Helllllloooooo October!

It is well documented that October is my favorite month of the year.
LOVE IT!
The humidity finally breaks.
There is a chill in the air.
Jeans and light sweaters emerge from storage.
Punkins appear by the side of the road.
 Apple cider abounds.
Trees put on their autumnal finery.
Pumpkin spice everything!
Yes, there is much to celebrate in October.
Here in the Nikiverse, October is all about doing craft festivals, gearing up for the holiday season and making, making, making, making beautiful and silly things.

However, there are uncomfortable changes as well.
My beloved pink camera has been retired.
Here is the post with the very first picture i ever took with it, in May 2008.  sniff, sniff, sniffle...
After a conservative guess of 14,000 pictures taken, she finally gave up the ghost two weeks ago and refused to turn on, even with much pleading, begging and cajoling.
    It was time to let her rest on a pedestal in the studio, in all of her pink glory.
Luckily, there is a backup camera that Jason and Kate gave me when they upgraded a few years ago.
Now just to find it...
Camera located!  It is a newer version of the pink camera so i already have batteries and memory cards and cases so now we just have to turn it on...
Nothing.
Panic briefly flared in my tummy at the thought that i might be without a camera.  Yes, i realize that in this day and age with cameras on phones and tablets it is certainly possible to take a picture without a camera, but it isn't the same people.
Okay, take a deep breath; maybe the battery needs to be charged. After all, i haven't used the pink camera in weeks. Okay, now just to charge the battery...
Where is the charger?!?
My apartment has been in a sad, sorry state of construction and disarray for a year. Nothing is where it is supposed to be - GAH!
After a few days of searching, the charger was located, the battery was charged and last night - TADA! - the backup camera is working and has graduated from its backup status.

Hazzah!

was that 6 or 7 or 6?

Yesterday while i was waiting for the optometrist my eyes were dilated to aye-aye level so i had to keep them closed to prevent the fluorescent light from piercing my brain.

credit: Philadelphia zoo

Sitting in a room full of people with my eyes closed naturally makes me think of meditation,
which made me think of missing my meditation group,
which made me think of the blog post earlier this week,

which made me think of the original picture i 

used of day lilies that Cassie and Mike brought me after my dad died,

which made me think of my dad,

which made me sad for a moment, but then concerned because dad had an issue with his eyes that i was being tested for that very day,

which made me nervous,

which circled me back around to meditation,

which made me consider my meditation haiku,

which gave me pause, did the mid line actually have 7 syllables or only 6?

Hmmmmmmmm...

Yep, that haiku is syllable deficient. 

How in the world did that happen?

Haikus are not rocket science, people. There are only 17 syllables total. That is the whole point.

I think it was because i was toying with both meditate and meditation during the writing process. 

bah

I also realized that i spelled meditate wrong. sheesh.

double bah

So here is the revised edition. 

Straight out of Camera

Do you ever see a picture and just know that it has to have been edited because there is NO WAY reality could look that amazing?
Happens all of the time.
Sometimes i feel like we are all so used to the hyper-reality offered to us digitally that it is easy to be jaded about everything we see:
Is that really real? 
That is so photoshopped?
What app/filter/setting did you use to get that effect?
But do you ever see something in reality that is so striking that you don't believe it is real, even though you are looking at it in real time with your own eyes?
This was the sky one day last week around 6:30am.
My jaw dropped when i walked outside.
Mostly still asleep (6:30 is a terrible time; i can't believe that i left for work then every day - BLECH) I thought i might be dreaming, but no, i wasn't.
It only lasted for five minutes, but WOW, what a breathtaking five minutes that was.

a Niki's-eye view

Sometimes we miss the most obvious things.
Often, when i upload pictures from my camera, it seems like the images don't look like my memories, especially the ones taken outside.
Well duh, Niki; you were wearing sunglasses when you took the pictures.
I realized that last week and decided to take a few shots though my lenses to capture what i was actually seeing.

feeling thoughtful on a hike

4 year old perspective

Dash and I were at the library and we ended up taking a bunch of pictures of him outside (to be posted later... sometime) when he announced that he wanted to take a picture of the brick wall. Not something on the wall, not me by the wall, just the wall.
Okay, buddy.

photo credit: DJP, April 2014

I see plain old bricks.

