Mild Flower

Posted on July 13, 2014 by marey mercy

I’ve had a chance to edit a few more flower photos, but only a few, so here we go.

I really struggled with the color on this one; that yellow flower in the background looked very dark and muddy and it was distracting. I ended up using Rad Lab filters to take the saturation way down, which did the trick, but it washed out the pink flower too. In the end I still liked it, and the softer tones worked, but it was much brighter in the original. The yellows worked better in this one:

One thing I did differently when using the macro lens this time was to place the subject, the vase of flowers, on the floor so I could sit down and crawl around while photographing it, as well as being able to stand above it easily. This helped me get good angles but more importantly, it kept me from getting tired due to all the stooping and bending into strange positions I had to do last time I used the lens, when I had the subject on a table. I also attached the 7D to a monopod to hold it steady and rest my arm a little. Both strategies helped. I took most of the 500 or so shots with manual focus, too, to control the focal point better. I think all these things helped make the shoot more successful than my last attempts at using the macro lens.

About half the shots I did were taken with my umbrella lights only; but when I tried to get really close-up they were coming out too dark, so eventually I attached this little piece of magic I purchased recently called a FlashPipe – it’s a cylinder made out of some sort of plastic which slips over an external flash to give out an even and soft diffused light. I’ve used my Speedlite when shooting macros before, but it is hard to control the light when aiming in so close or leaning in at weird angles; the FlashPipe did a beautiful job of filling in shadows where I needed it without overpowering the subject.

This next shot is one I took with the FlashPipe; I have more to come using it and I may do some comparison shots so you can see the difference it made (I also spritzed the flowers with water at this point for added interest). But for now I just have this one:

The nice shadows and sharpness aren’t all due to the FlashPipe there; I did use RadLab and Snapseed to add contrast and detail as well as tone down the color, which was a bit too bright initially. But still, it did a wonderful job illuminating such a close shot without blasting out the subject or creating odd shadows. And it only costs about $30. Of the three I processed today, this was definitely my favorite – I’m thrilled that I finally got some genuine macros out of that lens!

In case you missed it when I mentioned it above, yes I did take over 500 shots of these flowers that Lana sent me as well as the ones I bought from the grocery store (Lana’s were pink and yellow, the grocery store ones are blue, orange, and green). So there will be more coming as I’ve just scratched the surface here of what I took.

Flower Powered

Posted on July 13, 2014 by marey mercy

Would you believe that a day after getting out my trusty new super-tall step ladder to hang my old white backdrop on the wall the cool brick one from China came in? Figures. But as it turned out, my friend Lana sent me flowers Saturday, and given the day I had Friday it was a welcome and much-needed surprise. So thanks Lana!

Since I had the white backdrop up, I decided to use it for macro pictures of the flowers; these shots wouldn’t have worked against the printed brick background (at least I don’t think they would have) so it was probably best I hadn’t hung the other yet. These even inspired me to zip up to the grocery store and get some more to practice on, but I’ll show those later.

I used my macro lens, my two umbrella lights, my Speedlite on my 7D, and for added fill light in later shots I used a new gadget I bought recently called a FlashPipe – again, I’ll talk about the FlashPipe in a later post, as in these shots I’m sharing today I wasn’t even using it yet.

I don’t have many to share in this post, because editing them was time-consuming for reasons not related to the photos at all (my computer was being sluggish and difficult, and I had to re-boot a few times). But suffice it to say Simon felt he had to get in on the action, and I had to document that:

This last shot is actually of the teeny little purple flowers you can see in the Simon shot. I think I got some nice magnification and focus here:

I also used my Dirty Pictures filters on this one, not sure which I prefer:

I’m leaning towards the Dirty Pictures version, but let me know what you think. I know this post is brief, but it’s late and I’m tired, so I’m going to hang it up for now. Much more floral-ocity to come – but to close this out, enjoy a little video I made of Simon playing around behind the white backdrop. something he always does. As usual I forgot to turn my camera into landscape mode, so it’s a silly little strip of a video. But it is kinda cute.

