Oh, Sandy

Posted on April 29, 2014 by marey mercy

I went to get my arm worked on Tuesday night, and as Sandy was kneading the knots out of it I realized I seriously need to find a way to record our conversations without feeling guilty about it or getting caught (although, probably if I don’t get caught, I won’t feel guilty, since that’s how it usually works, so there’s really only one thing I need to figure out). Since I haven’t done that yet, I’ll have to summarize today.

Sandy: “I had such a nice morning! I had no appointments until evening, so I decided to go out on my back porch and grill me some pork chops. While they were grilling, I decided to put some feed in the bird feeder, and wouldn’t you know it soon enough there was this squirrel sneaking around my peach tree to get at that seed…”

If you know Sandy, you know where this is going:

Sandy: “So I went and got my BB gun and I shot that squirrel. Then I thought, hm, I do have the grill going already, I oughta just skin that thing and grill it up. But then I decided that was too much work, so I got a Wal-Mart bag and put it in there and threw it in the trash.”

There was also a description of a tumor she had removed one time that, according to her doctor, looked like an octopus, but he “got in there and took all the tentacles out.” When Sandy told me that, I was face down as one is when getting a massage, with my face through the little pillow-hole where she couldn’t see me, so I was free to make the appropriate OMG face in reaction to this description. Which reminded me of how years ago, when I used to get massages from this massive, six-foot, two-hundred-and-something-pound Swedish woman named Elga, I would make the most ridiculous faces into the void opened up by that pillow hole while she mashed me into oblivion, and I used to think it would be a great photo series to stick a camera under that hole and snap pics of people while getting literally ironed flat like fresh linens by that woman (she injured me more often than she healed my injuries, which is why I had to quit going to her). Such a portrait series might even be better if the shots were taken while listening to Sandy’s stories.

No photos today – just wanted to share a little Sandy tale of squirrel murder. She did say that after she got rid of little Rocky’s remains and ate her pork chop, she went to “Mickey D’s” for her daily sundae, so at least the story has a sweet ending. And my arm feels great, so maybe I’ll edit some more pics tomorrow.The aviation museum shots, maybe?

Oh and in other news, I recently mentioned submitting more photos to Getty Images – and they accepted all but one of them! The new ones are included on my artist page. I had a feeling it would be easier to get these shots accepted than my movement shots, which I don’t think make very common or sought-after stock photos. But I am going to submit some more recent stuff, including, probably, that striped-dress levitation shot everyone liked so much. But I have to fill out model release forms for that stuff, which is a pain, so I haven’t done it yet. Until next time!

Plain Spotting

Posted on April 27, 2014 by marey mercy

Saturday morning, I got up early and decided to zip back out to the viewing areas I visited last week with my father and get some better shots of planes, in spite of my resolve not to do so and save my arm – I wanted to try out the higher shutter speeds and lower ISO settings I mentioned in a previous post. However, this trip was a total bust, at least in the sense of getting any new photos. It was a boon, I guess, in that I learned a few valuable lessons I can take with me the next time I venture out.

Lesson #1: When it comes to spotting planes, the details matter. I was given a false impression of how easy it is to pull into the parking lot of a viewing area and start snapping away when it all fell together so easily on my first outing. There were literally planes flying right over our heads every other minute that day, so I mistakenly assumed that would always be the case at this airport. As it turned out, arriving early in the morning was a bad idea, because the airport was not busy yet. And furthermore, due to the direction of the wind at the time, the planes were not even utilizing the runway where the two observation areas were located. So, I pulled into the parking lot, put my camera together, and waited. And waited, and waited. I could see planes taking off and landing a fair distance away, but they were nowhere near close enough to bother photographing. After driving back and forth between the two viewing areas for about an hour, hoping to catch a plane or two somewhere in all that time, I gave up and drove back towards home without one decent photo to edit or show. Later in the afternoon, long after I’d returned home, I checked the airport with the flightradar24 app on my phone, and sure enough by that time planes were all over the runway that would have produced results had it been in use that morning. So, lesson learned – check the radar app before leaving, and maybe make plane spotting trips in the middle of the day instead of getting to the airport early, to be sure traffic will be high. Moving on.

