lessons

Here are some scenes from my violin lesson.

(There’s a story behind these photos, but I can’t get into it now, since it’s almost midnight, and I have to get up early in the morning to pry two overtired children out of bed to get them to daycare and preschool so that I can head to a lab meeting that I talked my bosses into scheduling for tomorrow since I couldn’t make the Tuesday meeting in person and I was sure we’d be back from my in-laws’ by Wednesday at the latest, and I need to get to bed since I’m tired after a long day involving packing up two stir crazy children and driving with them over 4 hours, much of which included stop-and-go traffic, only to get home half an hour before needing to leave for the violin lesson, which was rescheduled from Monday, and still needing to get the children to eat dinner before leaving for the violin lesson and half of dinner ended up being graham crackers in the car, which sounds like an intriguing name for a dish, kind of like pigs in a blanket, and I’m so tired right now that I think I’m starting to see things since I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a large floating guinea pig in the house when we left last week.)

another flower for you

tapped out

I’m feeling pretty tapped out just now. But shiny is good.

a flower and two stumps

We’ve stayed down at my in-laws’ for a couple of extra nights to help out, so I’ve had some bonus photo time. Here are some things from the yard that I found very pretty.

The stump of a mimosa tree.

The stump of another kind of tree.

A daylily. (Actually, I found the stumps more interesting. But I liked the lily shot, too.)

sharing a chair

One of my regular pursuits is to try to get a good picture with both Phoebe and Theo. They are often like bouncing atoms, rarely at rest at the same place at the same time. Today at lunch, they were fighting over a particular chair at the kitchen table. I have no idea why that chair. But then they finally agreed that they could sit in the chair together. Oh, the cuteness! I had to get a picture! Of course, my hands were full as I headed towards the table. I turned around to set aside the plates of food I’d been about to serve and pulled my iPod out of my pocket. As soon as I had the camera pointed in the right direction, though, Phoebe decided she was over the moment. She ran off. However, we were able to talk her back to the table, and amazingly, both of them stayed put (without glue or other restraining devices!) while I aimed the iPod camera at them. Rejoice! There was much cuteness to be had. (Not shown, though, are the shots of the kids with food hanging out of their mouths.)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

(I do find myself wishing I’d grabbed for my real camera, since the iPod photos are so grainy. Instagram filters are fun and all, but I’m pretty sure I’ll grow tired of them…)

of spoons and spools

We are down at my in-laws’ again this weekend. I realized that I typically take a lot of pictures when we are here. Here are some reasons why:

• When we come down here, I go into travel mode. Because we don’t have childcare when we visit, I don’t typically expect to do much work. This seems to lead to a bit of a sense of vacation, even though I am usually still busy all day with the kids and helping out my in-laws with meals and such. But I keep my camera handy!
• The yard here is more amenable to playing outside. (We live in the woods at home, and if there is no breeze, our yard can be ridiculously buggy.) It’s nice to take pictures of the kids out with natural light. (For that matter, the light inside is also better. Living in the woods as we do, our house is often pretty shady.)
• The inside of the house is much less chaotic than our own home. I can take pictures of the kids without being annoyed that the background is dominated by gigantic piles of papers or toys or whatnots. (It’s the whatnots at home that bug me especially, with their annoying whatnottishness.)
• There are lots of different odds and ends here than are at our house. (I feel like, especially with project 365, I have pretty well tapped our house for subject matter.)

Case in point: there is a rack of spools of thread in the basement, right by a very classic looking sewing machine. I’ve also frequently found myself taking pictures of utensils and housewares. Not that we don’t have housewares at home, but they are different ones. Our spoons have different shapes. So, yes, I took a photo of the spoons in the silverware drawer.

So I posted my spools on Instagram, with the caption “Spools.” Then I posted my spoons, with the caption “Spoons.” And it pleased me well to notice at that point that they were only one letter off. Naturally, I tried to think of other things that started with “spoo,” but there were no spooks or spoofs readily available to photograph. I did, however, take a photo of this juice glass, which I think I will have to dub a spoob. Or maybe spoop. Spoot? You be the judge.

Spools.

Spoons.

A spoo_.

playing with Instagram

First with the Tumblr, and now with the Instagram. It would appear that I’m all about jumping on the social media bandwagons. (Or maybe on the trailers that follow the bandwagons, since the bandwagons passed me by ages ago. I’m a late wagon jumper.) (Not that I’m about to start a MySpace page. That wagon is long departed.)