Bee Positive

Posted on July 10, 2014 by marey mercy

It feels like forever since I last had a full-on photo session, but it also feels like every single day this summer has been spent waiting for some appointment or other, which gets in the way of setting up for a real shoot. If it’s not contractors or other home repairmen, it’s some appointment I’ve got set up for myself somewhere, and all this waiting around to wait around some more has got me in a bit of a foul mood. Oh, and we have bees in our walls too:

Yes, they are honeybees, and yes, we are having them relocated this Friday. This is one appointment I had to sit around and wait on this morning, in order to set up the next appointment I’ll sit around and wait on Friday morning. Sigh.

As far as photography goes, I got tired of the black backdrop that hung on my photography wall for over two months, but was waiting until we got the walls painted to take it down. Then we decided to replace the carpet first, so I finally took the black one down and and got a contractor in the house to get an estimate on painting our interior, which, by the way, I’m still waiting to get two days later. The truth is, no matter what’s going on in the rest of the country, the housing market in our part of city is booming at a ridiculous rate, and there isn’t a housing contractor alive who moves quickly when it comes to dealing with a relatively small job like ours. Basically, no one needs our business, so if we aren’t willing to be a pain in the butt about getting service we’re going to be ignored. And I’ve been dealing with broken toilets (yep, that happened too) and air conditioners and bees the past two days, so I haven’t called the painter back yet to find out what the cost will be to get our house done.

In the meantime, I ordered this fairly cool-looking brick wall backdrop to hang for now, since I’m tired of both my black and my white one, and I’ve been – you guessed it – waiting since last week to get it in and hang it so I can shoot again. After a few days without it showing up on my front door, I checked Amazon.com (where I have a Prime membership, so most things I order from them I get in two days) only to discover that this particular backdrop I bought is shipping from China, something I failed to check before I placed the order. So, I am not going to be using any cool new backdrops anytime soon.

In light of this discovery, I’m currently washing my white backdrop and am going to hope most of the wrinkles fluff out of it in the dryer, and I’ll pin that one back to the wall so I can at least get some photos done soon, even if it is with my boring white background. I’m still not sure when I’ll get a chance, though, because this afternoon I noticed our refrigerator is leaking and I’m sure I’ll have to sit around and wait for a repairman to take care of that too. Oh and I almost burned the house down trying to use the new stove we had installed a few weeks ago, because the knobs on it are NOT intuitive at all, and in no way mirror the actual layout of the burners, so I am constantly turning on the wrong burner when trying to cook – unfortunately the burner I mistakenly turned on had a burner cover on it that heated up and started to melt. Luckily I caught it before it started a fire (the burner covers were some sort of cheap plastic and are purely decorative, well, rather, they were) but it was smoking something awful and stunk up the house for hours. Good times.

So yeah. At some point in all of this we still need to get the house painted, although the way my mood is lately I’d just as soon put it off until next summer; I’m pretty much over the home repairs for this year. The stress may do me in – that is if I don’t kill us both while using the new stove first!

Lace Has Been Around for Thousands of Years…

Posted on July 6, 2014 by marey mercy

There are so many great quotes in this video, I didn’t even know where to start for a post title (some others that come to mind, as I’ve seen this video a million times by now – “Notice the slit?” and “Ostrich feathers, anyone?”).

I’m not sure if I’ve posted this video here before, but even if I have, I know it’s been awhile, and if you went back to try and find it I’m sure the YouTube link has been taken down by now. Brenda Dickson, the creator of this bit of eighties loveliness, who was a soap opera villain on The Young and the Restless for many years, got wind of how popular this video became on YouTube and got it shut down so she could market and sell it herself through her own website. Every once in awhile someone gets brave and uploads it again, and it generally only lasts a few months before they get shut down too.