Lesson #2: Dress for a lack of success. Because I decided to head out to the airport at the last minute, I just threw on a t-shirt and some hiking pants (never been used for hiking of course) and some flip-flops, stuck my hair into an old ballcap, slapped some SPF onto my unwashed, makeupless face and headed out the door. The weekend before I’d gotten sunburned and sweaty taking photos of planes, so I figured there was no reason to gussy up this time. I was just going to snap photos for a few hours then come home, after all. Except, as was explained in Lesson #1, that isn’t what happened. After accepting defeat, it was only 10 AM, and I could have done any number of things with my day at that point since I was already out and about, and I had my camera. But I looked too disheveled and frumpy to bother. I’m not above zipping out of the house without makeup from time to time, but at this point my hair had not been washed in two days, my outfit was pretty tacky, and I just felt blech overall. I could have gone to the mall just a few miles up the road and done some shopping, had a nice lunch, then still been in the area when the winds changed direction and head back to the observation areas to snap pics, but I was too grody to make a day of it. In the future I need to take time to get ready for the day before heading out, in case I have to go do other things for a while and wait for air traffic.

Lesson #3: Plan ahead. This ties into Lesson #2, but I now realize these plane spotting trips are not spontaneous outings, at least not for me as I live quite far away from either airport in our city. When I got home I read a lot about the observation area at our other, larger airport, and it sounds much busier and better than the ones I saw last week, but it’s an hour away while Hobby is only about 40 minutes. I was pleased to read this one has portable toilets, because let’s face it,one of the things I have to plan ahead for when driving an hour away to sit for another several hours in a parking lot is how I’ll go to the bathroom when I need to do so (my solution to the Hobby airport situation is the mall located not too far away). Not only do I need to plan what lenses to bring, and where to pee when the need arises, but I probably need to bring snacks and water and some sort of diversion to entertain me when there’s a lull in the action. Plane spotting, at least for me starting out, is probably going to be an all-day production to pull it off properly, and I should plan accordingly, and plan ahead.

All in all, I don’t mind telling you that I was seriously bummed once I realized I’d be taking no plane pics that day. I was in quite a funk as I drove home, but since I was out and I had my camera, I did stop by this lovely, busy park that’s not too far out of the way on my trip home; it’s one of the first places I went when I got my first DSLR and I’ve always considered going back now that I know what I’m doing. But there were lessons to be learned here as well. #1 is that my 70-200 lens is a real attention-getter. As previously stated, I looked a mess, and therefore was not feeling particularly social (plus I was bummed). But everyone who walked by wanted to ask me about that lens – one guy even yelled “70-200! Yeah!” at me as he jogged by, as if my lens was some sort of hair-band celebrity; another guy chased me down to tell me about the bird perched on a branch in the middle of the bayou that I ought to go photograph (ME: “My lens doesn’t have quite that much zoom,” HIM: “It doesn’t? Well it looks impressive enough to do it.”) So, I wandered about snapping a few pics un-enthusiastically until it started to freaking rain, and then I said to hell with it, I’m done for the day.

I tried to process the shots when I got home, but couldn’t whip up a whole lot of interest for more than a few – like this one of the aforementioned bird:

That’s actually a damned nice picture, and certainly not the sort of thing I usually photograph. The other one I liked was this one, taken as another dude at the park with a camera was lining up family members for a group shot in front of a fountain:

It came out a bit too bright and blue, but I like that the little girl is looking right at me. I tried this one in black and white but it was too contrast-y, so I stuck with the color.

And that’s it for now – although in the evening, I decided to pull myself out of my ongoing funk the only way I know how: I gussied up and jumped for the camera! But I’ll share those photos later. And I still have to finish editing the pics of the aviation history museum I never shared. As usual, more photos to edit than there are hours in the day, so let’s get to it.

Final Flickrings

Posted on April 24, 2014 by marey mercy

Just a quick update on all things Flickr, but first – I know I say this all the time, but I am going to keep this blog post short because my right arm is killing me again. I’ve decided to go see my new friend Sandy twice a week, for thirty minutes each time, solely to work out the terrible kinks I’ve developed in this arm over the years. The knots and spasms are really out of control, and Tuesday’s Flickr panic did NOT help, as I was literally typing and clicking computer keys for ten hours straight trying to get that all straightened out. I kind of wanted to get back to the airport on Saturday to shoot some more airplane photos, but using my bum arm to hold up a slightly heavier than usual camera and hit the trigger over and over is probably not a good idea right now. More photos would then lead to editing which is even more computer clicking, and I really really need to try and give it a rest. Unfortunately, it is also scheduling time at school, and I have to sit at work all day and click keys to get them enetered because we have an archaic computer scheduling system which requires us to enter everything manually; it’s already gonna be a challenge to see if my arm can survive that, much less throw a bunch of photography and editing into the mix. We’ll see if I can actually stick to this plan or I give in and go shoot photos anyway. At least the airplane shots don’t require the massive editing my portraits tend to, so that might help.