I wonder, what did he see

that this adult can't?

a new morning

we're all good here

Hey Winter -
  I have the picture of a single snowflake that i've been trying to shoot.

 Thanks very much for your help.
You can go now.
Spring can take it from here.
No, really.
Go.

in which i give the paparazzi what for

I'm having fun editing the pictures from Amy's and my adventure to Elioak Farms and integrating them with mine to tell the story of the day.
Rea and I maintain that we need staff photographers to capture our lives so that we can be IN the pics instead of just behind the camera.
Looking at Amy's pictures of the day reinforces that thought because there are a jillion pics of me to choose from: me with goats, me with horses, me with giant shoes, me with alarming bears.
There is however one snap that makes me wonder if I would actually like having my photographer:

Wow.

I look super unamused.

Funnily enough, I don't even remember looking up at this moment and Amy had been there the whole time so it isn't like I was suddenly Why can't you vultures leave me alone on my day off? Can't you see that I am having a moment with these goats? Go earn an honest living that doesn't involve barely legal stalking!
Plus the whole day was fun, fun Laughing-ville so I was never actually this unamused.
It does however give me a good avatar to use when I need to broadcast utter disdain with an undernote of incredulous.

Don't you even...

Indian Summer

ahhhhhhh, Maryland...
Just when i am excited about getting out my fuzzy blanket you throw a week of sweltering temperatures at me.

Nice, then way too hot.

But today was just lovely.

I like October.

Randomeo, Randomeo, where for art thou, Randomeo?

So how about we start off by doing the Friday Randomness post on Saturday?
How's that for random for ya?
As you probably saw, yesterday was an Etsy day so randomeyness was pushed to today.

You think you are a football fan?

I mean, really a football fan?

Really?

Do you have a tailgating RV?

Oh really?

Well, does tour tailgating RV have goal posts on it?

Because that is a serious football fan.

(seen driving through Halethorpe)

I love New Toothbrush Day!
You know, the day every quarter when you toss the old toothbrush and open a brand new one.
It was New Toothbrush Day this week and I realized that I was in a spectacularly good mood all morning simply because i'd brushed with a new toothbrush.
It didn't hurt that the new one is purple.

I'm in the library doing some research, have out my brand new Hello Kitty notebook and can't find a pen.
Where is the pen?
[rooting around in my purse] I know that I threw a pen in my purse a few days ago.
Honestly why are all of the pens always disappearing? I couldn't find one in my dining room this morning either.
All a girl needs is a fricking pen. Come on, people!
Frustrated I pull every single thing out of the middle pocket of my purse.

Well then.

Nevermind.

It has gotten cold enough at night that I put a light blanket on my bed about 2 weeks ago and just last night it was cold enough that I got up in the middle of the night to grab MY blanket - my wonderful fuzzy brown blanket that I sleep with about 8-9 months out of the year.  I haven't seen it since I washed it and put it away for summer.  Hello my dear friend.
It is now officially Autumn in the Nikiverse. I bet it will only be a few more weeks before the electric mattress pad makes its first appearance.

not this one; this one is just a preview

Last week I saw the most awesome day moon:
it was waxing gibbous and surrounded by streaky clouds.
 Having learned my lesson about missed photo opportunities, I pulled over to the side of the highway and got some shots. 
One of them looks so cool that I think I am going to print it on watercolor paper as a base for a new painting/collage.











Speaking of pictures I did an etsy shoot this week and going through the almost 300 pictures that I had taken, I found this gem.

Honestly, what was I thinking?
Could I be further off the mark and still have the earrings in frame?
What am I even aiming at - my shadow?
This is one reason it takes 300 shots to get 75 great pictures.