Anyway I thought of this video again for some reason, and went searching for it to show a friend. Lo and behold it’s been up and running since January 6th, so I’m going to go ahead and post a link to here so you can enjoy the cheese yourself. The video cuts off abruptly, as all copies of it do – whoever uploaded that first version to the internet did so back in the day when you could only upload 10-minute increments at a time, so you only get about that much of it here. But the ‘fashion show’ is truly not to be missed.

Also amusing are the various parodies that have been made about the video over the years, so feel free to check those out too. And don’t think I’m not aware how close some of my own blog posts and photos come to reaching this level of cheese (I can totally hear me saying “Let’s teleport into my closet!”) but I think that’s part of what I love about it. And now, onto the show!

Fresh Start Carpet

Posted on July 2, 2014 by marey mercy

Well, we managed to get the carpet installed in a day, but the installers didn’t leave until about 8:30 PM (they arrived about 10:30) so it’s been a long night of trying to put the house back together. I started out taking photos and even made a little collage to post to Facebook as the festivities were just beginning, with the intention of adding progress photos throughout the day, but that didn’t happen.

That up there is, of course, is our old Berber carpet, which has been thoroughly trashed over the last 12 years. In really thinking about it, it’s surprising it got as ragged as it did; we don’t have kids, never entertain, and while we do have pets, it’s not like they’re elephants or anything. And yet, that Berber has completely come apart in the past five years. I’ve read reviews of Berber that are less than stellar and complain about the sort of snagging and unraveling we experienced – especially coming from people with indoor pets – but the extent of the damage we experienced still seems extreme. I actually took a picture of some of the worst bits, but then decided there was no way in hell I wanted to share that mess with blog readers, so you’ll have to look at the photos above for your only reference.

While I do not want to go all First World Problems here whining about sitting around in a warm house all day watching other people install carpet in my home, I have to mention that I am still out of sorts about the whole experience. There is something about strangers coming into your home and ripping it apart that’s unsettling; it’s not just the presence of the strange people but also the weird secrets that tearing apart reveals about the home’s owners. Or at least it felt that way to me. And it’s not just how small and simple and shabby the floors looked once the carpet and the pad were removed, although that was disconcerting enough; it was the little patches of rotted wood in the bottom stairs, and the strip of fallen wainscoting we’d haphazardly stuck up on the bookcase that fell down when the men were stretching the carpet in the den, exposing our laziness. Every piecemeal, patchwork, slapdash, and half-ass “repair” we’d made to our home over the years was on full display, and while I’m sure this is not a unique experience, and I wasn’t exactly embarrassed by it, I still felt as if dirty little flaws were being revealed – to me as much as to anyone. Not to mention the surprises that occurred throughout the day – the yellow jacket’s nest the installers discovered in an upstairs wall (spent the rest of the day killing them, and obviously have to take care of that ASAP) and the air conditioning unit on the bedroom side of the house that decided to stop working mid-day (we were all boiling by the time they got done). So, we get to take care of that now, too. Secrets and surprises, all tied to a sense of disarray and, I guess, this homeowner’s guilt that I’ve fallen down on my duty.

But for now, this step at least is done, and I’ve tried to put the house back together and regain that sense of security I had before, when I was convinced it was all rock-solid and indestructible – but I haven’t settled back into that yet. I’m still seeing it with all its ugly guts exposed, and it’s odd. I don’t know if that makes sense to any of you – but Simon gets it. He’s kind of skittering around the house hesitantly, sniffing everything as if it’s all new now, and not just the carpet. As if we tried our best to set the house right when it was all over, but we didn’t quite get it done, and things are still off-kilter. As am I, obviously, given the weird tone of this post. I mean, it’s just carpet. And by the way – holy crap, is this stuff soft. The Berber we had before was hard and unyieliding, and we went from that to this carpet called SmartStrand that is marketed as the softest available, with more strands per fiber, organic materials, lifelong stain resistance, blah blah blah. But it’s seriously so soft it’s almost puffy. It’s actually lush. I am a hard-core shoe-wearer who never takes hers off, but I can’t bring myself to wear flip-flops or even my Uggs when walking on this new material. I bet when I jump on it for pictures it’ll be like landing on a huge marshmallow.