As far as Flickr, I am working on moving my photos over to the new account. I am hoping once the brouhaha over Yahoo switching off Google IDs dies down, I can get Flickr to remove it. I thought about just leaving it up with the announcement posted so if people stumble across the page they can go follow me at my new one, but I’m concerned that it might get hacked at some point if it just sits out there unattended forever – I’d hate for an account associated with me to start posting pornography or harassing people. I am going to keep it up for a month or so, so that people who followed that account have a chance to see the announcement, but after that I would like to remove it. I’ve uploaded most of the photos I want to showcase on the new page at this point, but I’ve marked them private so as not to overwhelm my “new” followers with photos and will try to slip them into my stream in a week or so.

So I’m shutting up now to protect my arm. Have a nice day!

Flickr Fallout

Posted on April 23, 2014 by marey mercy

As I mentioned (and griped about in the comments) in yesterday’s post, Flickr disabled Google ID logins at some point, and yesterday it hit me. Well in reality, Yahoo did the disabling, and since they own Flickr, my Google ID got the boot. I am sure there was some sort of warning this was coming, but I did not see or notice it anywhere – just went to login yesterday and got error message after error message about it.

The Help forum wasn’t too helpful, although I suppose they tried. The truth is, to get my old account back I was going to have to jump through hoops I wasn’t willing to attempt; I am terrible at following written instructions, and when those instructions are purely internet-based without any human contact (even if it’s just a voice on a phone) is overwhelming as hell to me. I need to actually speak to someone to understand what I am supposed to do, so to force myself to figure out step one of some fairly long list of steps I am going to have to take to accomplish something, only to have step one fail and involve a second list of even more detailed sub-steps just to move to step two, was simply not going to happen. Honestly I melt down pretty quickly when something like that happens (“Wait – before you can follow these steps I just sent you, you must backtrack and undo the other five steps you were already told to follow earlier. Got that?”)

The first thing that happened Tuesday morning was that I tried to login and it failed, repeatedly. Then I read through Flickr’s thread that I had to create a Yahoo account to login. So, I did. But oh no, that was wrong, because in order to get my old, Google ID Flickr account connected to the new Yahoo one, I first had to delete the new Yahoo account I’d just been told to create to login. Then step two was to – you guessed it – login with my Google ID account. But the login for Google ID was disabled so I could not do that anyway. In the end I said to hell with it and opened a new Yahoo account and am trying to start over from there. I managed to gain access to my old account through the Flickr mobile app (first time I’ve had a use for that crappy thing) so that I could post a statement on it, asking people to follow me at the new Yahoo account, then I posted a statement on my new account stating that yes, it was, in fact, me.

Now it gets even more fun. After working to re-establish contact with users, I found that I was blocked from following new people after I’d connected with the first 20 I tried. From what I can glean skimming the help threads, Flickr is only going to allow me to follow 20 new people a day. I also cannot email because Flickr thinks I sent too many at first and therefore may be a spammer, so everyone who has emailed me to say hi is currently being ignored as I can’t respond to them. great. Then I thought, well wait – i can go to their photos and comment to let them know I appreciate them sending me an email of support – but nooooooo. Flickr has now decided that I, as a “new” member, have posted too many comments at once too, and has blocked me from adding any more to people’s photos. This sucks, because I want to let people know that I appreciate them following me to my new page, and that I am going to get back to them as soon as I can, but I can’t do it through any means on Flickr right now.

