people pics

This boy makes a good subject. (I have his dad's permission to post the pic.) I know that the photographer is supposed to make the subject feel comfortable, but it was the opposite with him. I asked, "would you stand by that tree? on the other side? come out a little more. now step back just a smidge... He let me tell him how I wanted him to stand on a nearby fence, and let me take several photos with the sun behind him, as I messed around with the flash. He was so accomodating, and put me at ease from the start. When I looked at this picture, I got to feeling pretty competent.

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Ha! Then I asked a visiting telecommuter if I could take her picture. She said yes, but I felt sooooo uncomfortable. I don't know why, but the creep-o-meter was off the scales. My confidence waned to zero. (I don't know why--it didn't make any sense.) She asked what I was going to use the picture for, and I didn't have the heart to tell her, "probably nothing, because most of what I take is thrown away." The LCD screen was dark, but I didn't want to take any more time to fix the lighting, so I told them (2 coworkers) thanks, and crawled back into the hole that is my cubicle. That is all.

one drop tells a story

There is a new weekly assignment that I want to try. It is called storyboards. You tell a story in three photographs. I like the idea. I chose to tell the story of a drop. Today's administrator offered a tip about using a tool called Mosaic Maker. I tried it. I like it.

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About our subject: It was not easy to get the right models for this project. Unfortunately, I do not have continuous shooting with my old camera, so we had to interview dozens of prospects before finding just the right ones. What's that you say? All drops look the same to you? Please, that's not a very sensitive remark... a drop might take offense to that!

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(The guy from Steve's Digicams is not me. Back in the year 2000, he did a nice job reviewing the kind of camera that I now own.)

hasta la vista, Bug Lady

[click on any picture to enlarge]

You meet interesting folks in the blogosphere. One recent find was Joan from South Africa. She called herself "Bug Lady." She took lots of remarkable photos, and I loved to visit her blog. The macro shots of bugs were astounding, and this lady had a great sense of humor.

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She has stopped blogging now, and I miss her. That reminded me of how I have learned to numb myself from the pain of losing people. Yesterday, a dear family moved out of the country. One person moves away or changes jobs. Another passes away. In Joan's case, she closed her blog.

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We need to make sure that we make the most of it when people are here, because you never know when they may be taken away by any set of circumstances. Who knows, but that it may even be us, who are shuttled off to who-knows-where.

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About the bee... Those two pics are of a yellow-jacket. One of my sons found a dead bee and brought it to me. (You can see the clear tape that I used to hold it in place.) I was thrilled to have this opportunity, because I had been so eager to photograph ocelli. Those are a bug's tiny simple eyes, located in the middle of the forehead. Most of the time, we only see their large, compound eyes, but some bugs have more than two... and it's not just spiders.

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Anyway, it means a lot to me that we can "visit" by blogging. Hasta la vista, Bug Lady. (sigh) I think I'm gonna need a mug of hot cocoa.