Creative
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Studio Tour
Behold! The Studio! It is kind of daunting to look at. I managed to throw a few dried up pens and bent paint brushes out, but not much else.
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Little Gem Magnolia | A Photographic Study
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Summer in Photos: Week 1 | June
June 1: Black swallowtail caterpillar munching on some parsley June 4: Leo hanging out with me while I write some blogs. June 5: A cropped photo of what I’m 97% sure to be Venus exiting the sun during its transit last week. I took a bunch of photos but thought I didn’t get anything at all until I opened them a week later. I used a red filter to force the camera to be able to shoot into the sun, turned my F-stop to 32 and ISO to 100 and hoped for the best. No, I didn’t look at the sun when I did this—you should see all the outtakes…
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A Handmade Blanket
Sewing is not one of my fortes but I do like to make quilts/easy blankets. Right now however I do not have a sewing machine so I took up this endeavor by hand—something very dumb of me to do in the middle of a big harvest season. My coworker is pregnant and due in a few weeks and I wanted to make something for the baby. Normally I would have used a machine to sew up a quick blanket or even crocheted but no, I did it the hard way. It turned out mostly good with a few blemishes but I think that adds to the charm. I miscalculated my…
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My Favorite Kind of Entertainment
Growing up, my hobby, other than playing outside, was reading. Now I don’t devote nearly as much time to reading as I should, though the internet is my source of reading a lot of times these days. Anyway, this is the stack of magazines I need to weed through. Chris’ dad gave me a stack of Outside magazines, a new Yoga Journal came in the mail, as did Urban Farm, and Backpacker. So did Texas Parks & Wildlife. I have a lot to flip through! And then there is this stack, too! I have finally worked up the nerve to start The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second in…
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The Creative Process
The other day I was lamenting that it is incredibly frustrating that I have my best creative moments in the middle of the work day. Those moments where I think, ‘Man, I wish I was at home because I could really get some writing/art/whatever done right now.’ So, in those moments, in the middle of the day I get excited for my creative energy and inspiration and then, what happens? I go home. And what happens when I go home? I’m hit with being tired, lack of motivation and an overall brain drain from working on projects for clients instead of my own works. I thought about this as I…
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Macro Magic
One of our Christmas presents to each other with Christmas money we received from family was this beauty a 65mm macro lens. I had yet to play with it so I took it out in the backyard one day at lunch and shot some seedlings, garlic, and dill. It is pretty freakin’ amazing! I love using the reverse macro mounting technique and use it quite extensively, but this lens is crazy! The depth of field has a similar feeling to the reverse mounting, but it seems sometimes I can get more in focus in the whole frame with the macro lens. It will definitely be a working experiment!
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Paddling the Wild Neches | A Review
A few months ago we were in REI when I spotted this book, Paddling the Wild Neches. Having spent the better part of spring and summer working on and around the Lower Neches River near Beaumont I thought it would be a fascinating read. Ever since we did our two thru-thikes I have been intrigued by those who also paddle source to end (or sea) down rivers, particularly relatively unknown or lesser known rivers such as the Neches. I think many people in Texas know about the Sabine since part of it forms the boundary of Louisiana and Texas, or maybe the Trinity and Red Rivers, or particularly the Guadalupe…
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The Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania | Pine Creek Gorge
A couple of weeks ago Chris and I had one overlapping day as he went to PA to work and I was heading back to Texas. Part of our day together was at Penn’s Cave and the first half of the day was spent at Leonard Harrison State Park and hiking down the Turkey Path to the bottom of Pine Creek Gorge. It was a beautiful hike down as is evident in the photos below. I highly recommend hitting this park up if you are in the area. The trail itself is switchbacked well and maintained nicely. Though I am out of mountain hiking shape and was still huffing and…
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Four Mile Run | Sneak Peak
Since Chris and I hadn’t seen each other for two weeks we were able to get a day off together this last weekend in Pennsylvania. I was being sent home and he was going to be there for a few more weeks. We took off to sight-see around Pennsylvania and ended up at the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania. We snaked our way down the trail to see several water falls and then finally to Pine Creek itself. The photo above is just a teaser to the rest I am going to process later this week. I had a bit of fun with this one, it was my first HDR image.…