I’m also working on transferring old photos over to the new page, which actually isn’t bad since it’s forcing me to sift through everything and decide on the work I really like. It’s something I”ve been meaning to do with my old account for about a year – get rid of the scraps and just leave the best work up to view. But I had almost 2,000 photos there and it was overly daunting to even consider doing that amount of work. Here, if all goes well, I will have a much more streamlined photostream; I just hope people will see it, since right now I can’t reach out to anyone beyond the 20 I first contacted with everything hit the fan. Keep your fingers crossed that I comment and follow some more people tomorrow morning.

By the way – my husband thinks it’s the stupidest move ever for me to be opening this new account rather than waiting around for days and days for them to reconnect me to my old one. But the only way I see to get reconnected is for me to lose my mind going through all these convoluted steps and emailing Yahoo Help (oxymoron if ever I heard one) two hundred times. I just can’t bear to deal with it anymore – so I am holding out hope that on Wednesday I can once again comment and email and follow more people. If not I’m at least going to try another update statement at my new account to see if it can tide us all over until i get things established. Wish me luck!!

Update: Late Tuesday night, Yahoo emailed me suggesting I try one more thing to get my old account merged with my new one, and asked me to send them an email from the account that was connected to it. So, i did that, and now – that email server is DOWN. Totally unrelated to all the Flickr mess, but gets in the way of correcting the problem for sure. It is as if the universe wants me to let this account go.

Takes on a Plane

Posted on April 20, 2014 by marey mercy

As I waded through all my photos from Saturday’s outing to some planespotting sites at Hobby Airport, I had a few thoughts I’d like to share, and I’ll throw in a few more photos to boot.

I’ve realized I have zero interest in smaller, private planes. Yes, they can also fly, but the sheer size of a commercial jet or a military plane is what makes that act so impressive to me, I guess, while those little planes or private jets are so small they fail to wow me. I suppose what I’m saying is, when it comes to planes, size matters – at least to me. Plenty of little planes flew in to visit the museum’s fundraiser, and a few zipped past the observation areas when I had my camera out shooting airliners,so I snapped a lot of them – but I can’t bring myself to care enough about them to get them edited. Sorry.

I also noticed that when shooting the airplanes taxiing or taking off from inside the airport, all the heat coming off the ground distorted the image of the plane. Some of that can be cool if it’s strategically placed, like in the shot above where the heat can be seen distorting the picture from underneath and behind the plane, but when the whole jet looks squiggly it’s a problem. Not sure what to do about that in the future, but if I just shoot them in the air the problem is solved, so that’s one way to fix it. My photos, for the most part, didn’t come out as crisp as I would have liked them to be, but the truth is I only needed one really good shot to feel like I accomplished something with this sort of thing, and I think I got one this time out – it’s the one I shared at the bottom of yesterday’s post. For now at least, a lot of what I shoot will be sub-par, but if I end up with one real winner I’ll be happy.

I did take some time today, once I figured out how to find EXIF data on the new Flickr layout, to check out camera settings and lenses used on planespotting photos I admire, and it does appear I could have set a much higher shutter speed and reduced the hell out of my ISO and gotten better results – my shutter speed was generally about 1/250 and I had the ISO upped to 640, while most EXIF data showed shutter speeds of around 1/1000 and an ISO of 200. Oops. Makes me feel better to know this, though, because a lot of people in the know commented that I did, in fact, buy a great lens for this sort of thing, and I was wondering why I got so many soft shots. Not that I’m complaining; as I said, I got several really nice ones and more than a few that are still satisfactory even if they’re not stellar, but obviously I want to improve where I can and do better next time.

Also, aside from looking for clarity, I’m not yet sure artistically what to consider a ‘good shot’. I’ve always had an instinct with my portraits regarding what to keep and what to throw away, and can easily narrow down a set to the ‘best’ shots; but with these I’m rather overwhelmed. Just when I think I’ve got a handle on what I like, I venture out to the internet and find an awesome photo that breaks all the new rules I’ve just set up for myself – at first I thought I only liked shots of the planes in the air, but then I saw some awesome stuff taken on the ground; then I thought I only liked close-ups, until I saw some cool shots of the planes disappearing into the sky. I know it sounds like I’m being crazy picky and analytical here, but not yet having an instinct for how to cull the best shots from a set is really overwhelming – I either think everything is good or everything stinks, and I have no basic preferences from which to start choosing. I think that’s partly because I really didn’t think I’d be able to take shots like this with any level of success; everything about it is so far out of my comfort zone (taking shots in public, of fast-moving objects, in an environment where I control very little about the shot itself) that I never really believed I’d be able to do it. But it turns out I can – I have a lot to learn, yes, but even on my first outing I got some decent stuff, and I managed not to make a fool of myself while doing it. I kind of actually appeared to know what I was up to while I was out there shooting, and the fact that I might actually be able to get a grip on this surprises no one as much as it does me. I expected the shooting experience to be different, but wasn’t prepared for how overwhelming the editing would be. I guess you could say I’m a bit “in the clouds” about it right now. Moving on.