I am doing a craft festival every weekend in October;

stay tuned for dates and places.

focus

Wow Niki! That is such a cool shot of those red mushrooms. How in the world did you manage to get both the front one and the back one? It so clear and crisp through the glass. I mean, wow, what an interesting and creative perspective.

I was trying to get a shoot of the panda head earring.

Oh. Ummmmm.... in that case... it is artistically... uh... I hear blurry is all the rage these days.

a little explanation can go a long way

To really understand

what is going on

in this photo

and my expression, 

you might need

to know my motivation

during this shoot.

You see,

I was pretending that

the Ugly Duckling

and I had been

invited to the same slumber party.
The other girls wanted to watch a movie that was too scary for me so I hid on Ducky's back and was peeking around his neck at the screen.
See?
It makes perfect sense now.
Right?

reality is funnier than fiction

So how about this heat?
(statement in compliance with internet mandate that one must comment on the obvious)
The temperature is oppressive and horrible, but it IS July;
 one expects Maryland the be a humid furnace in July.
Drastic temperatures bother me more when they are unexpected: those sudden steamy or frigid days in Spring and Autumn that just  pop up, make you miserable and then disappear.
There was a stretch of four such icky days in May.
Coincidentally it was also the week that the AC broke at the Parisian Flea and that there was a photo shoot scheduled for the Baltimore Sun.
The pictures were to accompany this story about formal 1920's style parties.

Which means tuxedos.

Tuxedos in unseasonable heat.

Tuxedos in unseasonable heat without air-conditioning.

Here is the published photo of my boss, Andrew, by Gene Sweeney Jr.

He looks so dapper, right?


What you can't see is me hiding behind the sterling cases laughing hysterically and then calling Andrew's name to take this picture:

The best part of the shoot -besides the surrealistic hilarity of the whole thing- was that all of the champagne saucers were filled with real champagne which the three of us then drank, toasting to anything that popped into our heads.
Mayhaps that was a contributing factor to the hilarity.

the answer is light

A friend recently started an Etsy account to sell vintage housewares and has asked me to help her get started. She wants to know how i get my photos to look good, so A. this post is for you.
I could spend paragraphs talking about staging and height and props; in fact, i have so here is the link to that post.
The most important thing to know, in fact probably the only thing you really need to know, is that the answer is light.
 Light is everything.
Finding the right location with the right light at the right time of day is hard, but once you do everything else is a cinch.
My first shoot for Etsy took hours and hours and days. Some things i shot at 3 or 4 different times. It seemed like it took forever to find the right combination, but now that i have, the actual photography takes almost no time at all.
Now all i have to do is wait for the correct conditions. If light is the number one answer, patience is number two. Be ready to wait. These three pictures were taken 4 minutes apart:

too dark

too much sun

ahhhhh... just right

On Etsy you are allowed up to 5 pictures per item so i will take anywhere from 15 to 30 snaps to edit them down to the ones i want.  It is a personal choice that i will not correct, filter or use any effects on my Etsy pictures; every picture on my site is straight out of camera. I do crop them square because that is the format Etsy uses, but it is important to me that customers see exactly what they are buying. I'd rather spend the time going though hundreds of pics to find the right one than spend the time correcting a not-quite right one. But as i said, it is a personal choice.
Be sure as you are taking all those pics that you are changing your angles, perspective and distance. You don't want 30 pics of the same thing, but rather full shots, close-ups, up shots, down shots and even some crazy shots.
As for the question of shooting indoors and using non-natural light, well... good luck to you. I did a bunch of my card pictures indoors and the lighting was too frustrating. I would rather wait for a sunny day then play with white boxes and spots. Some people do really well inside, but not me.
Finally, practice, practice, practice. Don't get discouraged, it gets easier.
To bullet point it for you:
-light
-patience
-light
-volume
-light
-variety
-light
-practice
and, of course,
-light.

