Day 8 | January 8th

      As I was sitting in the office, playing with my camera, Carter asked me about the new lens (Lensbaby Sol45) that was on my camera. He knew it was a manual focus lens (from having to patiently wait previous times I have used it), but he didn’t know what the optics were like. I asked him if he wanted to sit for a portrait and I would show him what it looks like.

      I kept the twinkle lights up in our office after Christmas – it gives it a warm glow during our loooong winter days. With the lights creating fun bokeh behind him, we took a series of shots. At one point he exclaimed he could see the shutter moving through the lens. Here is my favorite from the handful he would sit for.

       

      Day 9 | January 9th

      Yearbook photos for middle school were due today. I asked Carter if he would like me to take a portrait of him to submit and he refused. He did not want to be in the yearbook at all this year. Given we are stuck with remote schooling for probably the whole year, it will be a book full of photos of kids at home. I thought about pushing him to include a photo, but then I realized I don’t remember the last time I have looked at any of my yearbooks. At the time, they were the most important part of school – these memories all bundled up for you. But now that I am solidly past that part in my life, I don’t really feel the need to revisit it. So I respected Carters wishes and he will not have a photo in the yearbook.

      Callie needed a shot however. I set up everything (two key lights, one hair light) so that we could have some fun. After she got here, I pumped some energetic tunes to get her in the “modeling” mood, but I am pretty sure she just thought Kristen and I were crazy. I got a bunch of really fun shots of her, but loved the seriousness of this one.

       

      Day 10 | January 10th

      Part of my Year of Creativity is to try to head out at least once a month on a photo walk with my friend Kelly. With all the recent rain, we decided to head to Snoqualmie Falls at sunrise. While it was a dry day, there was a lot of cloud cover so there wasn’t much of a sunrise. It was amazing to get out early and get a little bit of a hike in. Here is my favorite photo of the falls. You can check out the other photos I took in my Photo Gallery.

       

      Day 11 | January 11th

      Another week, another self portrait attempt. I tried to use the two key lights on myself, but realized I didn’t like anything that I was taking. I scrapped that and moved over to the couch, pulling one key light with me and then bouncing a flash off a reflector to fill the shadows on the other side. I wanted something other than a boring shot of me looking off to the side, so I tried to incorporate a little more world context into it. The news is disturbing these days – rioters broke into where Congress was in session, people died, people who were hiding together got Covid. There are threats that the presidency would not be handed over peacefully … it is a shitshow. So here I am, reading the news on my phone like I do every morning.

       

      Day 12 | January 12th

      And it is time for my next art study! This weeks painting is The Tribute Money by Tommaso Masaccio. I was thoroughly confused by this painting as there were three sections to it and I had no idea what was going on. After learning more – this is a story of three parts. The middle section is where Christ and the Apostles are being asked to pay the temple tax. I am going to paraphrase greatly here – Christ and the Apostles have no money, but Christ tells St. Peter to go to the river and get coins from a fishes mouth. This is the left side of the painting – where St. Peter is retrieving the coins. Then the right side is St. Peter paying the tax collector the money from the fish. So there are three parts to this story – St. Peter shows up three times and the tax collector twice.

      When I sat with it for ten minutes, I noticed the vibrant foreground colors set against the muted background mountains. There is a lot of depth to the figures being painted – they felt like they were taking up volume/space in the painting. I couldn’t figure out what was going on with the interaction of who I learned were the Apostles, Christ and the tax collector. I did notice that it seemed like everyone’s eye line was going in different directions. But the thing that was super humorous to me was the Apostle to the right of Christ seemed to be giving a side eye. So I chose to do this in my photo interpretation this week – when I explained to Gavin what was going on and what I wanted, this is what he gave me, hahaha.

       

      Day 13 | January 13th

      The winter sun in the afternoon comes through our office in these glorious strokes of light. I have blackout curtains on the doors, so I can direct that light a little bit. When I noticed the light today, I ran and grabbed my poinsettia to try and use the Lensbaby Velvet 56 on it. I tried all sorts of angles, perspectives, parts of the plant and decided I liked this one the best. It was like parts of it were echoed in both the repetition of the leaves, but also the slight blur from the focal point of the veins on the leaf.

       

      Day 14 | January 14th

      And the Itty Bit will not be able to have kittens. After waiting a little too long to get Luna spayed (she went into heat once) we decided to take care of things very early on with Zelda. Now she is stuck with a cone on her head for the next two weeks.

       

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