I was a bit surprised to discover a hangar going up in flames in the background when I processed this one

One more thing: I took some time this morning to search the internet for the registration numbers of these airplanes, and what I found was pretty awesome. For example, this jetBlue’s recent flight history is here, and you can see the actual flight on April 19th when I took this photo listed. There’s no real reason to find this cool, except for the idea that airplanes – and airports themselves, really – are all about connection, and journeying, and departing, and arriving; all sorts of magical human stuff that fascinates me about aviation in general. It never ceases to amaze me that humanity has figured out how to put these huge metal monstrosities in the sky, and take flight. So, being able to capture a second of that happening, to freeze it mid-flight then go online and find out where that very airplane has been, and where it’s going (as well as finding all the photos of it that have been taken by others over the years) is incredibly uplifting to me – no pun intended. I guess when I look at an airplane I’m still a little kid in awe of it all.

Tomorrow there will be no more plane photos to share, as I think I’ve exhausted all the ones I felt were worth editing. But I will show some of the museum, and talk more about how the day went in general. Stay tuned! Or don’t if you’re totally bored and pissed that I’m not posting about makeup and wigs. I’m sure I’ll get back to all that soon enough.

Plane and Simple

Posted on April 19, 2014 by marey mercy

2014 isn’t halfway over and I’ve already fulfilled my photography bucket list – I held a real photoshoot in an honest-to-god studio, and now I’ve taken pics of airplanes. I wonder what I need to do next? I have no idea, but I am happy as hell with the airplane shots I got today. All in all, I completely filled up one 32G CF card and put a serious dent in the second, much smaller one I brought along just in case. About 1400 photos in all, and some of them were exactly what I was hoping for!

My dad and I behind the aviation history museum

The aviation museum was great, and I got some photos of the space, but I haven’t processed those yet because I was most excited about the commercial jet photos. Once a month the museum opens up the back tarmac to incoming planes and serves food as a little fundraiser; it provides photographers a pretty close-up view of a nearby airport runway. That was cool, and my telephoto lens served me well, but honestly, the best shots were to be had at the ‘family viewing areas’ located around the airport.

One of the two airport viewing areas opened to the public around the runways

It’s late and my arm is killing me, so I’m going to share some shots and keep things brief for now, but I’ve got loads to say about the day with my dad. It was tons of fun and we are raring to hit up the much larger Intercontinental Airport soon, which also has viewing areas where one can take photos, so I can get shots of a bigger variety of planes. Since Hobby Airport is home base to one particular airline, almost all the planes I shot today were this company’s jets. I’ll see if you can guess which one it is after you see some of the shots.

One of the shots taken at the end of the runway right behind the museum

The runway behind the museum was pretty busy with planes taking off, and each time one taxied out to the end of it, it would turn around and face directly into my camera for a few seconds before turning off to the left and throttling up the engines. So I got loads of nose shots like that. Then one time this happened:

Have you figured out what airline it is yet?

I like the heat waves radiating out from the underbelly of the plane, and the placement of them, obviously. As the planes took off, the runway angled farther away from me, so I didn’t get any decent shots of them lifting off – I took a ton, but the plane is too small for them to be exciting. However, I did snap a few good ones as the planes sped by:

Even though most of them were blurry, I thought this one looked nice, and the blurring of the grass shows the speed at which it was already moving. The sky wasn’t all that pretty here, but as the day wore on it got better. Also it got hotter, and unfortunately I am now sunburned as I didn’t think to put on sunscreen.

This plane is called the “Kangeroo Crew,” and it partners with Texas Children’s Hospital to fly children in need to and from its’ medical facilities. It just happened to be taking off while we were still at the museum, and the volunteers there were all very nice men and women who were sure to alert me when an interesting airplane was about to take off – even if they had to chase me down to be sure I knew about it. Great people.