Questions?

today's haiku brough to you by Picasa

Click, click, crop, crop, crop,

another batch of shop pics

has to be resized.

chasing the sun

To finish the shop update for tomorrow I needed to take some pictures today so i prepped my highly professional setup in the front yard: floral velour folding chair from before i was born, mini camp table, neutral fabric, several glasses to hold bracelets, some random items to give size perspective (these pine cones are all over the yard) and a big candle holder to help with necklaces since my schedule, Amy's schedule and daylight have not matched up lately and the dress form experiment was an epic failure.
I shouldn't make fun of my little setup because as cobbled together as it is, I have been really happy with the pictures i've been getting for my shop; every picture currently on my Etsy page is straight out of camera except for being cropped square.

Also, i brought out all of my current stock that hasn't been photographed yet so that i could change my mind and add something to the update in case the shoot went really well.

And sunblock. This sunblock lives in my photoshoot box so if the lighting is suddenly perfect i don't have to lose anytime and i don't get burnt either.

This was all the more critical today as the sky was right on the line between partially cloudy and partially sunny.

mayhaps this is what they call broken cloud cover?

Luckily the clouds were moving pretty quickly so i didn't have to wait too long between cloud covers; of course the bursts of full sun were correspondingly brief.

To utilize the lighting as well as possible i worked a bit differently by actually staging several pieces at once during the cloudy moments so that as soon as the sun came out i could shoot multiple pieces by simply moving the table. It was a lot quicker to pick up the table and turn it so that the sun was falling on each item in turn than to completely stage one piece after another. With some forethought about which things could use different bases i was able to get more accomplished in a shorter time.

In fact it was working so well that during a particularly large cloud cover i tried to figure out a way to stage multiple earrings at once.  I only have the one wrapped holder so looking around the yard i decided to try using a tree.

Success!
The naturally broken bark of this species of tree (no, i have no idea what it is; something in the elm family?) presented plenty of places to hang earrings;
i just had to find enough of the correct shapes for multiple pairs on the sun-side of the tree.


It was right after taking this picture, during my happy dance celebrating my brilliance that i realized that i'd been shooting in VGA instead of 5M for the previous 30 minutes.
DOH!
That means that all the planning might well have been for naught if the pictures are too small for the cropping process to show enough detail.
sigh... oh so not brilliance.
The only thing to do at that point was abandon the shoot and come inside to start editing to see what would need to be reshot before the light was totally gone.
And have a shot of tequila.
The good news is that it looks like i can salvage parts of the little pics and will only have to do some detail shots on 2 items and fully reshoot 3 items. The bad news is that it is now completely cloudy. But with everything else done for the update i can get up early, do the retakes in 15 or 20 minutes and have them cropped and uploaded before going to fTM Erin's house to babysit her adorable boys in the morning.
Plus, i had time to do this blog post, which i wasn't planning on doing until tomorrow afternoon so i guess it all worked out in the end.
Then again, doesn't it always?

PAX

well hello there

Great light today so i did a lot of reshoots for the store.

Now it is time for editing and editing and editing and after a while you start to see things.
Do you see anything in the gold bead in this picture?



How about now?

 

ps- Happy 10-11-12!

the photo shoot that went on forever

It was a lovely, sunny Saturday in the spring and i needed a picture of an angel.
To be more specific, i needed a photograph of a statue of an angel and if i ever finish the project i'll tell you why. Suffice it to say that i needed to go on a photo shoot in a cemetery.
There is this great old cemetery on Rt 40 that i pass driving the back way into the city that has always fascinated me, but i've never visited so i set out purposefully with water bottle and camera in hand.
Just to find it closed.
Really, people? Really?
This was not just a random stop by me. I had planned this shoot and by jiminey i was not going to be twarted.
I'd only ever seen the side that faces Rt 40, so i figured i'd drive around to see if there was another entrance.
All i had to do 
was follow the wrought iron fence.
Little did i know that this cemetery is humongous. I made my best guesses about following the perimeter when i hit curves or one way streets,
so sometimes the fence was barely visible in the distance, but when i found this really old patch of fence i knew i had to be getting close.    Voila! Open gate.
The main entrance is on Monastery Rd, across from -you guessed it-
a monastery.  Thing is, i never knew this monastery even existed. It is only 10 miles from where i live and i had no clue. It is no surprise, though, cause Maryland was the only original colony founded by catholics so there are monasteries and seminaries and basilicas and convents a plenty.
I love finding new things in my own backyard.
But no time to dawdle; I was on a mission to explore and find the right angel statue for my project.
I started to drive through slowly
  but was quickly overwhelmed by the vastness of the place; it seemed to go on forever:
 
