The best photo I have ever taken.

I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate my sister and her now-husband. Yay!!

It was a great wedding, the best I’ve ever been to. I’ve never had such a good time in my life. It was interesting to be both the maid of honour and the photographer, but I think it turned out alright in the end.

I love them both dearly and have not doubt there is only happiness ahead of them.

I have a new tutorial up at Photojojo. This one was really tricky to complete because I’d never tried anything like it before, but I’ve kept the etchings I made and think they look pretty great in the window of my house.

There are so many wonderful things you can do with the Diana F+. It’s probably one of the most versatile cameras I own. It has a pinhole function, and an instant back. You can shoot instant film, 35mm or 120 film. There are flashes for it and filters.

And I guess, what you need to know is… I took one photo. One photo.

Don’t get me wrong, I love this one photo. I took it on our first visit to the Telus SPARK science centre. It was beautiful when the sun was streaming through the window and through the bottles of various colours. It was pretty and I was in good company.

I think I’m just over this project. As the year has come to and end, I’m ready to get back to doing a healthy mix of film and digital, to taking what I feel like. I have some photo ideas swimming in my head, but I’ve been trying to adapt them to film and it hasn’t been working out. So, instead, I’m leaving them on a list of things to do later, saving them up for another time.

The next camera turned out better (I think). I’m still waiting to develop the prints, but here’s hoping I had a little more inspiration in December.

I’ve been saying for a long time that the staplers at work look like whales, so I suppose this was the only natural conclusion to that thought.

Thank goodness for staplers, cell phones with video capability, and quiet moments at work.

One of my favourite little cameras. I don’t know what it is, but it takes marvellous little images. Instax makes me happy, what can I say?

I didn’t take many pictures this month, but the few I got, I really enjoy. My favourite:

I also took:

And:

And that’s it. Those are all the photos I took. Just wait until you see next month’s.

I wrote a new tutorial! And to prove that I do more than just write tutorials for other blogs, I’m going to have my very own post here today. Promise!

I wrote a new tutorial for Photojojo for the holidays. I had a good giggle when I photoshopped a Santa hat on Mouse. Hahahaha. Dogs in hats. Hilarious!

For September, I was away for the majority of it in Bulgaria. This effected my choice of camera quite a bit, since I didn’t want to take something that was too bulky or that wouldn’t offer the quality of photos I’d want from travelling.

So, I pretty much took the film version of my 5D: the Canon Rebel K2. It was a pretty safe bet and I kind of don’t regret that. It was really nice to have to feel of film for that month, analogue felt appropriate for a former Soviet bloc country. I’m not sure why.

My favourite photos came from our hike down to the Emona monastery, where we made friends with the wild horses and got to look at the Black Sea off the cliffs.

There was one really beautiful night in Sozopol though, when the clouds were swirling around the moon and the stars were bright and the city was multicoloured below.

I had this one shot that I absolutely loved, but unfortunately, it turned out a little blurry, which is probably one of the biggest losses I’ve felt with photography. I mean, I really, really, really, wanted this shot. I have high hopes for the next version of Photoshop and its unblurring feature. Here’s the blurred shot:

See? See?? Ugh, it hurts. I was so sad when I scanned this one and it was blurry. UGH! Okay, let’s never speak of this one again.

One more month to catch up on writing about before I’m back on track with these posts. Whee!

I wrote this post at the beginning of November, but then my host got completely hacked and that took a few weeks to fix. And then it was the Christmas rush. Now it’s the end of December and I can finally have some time to work on my own projects again. Isn’t that something?!

November 11, 2011

It’s been an interesting few months. After my blog died in September, I spent a couple weeks trying to get it up and running again. My host was little to no help and, as you know, I lost a good deal of posts in the process (thank goodness for backups and the kindness of internet geeks, yo!). I’ve managed to get everything fixed, so here’s to writing new posts again! Hurray! [Little did I know, two weeks later, my host would be completely hacked. Fail.]

You and I both know the library was the first thing to get set up.

Towards the end of September, things got really busy. It wasn’t just the whole fitting-back-into-real-life-post-travelling, it was that my whole life suddenly changed somehow. I ended up moving and spent most of October working on that. I don’t want to move ever again.

Also, I own too much stuff.

Of course, working three jobs suddenly wasn’t enough for me and I took on a job writing tutorials for Photojojo. Most of the time that could be spent writing has been spent working on those. Trying to write in a different voice is time-consuming, but it helps pay the bills and is a tremendous amount of fun, like a good job should be.

Now, I’m trying to settle into my routine and get my schedule together. It’s been an interesting Fall and I’m quite loving life right now. My place is awesome. I’m totally in love with one of my favourite people in the world. Work has been fun. Life couldn’t be better!

… Well, unless I had more time to play World of Warcraft. Then life would be complete. Maybe I should just stay up later. Sleep is for the weak!

These updates are coming a little late, but for August, I spent my time with my Horizon Kompakt camera. I bought her off of eBay one year as a birthday present to myself, which was an awesome idea because it’s a really fun camera.

The Horizon shoots all panoramic images, but thanks to the slow-moving shutter, there’s opportunity for some slit-scan style fun. I only tried to do it a few times, but I think it’s something I’ll come back to.

Sashiere organized a day trip out to Writing on Stone National Park, followed by a jaunt to Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump for an Albertan archaeology day. So fun!

I used some fairly crappy film and cross-processed it, which didn’t yeild the results it should have. I usually only use Sensia 100 for that, but I wanted to try something different. In the end, I just did a black & white conversion on most of the frames, which led to a sort of lunar landscape feel.

Luckily, I did the rest of the day in my usual Sensia 100, so all was cross-process beauty.

Honestly, I think August has been one of my most successful months so far in this project. I absolutely love my Horizon camera and I can’t wait to try more slit-scan style photos. I think the one of my feet above is one of my most favourite photos from this year.

I still have to upload reports on September and October. Stay tuned.