Believe it or not, there actually are other airlines at Hobby Airport besides Southwest, but to be honest, this American Airlines plane just wasn’t photogenic. The Southwest planes really stand out, and this one blends into everything so much that it provided very little visual appeal – at least, that’s how I feel about it. Still, I took pictures of it anyway, so there you go.

I really wish this shot had come out better; it’s a cool placement of the two planes, but it’s pretty blurry and the color was blah. We were at the museum during the brightest part of the day, so color was tricky. Still, almost a cool shot, and the only decent one I have of wheels leaving the ground.

Now, onto the shots I took from the viewing areas – these were where I could catch some real winners (and as is always the case for me, I’m saving the best one for last).

I did not manage to get this entire Delta plane into any of my close shots; they moved too fast and came in at an odd angle that made it hard for me gauge ahead of time how much zoom to use. So, this was the best I got, but look how close it is! Way better than what I could get at the museum. Check this one out:

I mean seriously! If the pilot had known I was down there, he could’ve waved at me and I would’ve caught it. These shots were taken at the end of the day, when I was sunburned and tired (due partly to the minor disaster of me locking my keys in my car at the museum – erm, sort of – more on this later) and almost out of memory on my camera, but next time I’m going straight to the viewing areas and hitting up the museum for french fries later. I have an app on my iPhone called Flightradar24 which tracks flight traffic all over the globe (but only if they emit from a certain type of transponder or something, still, it’s an amazing amount of flight traffic to monitor) and my dad sat in the car watching it while I stood outside with my camera ready; when he saw something heading our way he’d shout out where it was coming from and what it was, and in that manner we team-worked our way through the shoot. As I may have mentioned, my father is an airplane fanatic (although WWII airplanes are his thing) and he is as obsessive about his interests as I am, so he was totally game for all of this. In fact, I was the one who eventually conked out and had to quit – we were all about the airplanes from 10:30 AM to 3 PM.

And now, without further ado, the best damn shot of the day. This right here is THE EXACT SHOT I was going for – I didn’t care what type of plane it was, I just wanted to get this shot:

BAM! Perfection! At least in my eyes it is!! Notice how much nicer the sky is here, and well, that the rest of it is awesome.

Much more to come, including shots of the museum and a JetBlue airliner, which everyone at the museum made a very big deal out of when it lined up to take off, so it must not be a plane that regularly flies out of this airport or something. My telephoto lens made me proud (lots of planespotters at the museum confirmed I’d made a wise choice for this kind of photography in buying it) and my dad and I had a real blast and are ready to try it again. I’m just going to have to remember to wear sunscreen next time, and to not (sort of) lock my keys in my car.

Macro’ed Up

Posted on April 18, 2014 by marey mercy

First of all, I got confirmation at work today that next year I can move out of counseling and into a teaching position at the school. So yay to that. And also:

My macro lens arrived! Like my last eBay lens, it shipped quickly and seems to be in good working order. I wandered around the house and backyard this evening attempting to take close-up shots. The lens was a little tricky to work with, but mostly because I haven’t done any reading about the best way to use it; I just threw it on the camera body and started walking around snapping photos of things. Mostly I had a hard time getting the lens to focus, and I had to put my Speedlite on it to get enough light which made my camera pretty damn heavy; this may be my heaviest lens yet.

That’s a shot of the chandelier, BTW. I am pretty happy at this point with my lens collection; I think I’ve got a nice variety of choices to use in different situations and for different effects. At some point I’ll line all my lenses up for a photo of them, but I’m not in the mood tonight. It’s late already and I’ve got a full day ahead tomorrow.

This is a shot of the beveled glass in our front door. Apparently we need to clean it; didn’t notice that until processing the photo.

And this is some sort of decorative geegaw that was stuck into a floral arrangement. Damn, it’s also dusty. I’m going to have to do a better job cleaning if I’m going to keep using the macro lens around the house. Oh, who am I kidding. I’m going to have to do a better job paying someone else to clean my house if I keep using the macro lens around the house. #firstworldproblems.

This is a bracelet that was hanging on a jewelry box that sits on top my vanity. I have loads of bracelets and earrings that I never wear, so at this point they’re more like decorative accessories for my bathroom counter. Not as dusty as the other stuff though, so that’s a positive.