I think I need to go to bed now. This post makes very little sense. And also has very few pictures, because I’m still feeling weird about this whole home invasion, and I kind of want to spin a safe and new cocoon that doesn’t include outsiders. Sorry. Those of you that know me will understand. 🙂

Tragic Carpet

Posted on June 30, 2014 by marey mercy

The carpet is supposed to be installed today. I say supposed to be installed, because Monday afternoon we got a call from the installers, saying that they might be able to make it to our house around 11:00 AM to begin the installation, and that they possibly would be able to finish by the end of the day. To which I say – WTF? Since when is it acceptable for installers to show up when half the day is over when know they have a full day’s worth of work to do? They told Doug the reason for the late start is due to not being able to pick up the carpet Monday evening, which means they will have to pick it up the morning of the installation. To which I say, then GET OUT OF BED EARLIER to go get it so you can show up to the job at a respectable time. An inconvenience on your part should not create one for me, the customer – what is it about carpet that makes all of this customer-service stuff so difficult to understand?

We did our best huff and puff and threatened to pull the entire sale if they couldn’t guarantee us better beginning and end times for the installation, but who knows if they will actually give a damn or not. We are having to board our pets for the day to do this and did not reserve more than a day at the kennel, because the salesperson told us the job would be done in one day when we made our down payment. And they absolutely could be done in day if they bothered to show up between 8 and 9 AM like, oh, any other contractor or installer I’ve ever dealt with in my life doing a major job at my house.

Anyway, we did our part and cleared out closets and moved all the knick-knacks off the tables and will get up in the morning, take the pets to the kennel (which I hate doing, I feel so guilty and miserable the whole day they’re locked up), and unhook all the electronics the installers won’t touch. Here’s hoping they show up at a decent hour and get the thing done quickly. We really need to paint the house, too, but we may have to wait awhile on that. I’m about done with home improvements for now. Well, not so much the improvements as I am the people I have to deal with to get the improvements made. Wish us luck everyone!

Favorite Shots

Posted on June 24, 2014 by marey mercy

I got off my duff yesterday and filled out and scanned model releases so I could upload some of my self portraits to Getty Images, which got me to thinking I could do another “favorite shots” post like I did last summer. However, that turned out to be more of a chore than I anticipated; holy crap do I take a lot of photos! For my first gallery I’ll just focus on portraits and people:

In looking over all of that, it’s hard to believe that all happened in one year. It seems like much longer ago that I shot some of those…moving on to, well, everything else (you can click any photo to see it full-size, by the way – and I’m not sure why some of the thumbnails are bigger than others):

Living area at 4447 Rusk

The old McKinney home’s front porch – this house was stunning

A shot of the den and the side driveway

Welcome to Eastwood

And to think these are just faves! Part of me wants to go through my external hard drives and clear out everything but my favorite shots – it’s recommended by a lot of photographers to keep me from getting overwhelmed, plus it makes it easier to find those photos when they’re needed. But man, I have soooo much stuff I just don’t know. I probably should at least weed out the non-processed shots, but again, so much time. I’ll add it to my list of things to do someday. As it is, I finally took “upload more self portraits to Getty Images” off my someday list, so there’s that!

Some Time to Com-Plane

Posted on June 24, 2014 by marey mercy

OK, so here’s the rest of my airplane photos! I’ll start with what ended up being my favorite one, but I’m also going to throw a little whining into the commentary that has nothing to do with airplanes:

Even though I failed to get the entire plane in the frame, this was my favorite shot from Saturday. I think the sky really makes this one. It was pretty cloudy, so in some shots the sky was flat and white, but there’s some nice drama to the clouds in this one.

