Blacklights Never Get Old

I know, I know I really should stop, but I shot these for my final and only got to show them to Taryn. This is the last post I swear (unless by some miracle it is clear when I go to Golden Gate Park with my friend).

Tree Hunting In Sebastapol

Every year my family goes tree hunting in Sebastapol and when we are done we stop at an apple ranch. Well, on our way out of the apple ranch we were hit with a bank of fog. All Pictures were taken between 6 and 6:10 pm

Final

For my final project I had some trouble coming up with a concept, so I settled on something that I have to deal with everyday: being sick. I get tired very easily and have chronic joint and rib pain. Because of this I have to regularly see several doctors. I've also developed a weird relationship with food. Codeine based pain killers make me feel ill and do almost nothing for my pain so I rely on sugar to take the edge off when I've been in pain for a long time. It doesn't work for acute or strong pain, but it does help for the dull, nagging pain that can last for more than a month strait. As soon as I've had dull pain for more than a day I crave cake or candy, but the weird thing is I've never been particularly fond of sugary things (aside from apples and plums) when I'm not in pain. In fact this past month I've been feeling fine and only had a few sugary indulgences, and that's all that I've wanted to have.

I found the image of the room, complete with odd lighting and a "soothing" shade of green. I guess I've been left to wait for an hour in too many doctor's rooms because the blank image of the room looks more eery to me than the finished image. I also scanned in the warning labels, distorted them to look slightly angles, and gave each label its own blending option. I thought of making sure that none of the labels overlapped, but then I remembered peeling them off the crammed bottles and felt it was more authentic. Finally I took the picture of the pills on the floor and the bottles on the counter.

And finally, my cupcake landscape. Originally I wanted to to the complete landscape in sugary treats, but I lost a couple of weeks due to an unforeseen emergency. I took the pictures of everything except for the back row of cupcakes right before I had to leave town and I assembled everything two weeks later. I scanned in the three leaf shaped sprinkles and I found the background.

St. Louis - Part 2

The Saint Louis Zoo has an amazing penguin habitat which includes the first walkthrough sub-Antarctic penguin exhibit in North America. It is well cooled and has lighting that simulates what they would be experiencing in the wild. It also has five feet deep pools-covered in glass so you can see them swim- for the penguins to swim in and allows them to swim below the path the visitors walk on. And while that has always blown me away, my favorite part had to be when the penguin keepers took some of the king and gentoo penguins outside of the enclosure and walk around.

To give you an idea of how incredibly close they got, this picture was taken with a 28 mm focal length and was not cropped. One of them almost touched me, but my innate fear of large birds (coming from being attacked by swans as a child) led me to quickly step back.

One of the keepers with some king penguins and a rockhopper penguin jumping into the water.

St Louis Part 1

I had to leave in the middle of the final assignment to go to Missouri and captured these images while I was there

The view of the bay from my seat

A charming view of an iconic midwest main street scene. (Incase you can't see it is Hooters across from a cemetery.)

A blue jay in the Saint Louis Zoo flight cage.

A gentoo penguin out of its enclosure as part of an enrichment program.

King penguins out of their enclosure with Humbolt penguins in the background and a toddler in between.

Retouch

I originally was not going to do the Christmas card because I hate that picture, but I let Taryn destroy it and apparently I'm more sentimental than I like to admit because I was sad to see my cat's picture destroyed.

Quality of Light - California Academy of Science

While I technically went to the California Academy of Sciences, I only really went to the Steinheart Aquarium. That's what I always did when I was a kid. I don't think that I actually went into the natural history part of the museum until my class went there in middle school because I always thought that they were separate places until this visit (why didn't the school let us go to the aquarium?)

This was me as a child.

The contents of a tiger shark's stomach.

I was so happy when I saw this alligator because I thought it was the albino alligator that I spent my childhood marveling at. When I got home I found out that it is in fact not the same alligator and the image has lost a lot of its appeal to me.

One of my favorite places in the world when I was a kid.

Quality of Light - San Francisco

I really wanted to go to the grand opening of the San Francisco Academy of Sciences, but vastly underestimated how quickly they would sell out of tickets so I took these images the day that I tried to get in.

(note: you can click on some images and make them larger, but not others, I'll try to get around to fixing that)

This image is mostly a reflection aside from the weird mannequin and red outfit.

This was inside one of my favorite restaurants The Blue Front Cafe. They were so nice to me when I took this picture even though I was blocking some foot traffic (and their Mediterranean wraps are amazing).

Quality of Light - Landscape

And the always popular landscapes. For these I mostly did sunsets, but I had a few daylights and night shots. I also played around with black and white so I'll include before and after images.

These are slightly different photographs, but I feel they are similar enough for comparison and the sun flare just looks off when the right image is colorized.

I really like being able to bring out certain colors in the black and white setting. It makes it easy to hilight the subject in your image.

Some people in class were wondering if this picture in particular would look better in color, but I find that the color takes away from how striking the crane is and makes it look much less imposing, which it always does in real life.

I once told a friend that I had always wanted a poster of the shipping cranes in Oakland and with disgust she asked why anyone would want a poster of something so ugly. I wanted it because I find them appealing. To me they represent the East Bay. When I’m on my way home from the airport or even just a long day in the city they bring me comfort because I know I’m on my way home. When I had morning rowing practice they would be light up along the highway and glow in the sunrise. And during the day they are striking additions to the skyline that look like giant prehistoric creatures drinking from the estuary. To me they will always be iconic, even if it is in an unconventional way.