and ever 
and ever! 
I just kept winding up more and more hills until i could look at distant sights,
including the monastery at the entrance 
and the city docks.  (click to spot them)
There was a newer section that was totally uncool (can you say uniform and boring?), but the vast majority of the cemetery was old enough to have a lot of character.
Check out this civil was dude -

A statue on a draped pedestal on a crypt on a base with urns.
Wow. Somebody had a healthy self-image.
How about these low mausoleums 
that look like tiny houses?
Or these that are built into the hill?
There was a plot of uniform little crosses.
Turns out they are the nuns. Something about the way they are all lined up together in the green grass makes me smile; like the sisters are still cloistered together.
While shooting angels, i'd stop to admire interesting or different monuments, like this brown cylinder which is both an unusual shape and color.
Or i might stop to wonder at monuments that seemed senseless to me: a sphere on a platter on a column on a base? I feel like i should like it, but i don't. I just don't get it at all (though don't those clouds look great behind it?).
I also don't get this cross  that is shaped like it grew from a tree. Trees don't grow branches like that. Stop it; put that away.
But even when i see monuments that might not appeal to me aesthetically, i still generally enjoy the stillness and the peace that seems to settle over old cemeteries on sunny days.
Not to say that there isn't the occasional completely alarming moment:
  What the...??????
It is a creepy statue of creepy dead kids covered in creepy fake flowers.
And the creepiest part?
 
These kids died over 100 years ago as children so its not like their kids or grandkids left those flowers. I mean, who put those flowers on them? I don't even know where my great-great-great-great-grand aunt's grave is, much less care enough to take flowers.
Creepy.
After a few minutes to shake off the heebie jeebies i pressed on cause you know,
there was still more to be seen.

Can i tell you how happy it makes me to know that her parents named her Bessie?
Not Elizabeth, Bessie. That was her given name.
And she lived to be 90. I bet she was a kind, old dear who had ribbon candy out in crystal dishes year round and would offer you cookies and lemonade when you'd walk the mail up to the porch for her cause her gout was flaring up. Oh, Bessie. I never knew you yet somehow i miss you.
I thought i'd gotten to the far edge of the cemetery when i hit a bit of woods,
, but look - somehow there is more.
And more 
And even more
 Plus more.
Great googley-moogley - does this place have its own area code?
Honestly, i feel like it is bigger than my neighborhood.
It was so vast that there were big sections that you couldn't get to by car,
so i had to climb.
Doesn't it look like these stairs just lead right up to heaven?
Helllllloooooo, little car -
I finally, finally made it all the way to the section that borders Rt 40, the section that i have seen through the fence for years. I realized that one of the things that has always caught my eye when driving was this lovely bronze statue: 
She's so lovely and though full bronzes are pretty rare because of the cost, i did also see an awesome monument with bronze insets as well:

In searching for angels i did find one other bronze figure as well:
Wow.
That's big. Really big to be full bronze.
Oh wait, the name on the base is Key. That explains it, then. The Keys were a prominent, wealthy family around these parts.
See this bridge in the distance? 
That would be the Key bridge that completes the Baltimore Beltway.
Mayhaps you've heard of one of the Key cousins from Frederick : Francis Scott?
Anyhoo... it was a lovely day in the cemetery and a very productive shoot.
I am still working my way through all the angel pictures i took, working on... well... its kinda hard to explain the concept, but when its done i'll share.