As far as jewelry goes, I’m not much for anything other than necklaces. I don’t wear earrings at all anymore, and even my so-called wedding ring is a simple band from Tiffany’s – I love it because it has a tiny band of Tiffany’s blue running through it, but it isn’t an official wedding ring or anything. I had one I wore for 13 years, but I developed an allergy to the nickel in it and had to replace it. When looking for a new ring, I couldn’t generate enough interest in anything I looked at to feel inspired to spend thousands of dollars, so I went with the sterling silver band with Tiffany’s blue and am fine and dandy with it. It only cost $150. Much less than this macro lens I’m using. I realize that at this point it would make sense to have a macro shot of my faux wedding ring, but I didn’t actually plan this little digression in advance so I didn’t take any. Moving on.

Well, what can I say? This is my favorite so far. Penny is hard to catch in front of the camera.

Getty-ing There

Posted on April 17, 2014 by marey mercy

I wasn’t going to write a blog post today, but after getting back from my weekly appointment with crazy massage lady Sandy (this week we discussed recipes, mostly, and home decorating, and lots of complaints about her husband) I decided to finally check out the links Getty Images has been sending me the past few months, detailing the changes they’ve made to their Flickr Contributor program.

I may have mentioned here before that I was accepted into the program a little over a year ago. My photos are here. When I was first invited to become a contributor, I checked the website constantly to see if I had any sales, but I never did, so eventually I forgot about it. But a few months ago Getty ended their partnership with Flickr, and started emailing contributors to let them know how they were changing our connections to their site. I kept getting the emails while I was at work and unable to really check into it, but about an hour ago I remembered about the messages and clicked on over to my Getty Contributor page to see what was up. Well lo and behold – I actually had money in my account. Turns out that just a few weeks ago I sold a copy of one of my photos, and on April 25th I’m getting $155.00 deposited into my PayPal account – it feels like free money! The photo Getty sold was this one.

Also, I no longer have to wait until Getty contacts me asking for a certain photo they saw on Flickr that they liked – I can just upload photos directly to my account and someone from Getty will review it and decide whether or not to take it. This is much easier, except that I have to fill out a model release for every single photo that has a human in it, which is a pain. But I’m going to upload some non-human stuff as soon as possible and get model releases from friends I’ve photographed so I can upload more portraits and jumping shots to my contributor page.

So, I’ve officially made my first sale. And I didn’t even know it.

Crazy Country Massage

Posted on April 8, 2014 by marey mercy

In spite of my arm troubles, I have to type up a little synopsis of my experience getting a massage tonight. It’s not what you think, if your mind went into the gutter right away – but it is really bizarre, in a fun sort of way. Fun, if you are accustomed to this particular sort of Southern old lady I’m about to describe. For those of you not from the South, this woman might not be familiar to you, and furthermore, she might horrify you. I apologize if that is the case. My Southern readers will recognize this type of character right away. But I should warn you there is lots of hunting talk, and the talk gets weird – it’s something I’m totally used to even though I’d never shoot an animal unless it was about to kill me, which would only happen anyway if a bear crashed through the back windows of my house because I sure ain’t venturing out into nature to encounter any. Moving on.

Now, when one thinks massage, one probably does not think of a strip center like this – at least, not massage of the therapeutic sort. But as it turns out, my dog groomer was housed in this little countrified shopping area right up the street from my house for years, so I was familiar with the woman’s massage office when Google pulled her up as being in my area – I just never thought of trying her out before. Had I not been frequenting this little place for years, I’m sure I would have taken one look at the place and kept driving, but I was already immune to its run-down “charm,” and didn’t really think twice about heading on in. This little center is actually one of the oldest in the area, sitting right across the street from a well-known neighborhood barber shop in a historic old home; everything has grown up around it like crazy, but it has always looked basically the same.

The “payment slot” is always a nice touch.

Just based on the door alone, I was not at all surprised when “Sandy” explained to me later that she knew NOTHING about technology. You don’t say? I can’t even remember the last time I saw those peel-and-stick letters put to such good use on an office door. Good times.

Speaking of Sandy, she was approximately 68 years old, tiny, and aside from the entirely white ensemble of long-sleeved turtleneck, stretch pants, and orthopedic shoes, she was a dead ringer for Flo, the sassy diner waitress from the 80’s sitcom Alice.