I’m never as interested in the far-away shots, but lots of people do take them and upload them so I thought I’d process a few and see how they fared. My poor little airplane pics do not generate much interest on Flickr, but I’ve noticed the photographers I follow who upload nothing but plane photos don’t get many comments either. I guess there’s not too much to say about them really. It’s a pretty narrow interest, so you either care or you don’t. Having said that, let’s upload more photos none of you care about!

Another JetBlue! I actually took some time last night to upload some plane shots to my Getty Images page, as well as several other shots that do not require model releases. I have 19 for sale through my account right now, and have only ever sold one; it looks like I can upload as many as 50 each week so I really need to make it more of a habit to do that. My goal is to update my model release this week and submit some more portraits too, but they are such a pain to fill out. Still, the one shot I sold was a portrait, and it was my portraits that initially got Getty interested in my work, so yeah, I should get on that.

More private planes

There’s nothing really stopping me from filling out model releases right now anyway; in fact, I am feeling rather bored the last few days and it’s bumming me out. I think it’s because we are doing so much work to the house that involves a LOT of sitting around waiting for people to show up, which makes me anxious and restless. It seems like every day there’s some new appointment I’m sitting around waiting on, if not having to rush out and fulfill. Lots of doctor stuff too, and in fact, I need to call my GP back and tell him the steroid treatment was a fail because as soon as I was done with it the arm started hurting again. But then that’s yet ANOTHER appointment for me to kill time over. Bleh.

Oh look – another Southwest!

Another big frustration right now is the carpet installation. Last week Doug and I went to the showroom that did our last install, took home some samples, picked the carpet we wanted, went back to the showroom, signed a contract, and wrote a down payment check. Then a few hours later, while I was out shooting planes, the salesman called me and said he was ‘concerned’ about a few of the measurements and wanted to come by the house that evening to double-check them. I was busy at the time, so I just said fine as he claimed he was trying to ‘save us some money’ if possible. He came by later that day, re-measured, reassured us everything looked good, then left. Then Monday afternoon he called me on my cell to inform me that the original measurements (the ones that were used to install carpet last time without any problems) were completely wrong, and had in fact left out our entire master bedroom, so our total cost was actually ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS MORE than the quote on our contract. Sigh.

I do like this one, even though it’s a little private number

We demanded to see the original measurements as well as the ‘new’ ones that included the ‘missing’ bedroom, and the salesjerk promised to scan and email all that to us by the end of the day. Of course, we received nothing. So now we get to call him back tomorrow and fight with him to get what we are rightfully owed, which is carpet for the house at the price given to us on the damned contract. I don’t know why things always have to get so nasty when it comes to dealing with home repairs; we try to be upfront with people and pay our fair share without demanding unrealistic discounts or accommodations. But no matter what we do, some snake tries to cheat us out of more. I don’t get it, and I swear customer service in this regard is getting worse every year. There was a time when, IF a salesperson made such a huge mistake as to mis-measure an entire house (and that’s a big if as I think the guy is just trying to swindle us) he would have honored the original quote he gave us because the mistake was his, not ours. But no longer. Now everything is a fight and if you as a customer aren’t willing to get ugly, you get ripped off. So, ugly it will be. Sigh. And we’ll probably have to cancel the down payment check to this showroom and start all over somewhere else. Now you know why our current carpet is in the state it’s in. Every time we try to get it replaced this is the sort of dishonest dealings we have to navigate, and I get angry and disgusted and give up.

So I’m in a bit of a funk right now, because I’m usually so mellow and satisfied with my summer vacations and that isn’t how this one is turning out – but it is what it is, and just I’m rambling. Enjoy the plane pics people! Or don’t, whatever…

Plane Storm!

