ than the stuff I post on Flickr.

All of these were taken around the house

I am hoping that through Instagram I can also get back into photographing outfits and fashion-y shots like that. But I’m SO picky about them that we will have to see how that goes. Using a DSLR instead of my phone already ups the amount of time photos take to shoot, and since I really prefer the full length shots to have good lighting that would require even more prep time, which isn’t really in the spirit of what I’m doing. I’m going for another photography avenue that can be more spontaneous and take less time, and even though I think I’ve found a way to do it with portraits and still be happy with the results, it remains to be seen if I can pull that off with full length photos.

Another random thing this photo makes me think to mention: the last time I went to get my bangs trimmed, I had my stylist cut them blunt and without thinning them out or making them look piece-y. I felt that a heavier bang might look better and so far, I am liking the results, although they still need to fill in a bit. Then, once I started playing around with hair looks and got my new cat-eye glasses in (from Zenni, of course) I started playing around with my makeup to create a more Rockabilly vibe (my new favorite thing to do, since I have the time in the morning, is to shut myself in my bathroom for an hour, watch CNN, and play around with my makeup and my hair). In order to do this, I’ve gotten into really pigmented, colorful lipsticks – something I have never done before. As much as I’ve always loved the look of a dark or bright red lip, I never EVER felt comfortable wearing it myself. My lips are quite thin, first of all, and the darker or brighter a lip color is the thinner the lips will look. But it’s more than that – for all the talk of how women over ‘a certain age’ shouldn’t wear bright red lips, I am actually finding that I really LIKE wearing it for all the exact same reasons the fashion industry says more mature women shouldn’t. To put it another way – I really do think it ‘ages’ me – but in a way I really like! I do think I look older in a dark or bright lip color as opposed to something pale and neutral, but in an “I’ve earned the right to wear this” way and not in an “I shouldn’t be wearing this” kind of way. To me, it looks really sassy, confident, and yes, mature – so I’m having lots of fun with that right now.

Anyway, Happy Thanksgiving to those of you that will celebrate it this week. I am looking forward to slowing down and catching my breath since I only have two students to tutor, then it’s off on the mad dash to the winter holidays!

Oh, and if any of you want to follow me on Instagram, this is me: Instagram. Just don’t be an asshole or I’ll block you.