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OK, so she also had a little less hair.

The massage itself was pretty good, and she worked a lot of the kinks out of my bum arm. But the conversation was the real stand-out here – and yes, I do mean conversation. Usually I fall to sleep during a massage, but although Sandy had the requisite tinkly, wind-chime-y music playing in the background, I could barely hear it over all her talking. Sandy is one of those people who manages to tell you loads of personal details about herself during the course of a conversation (she’s been married twice, her first husband died of cancer, she’s been in business over 30 years, she knows how to shoot both rifles and handguns and has a concealed carry license, etc. etc.) but at the end of it knows nothing more about you than your name. Well in this case, she knew my name and how much my right arm hurt, but why it was hurting (spending too much time on the computer) we never got around to discussing.

Oh, and she also owns rental properties. LOTS of rental properties. Owning rental properties is a LOT of WORK, y’all. Sandy can tell you all about it.

So here I am, lying on a table getting my knots ironed out, tinkly music playing in the background, and for a good twenty minutes Sandy is describing to me, in detail, not only how many times she’s killed a deer, but exactly HOW she kills them – where she shoots them, how far away she is from them when she shoots them, etc. That set up a nice segue into what she described as a “typical old person afternoon” – shooting squirrels off the back porch with a BB gun, then heading to McDonald’s for some ice cream. Yep. That was how my massage therapist described the ideal life of a Typical Old Person. Then there was this:

Sandy: “This morning I told my grandkids how I’d shot three squirrels in the backyard, and they said they wanted to eat ’em fried, just like they do on Duck Dynasty. So guess what I did?”

Me: “Um, you fried them…?”

Sandy: “Not yet, but I skinned ’em! Then I put ’em in the deep freeze, so the next time my grandkids come over they can have fried squirrel.”

Me: “So, where do you live again?” (Answer: in my neighborhood)

Abandon hope, all squirrels who enter here

When I told my husband where I was going for a massage, he immediately joked that the place probably got mistaken a lot for a massage PARLOR by the all the old country boys in the area, which surprised me because the thought had never entered my mind. But as it turns out, Sandy has lots of stories about men calling for appointments asking for ‘special services,’ as she called them. She even told me that when she first moved her business into our area she was denied a license because the assumption was that she was opening a house of ill-repute. For her first few years, she was only allowed to have female clients, and she was not allowed to operate after 5 PM (the assumption being, I guess, that most people looking for happy endings would do so after-hours. As if). And keep in mind, this was back in the NINETIES. Ah, the South. So much fried squirrel. So little massage.

I love it that you can get your feet massaged for $20. And I’m assuming this sign doesn’t actually mean you can get five and a half hours of massage in one session. Because – no. I refuse to reflect on that further.

But after all the crazy-talk, my arm did feel better (although typing this post up has caused it to flare up again – damn), and my wallet was only $50 lighter, so I went ahead and made an appointment to go back next week. The more I reflect on the experience, the more I think she might really be crazy, and I’m now a little suspicious about the fact that the client leaving the massage room right before me was a dude (she’s not REALLY doling out happy endings, is she?). Plus, her phone was ringing constantly the whole time (the rental properties, don’t ya know). But as far as the massage went, she was appropriate and respectful and she did seem to know what she was doing, so for now I’m going to surmise she’s just a bit nuts. If nothing else, she’s certainly an experience. We’ll see how long I can tolerate it.

Random Shots

Posted on March 30, 2014 by marey mercy

Here’s just a few more from the photoshoot. I’m pretty much out of things to say about it at this point, I think, so I’ll just share them and see what comes up.

This was a random shot taken while we were finishing up lunch:

I liked this one, but by the time we took these the paper backdrop was pretty wrinkled so I decided to add a light texture to it when editing; I’m not sure I like it, but it’s better than the backdrop wrinkles.

This last one’s pretty weird, but I liked the way the hair was flowing and how you can just barely see Candace’s eye peeking out: They were actually both down on their hands and knees after executing a yoga move, but I flipped it.

That’s it for now; but the new lens should arrive on Monday, so stay tuned! Although, another busy week at work is coming up, so I may not have much opportunity to use it until the weekend – but we’ll see.

mareymercy.

Art, Horror, and Other Obsessions

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