Posted on June 22, 2014 by marey mercy

Saturday morning I got up early to spend way too much money on new carpet. It’s ridiculous how much such things cost, but it is what it is. After that was done, I came home and found myself feeling a little down. I’ve been doing so much running around the past two weeks for the house that I haven’t really settled into the usual blissful lethargy of summer; I’ve been feeling antsy whenever I have a few free minutes, as if there’s some other errand I should be running. So as soon as I started feeling blue I decided picture-taking was in order, but I didn’t feel like gussying up for any portraits or jumping; in fact, I didn’t feel like doing any setup at all (I briefly considered more macro shots but couldn’t be bothered to set up the studio for them). I just wanted to grab a camera and go – so I pulled up my Flightradar24 app on my iPad and checked out the traffic at Hobby Airport. Lo and behold, there were a few planes scheduled to land that afternoon that were not Southwest Airlines planes (some JetBlues, Deltas, Americans, and a TransAir) and they were all coming in between 4 and 5 PM, so around 2:45 I grabbed my 7D and my 70-200mm and headed on out.

Hobby is about 50 minutes from my house, as long as traffic cooperates, which it did this day. I managed to snap the American airliner and the JetBlue, but missed the Delta and the TransAir – perhaps they landed on a different runway (Hobby is pretty small so the planes are hard to miss, but the observation areas only cover one runway, so it’s possible). I made sure to set my shutter speed higher this time, and my ISO lower, so I think I got better-quality shots this time out, not that I was unhappy with my last shots, they were just a little grainy and soft.

The sky came out nice in some of these too; there were sporadic showers all over the city as there always are this time of year, but none of them sprung up over HOU while I was there. It was hot as hell, but I just sat in the car with the engine and AC running and waited for the planes to arrive. For the most part I was not alone, and there was at least one other car hanging around waiting to take photos or video of the planes coming in. Usually I see people with little kids watching the planes take off and land, which is nice. And speaking of video, since I already have so many shots of Southwest planes, I experimented with taking video as they were landing. Some of the video was terrible, but I spliced two together here that aren’t bad; you can at least get a feel for how close the observation area is to the runway. It’s really exhilarating to witness:

Here’s one more of the American Eagle I snapped. Googling the registration number brings up lots of other photos of this plane; it’s cool to see where else a plane you photographed has been. Also, I have a friend who is a pilot for JetBlue, and she says she occasionally looks up the registration number of planes she flies to see if she can find any pictures of herself flying it (she can look it up by the date the photo is taken and know if she was the pilot). If you want to see some photographic history of this particular plane, try going here.

My one stupid mistake of the day (because apparently I have to make at least one) was not changing my custom white balance setting back to Auto; I totally forgot that the last time I used my 7D I had a custom setting, which was set using my studio lighting. So I had to mess with the color a bit to get it right when processing the shots. But other than that, I’m pleased with how these turned out. Lots of private places landing at HOU today too:

One thing about the shot above: I didn’t realize it was a propeller plane until it was too late to change my shutter speed. What you want to do when photographing a prop plane is slow the shutter down as much as you can so that you don’t “stop” the motion of the propellers, like I did here. When the shutter speed is slower, the propellers are just two circular blurs, which gives a much better impression of a plane in motion. Oh well. Also, these private planes fly in much lower than the big jets, so it’s harder for me to get decent shots of them over the barbed wire fence. By the time they’re right next to me, they’re already below the fence line. In the next shot, the fence was just below the frame:

All in all, I took about 500 shots and was back home by 6 PM. It was a perfect little jaunt for the day, and gave me plenty to work with for the evening. At some point I will have to venture out to IAH in the same manner; I hesitate because it’s a longer trip, but now that I know what I’m doing photographically (more or less) I’m pretty confident I could make the trip and have something to show for it at the end no matter what. Checking Flightradar was definitely a good idea as it ensured I was there at a time when traffic was high, and I was able to slip in, get my shots, and leave without too much hassle. The only disappointment was when I tried out the second observation area (at the other end of this same runway) and didn’t get any shots of planes taking off. One was taking off right as I pulled into the parking lot, which made me think more would be coming, but I got into place and waited for about 20 minutes to no avail. I’ve never been able to get shots from that lot, where the planes take off right over the heads of observers. It’s nice to have the other area see a lot of traffic, but it means I only get the same angles over and over and I’d like to get some shots going right over my head. More reason to try out IAH sometime soon too.