Having been without an iPhone, or other mobile device with a decent camera, I had only looked on to the Instagram posts of others with interest and some envy. The cool filters! The hipness of it all! But for my birthday, John got me an iPod touch, which comes with not one, but two cameras. Woo-hoo! I rushed to load the Instragram app. (Well, maybe not exactly rushed. It was probably over a week. I was busy.) First I played around a bit with some very lackluster photos taken with the iPod, with disappointingly lackluster results. But then I figured out that I could use photos I’d taken previously, with my real camera, and futz with them in Instagram. I have to say, I find the filters a lot of fun.

Here are a few photos I’ve played with. For most of them, I failed to make note of which of the many available filters I used, so I tried my best to reconstruct. However, if anyone can tell that I’ve got the filter wrong, please speak up.

This was a photo I took on my commute during my first week or so of Project 365, in August 2010. (I think this filter might be the one called X-Pro II. You can see the unmanipulated one on flickr.)

This one I took on my trip to Japan in 2004. It is (I believe) an old cemetery in the hills just outside of Kyoto. I love the photo, but the highlights were blown in such a way that I’ve had trouble adjusting it. Putting it though an Instagram filter gave it new life. (I think this might be with the filter called Walden. Here is the original.)

Here’s one where I tried applying the tilt shift doohicky, as well as a filter. (I think this filter might be the one called Sutro.) I like the composition of the original, but I really think that changing the focus and the palette adds to the nostalgic feel.)

I joked that this one was a composite photo of John’s and my 1977 school portraits, with the filter called 1977. Although I realized since posting that the school portraits were probably actually from 1979. (How I could I have been so far off?) Actually, in this case the filter didn’t add much, but it amused me so. Here is the “original,” which John made a few years back from photoshopping our two scanned school portraits together. (We didn’t know each other in the 70s, and lived on opposite sides of the country.)

So there. Instagram is fun. (If you are on Instagram, you can find me there as alejna99. Yes, the username alejna was taken. Again. I haven’t yet dared look to see who is using my name.)

distorted reflections

During my short visit to New York City last August, I left the conference to stop back at my friend‘s hotel room to collect my luggage. (She had been kind enough to put me up the night of my arrival.) The room was up on the 16th floor of the hotel, high up but still deep within the canyons of the tall buildings. I looked out the window, admiring the view, and was struck by the reflections on one of the buildings opposite. The glass of the windows revealed its subtle curves in the shapes reflected back to me. The hotel I was in, as straight-laced and straight-lined as you might expect from a Manhattan hotel, was rendered in improbably wavy and curving lines. It looked as if the building had been designed by Gaudí.

As the late afternoon sun lowered, the light reflected through the mazes and canyons of tall buildings shifted. The scene reflected before me changed, offering more and more architectural reinterpretations. I stood at the window taking photos, barely noticing the passage of time. (Though later I realized that I had been watching and photographing for at least 20 minutes.)

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

As with many things that I really like, it’s hard for me to pin down why they appeal to me so. In the case of distorted reflections, I like the way reality is visually reinterpreted. I find it fun to recognize the lines and the forms, but rearranged. Depending on the nature of the distortion, the effect can be beautiful or ridiculous. Human forms are typically redrawn in ways that are both amusing and unsettling. Landscapes are often abstracted in pleasing ways, such as the look of bold brushstrokes from rippled water. The reflection on a small, smooth curved surface can show an intriguing miniature world.

I also find the term distorted reflections to be appealing in its own right, as it carries a double meaning. It reminds me of how our thoughts and perceptions of the world are always filtered through our own experiences and personalities. If you and I both witness the same event, we likely will both interpret it differently, as we are each see it through our mind’s own lens.

Interestingly, I hadn’t listed distorted reflections on my working list of topics “40 posts on things I like,” which is surprising given that I had considered making it my theme for an entire year of project 365 photos. (I decided instead to spend only the first month working with reflections, and didn’t stick to distorted ones at that.)

However, I like distorted reflections so much, and have amassed such a large collection of photos with that theme, that I was compelled to finally start a Tumblr. If you are so inclined, please go have a look at distorted reflections.

(This post makes #3 in my planned series of “40 posts on things I like.”)

big top, small town

(We went this afternoon/evening to see a travelling circus that comes to our town each year. Now John and I are watching an episode of Carnivale.)