Last week I had the wonderful opportunity to celebrate my dear friends Amy and Renee who are expecting baby boys a couple of weeks apart. Both of these wonderful ladies are actually the first within my New York City friend group to be entering parenthood, and I couldn't be more delighted for them. The item I loved the most (besides the gorgeous cake and ridiculously delicious monkey bread) was the hanging twine with "favors" for after the baby was born. Ideas ranged from bringing over a movie for a girls night to doing a sink full of dishes to holding a real adult conversation! As more and more of my friends have entered into different life stages than me, I've wondered how I can love and serve them best when I have absolutely no clue what they might be going through. I loved these tangible ideas and can't wait to see how amazing of mothers Amy & Renee will both become! 
dslr
The Photograph Collective: Stop Playing With Your Food /
Project #4 was an interesting one: Shoot through the eyes of a child. I chose to take a break from the heavy topics and look into something a little more adventurous! For the project in it's native habitat with its critiques, please check out The Photograph Collective. “Stop Playing With Your Food”
For this project, I decided to take a whimsical approach and have a little more fun than I typically afford myself with photography. So often children are told to stop playing with their food, yet to me it represents an imagination and an excitement that we often lose as adults. I decided to make subjects of colorful candy and to bring them into an imagination setting by contrasting light & dark. I’ve always been fascinated and amused by how children can have a one-track-mind and wanted to focus attention on items that are normally not given much thought. Additionally, I chose to inject a little bit of my own childhood into the way I styled the food. I was quite the mini-adult growing up and was very particular about organization. Every day at lunch i would set out the perfect placement of my juice box, my entree, my snack, and even my napkin before I began eating. I wanted to reflect that child’s play is not always messy and chaotic, but can look different for each child depending on their imagination.
Light, Form & Abstraction /
For my second Digital Photography assignment, we were tasked with capturing "Light, Form & Abstraction." I'm starting to realize that I am really uninspired by wandering around my neighborhood and much prefer creating my own studio within my house....or maybe that's just my laziness and trying to avoid the cold! Either way, I find it much more enjoyable to take the time in my own house to set up my tripod, fiddle with my settings, and shoot the same thing 3000 times without needing to worry about a) my fingers freezing off, b) my subject flying away, c) people staring at me because I'm taking a super close shot of tin foil in public, d) all of the above. For the assignment, we were encouraged to play around with different types of lights and to point them in different directions to play with shadows and reflections.
We also have been learning how to use Camera Raw to edit our photos in the most basic ways: changing exposure, clarity, color hues, etc. It's a non-destructive editing format and it's the "pre" step to Photoshop.
The inside of an umbrella
Lamp stand
Handheld mirror with a clamp light at the side
Perfume bottle. I actually bought black poster board for my backgrounds! It looks much better than using an old black sweater, don't you think?
Wooden puzzle pieces
Perfume bottle with left low light
What do you think this below picture is? It's the inside of a boot! I thought it looked oddly cavernous.