For now, I’ll finish up with a few Southwest Airlines shots, and share the JetBlues and a few more private planes tomorrow. You can check out some flight history of this last plane here. but there’s not much, because it’s a newbie – only two months old!

Antique Fatigue

Posted on June 21, 2014 by marey mercy

I’m not really suffering from it, but you may be by now. Anyway, here’s the last of the “antique alley” set I started sharing last week. I’m going to keep commentary short, because although I went to the doctor Monday about my continuing arm troubles and he put me on a round of steroids, as the dosage tapers off I find my arm already starting to hurt again. It looks like there are some steroid shots for me in the near future. There has to be some way to remedy this, because not blogging or editing photos is simply not an option. Moving on.

I didn’t know much about Brownie cameras before snapping this in one of the antique stores, but I found a decent webpage dedicated to them – this “Hawkeye Flash” model came out in 1950; you can read more about it, and other Brownies, here.

I apologize for this picture, but it was too good to pass up. I’m not going to provide any links to what Ken might be getting up to here; I think you can figure it out. And no, I did not set this shot up this way.

I couldn’t find too much information about this particular old radio (Allegro Telefunken Hi Fi) but the company, Telefunken, still exists and has a website. There are a few of these for sale on eBay though, anywhere from $200 up to $800. I think this one was on sale for $99 at the shop. I probably should go back and get it, but I can’t remember what store had it for sale. And now for some color:

By the way, with all of these shots I used with the burn and dodge tools in Photoshop to enhance shadows and highlights. I liked the end results, but as Beth pointed out in my last post, the changes really aren’t noticeable enough to bother making comparisons. Plus, making comparison shots takes more time, and my arm was hurting so I decided to go as easy on the clickwork as possible. I will say that in these shots though, the tools really helped bring some dimension to these metal signs, which were very dark and flat in the original shot. Especially the hot dog, which may or may not be obscene and/or racist…?

This one is clearly not an antique of any kind, but I liked the bright colors and how I captured the spinning wheels. These were all taken, of course, using my new Canon SL1 with my 40mm pancake lens, as were all the previous antique store shots. I also used that camera and lens to snap some quick pics of a few wigs I wanted to sell on eBay this week; it was great for that purpose also, and so much easier to use than the 7D. Still completely pleased with that purchase.

A few rambles: Some time soon I want to take shots in the little “antique room” we have in our house – our home is older, and has a formal dining area that for some reason I loaded up with antiques and covered in dark red wallpaper. It’s very pretty, but not really suited to the rest of the house (which at the moment isn’t suited to much of anything, but we’re working on that). For the past several years it has been used as storage for a Christmas tree and a huge tube television as well as other assorted items; but we paid a junk removal and recycling service to clear everything out of there and it is a living room once again. As little as it matches the rest of the house, I think it is a lovely setting for photos; it has a dark, Victorian vibe. So even though we are doing home overhauls this summer, including painting and taking some wallpaper down, I’ve decided to keep it. Who says a house has to make sense from room to room anyway, and a few interesting spots for photo ops in a photographer’s house isn’t a bad thing at all. I’d like to do a little shooting in there this weekend, but I’ve got to go order new carpet for the house tomorrow and a few other random things, so I might not get around to it that soon. We’ll see. I do plan to take before and after pictures of the house too though, for good measure. Happy weekend everyone!

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Art, Horror, and Other Obsessions

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