Breathless

This blog has been kind of quiet for awhile because of school and everything. Yay for break! Unfortunately though, my creative inspiration had pretty much dried up while I was busy memorizing textbooks and concerning myself with curves, so Kelly came to the rescue! (You might remember her from this post or even this one) We came up with the concept for this shoot from this picture and luckily, I'd pressed some flowers from a walk I took at school at the beginning of the year and somehow managed to bring them home without breaking any.

Here are the results of our attempt at recreating that scene:

(Flickr Album)

Galaxy

5 years ago I was busy not paying attention in high school. The teacher was talking about something I couldn't care less about and standing in front of the projector so I couldn't see even if I wanted to. BUT it looked really cool projecting on her. Of course, while the idea was simple in theory, it was much harder to actually secure a projector. So I forgot about it for awhile...

galaxy girl 1

(^^ This was the main inspiration)

galaxy girl 2

galaxy girl 3

Fast forward to my Wednesday Electronic and Computer Music 1 Class. The room is too small for all 15 of us so we have to rearrange every few minutes, depending on whether we need to see the computer, white board, or projector. WAIT. PROJECTOR. We each get 2 hours in the studio every week to do that week's assignment. So I seized my chance. Unfortunately, sacrifices had to be made so the assignment didn't exactly get done, but- WORTH IT. I came prepared. I brought my camera and tripod and had picked out pictures to project. My friends came and we infiltrated room 117. And yeah we needed our backs to be bare... This is what we got:

You can find these in better quality on flickr here

Climbing Trees

Maybe you've felt like this before. Or, I don't know you, maybe you haven't. But I do now. It's the feeling 
of swallowing the lump.
of not enough oxygen when you breathe in.
of freefalling and grasping at air.
of the walls of this carefully constructed numbness caving in.
It's the feeling of being overwhelmed. 
When I get to this place, all I can think about is art. I can't sleep because I know I have things to do but I'll stay up and still not do them. Instead, I get incredibly creative.  It's a coping mechanism and it's a curse. There's that quote about "If you judge a fish on it's ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid"... and I don't know why but I haven't been able to get that out of my head since I heard it three years ago because it is just so relevant. I am judged everyday on my ability to do science when I know that's not what I am best at. So, right when I need to study the most, in the days before the test, I turn to art to prove to myself that I still have value even if I can't climb the tree. It's just kind of sad that the fish in this case was unlucky enough to be born into a world that pays its treeclimbers far better than its swimmers. And maybe it's good for me to learn to climb the tree but it's not exactly what I was designed for and sometimes it hurts when I fall off. But it's 5:21am and I'm hungry and I really need to study...

End of Summer Edits

The end of summer scares me. In the beginning, I have a long list of things I want to do before the end of August, but every day I go to bed telling myself I can do it tomorrow... until tomorrow I'm back at school and nothing on the list got done. So this is the beginning of the list that I should have started in May but I'm actually just doing now. And I go back to school tomorrow.

Mountain Air

There is a huge difference between seeing a picture of a place and being there. I guess it took me an extremely long time to reach that conclusion because that seems pretty obvious but it was news to me. I was standing on top of a mountain, trying to capture the view with a picture so I could savor it later when my muscles didn't ache and I didn't have to pee and it wasn't hailing/sleeting/snowing/raining on me, and nothing could match the feeling of being there. Even a panoramic picture can't capture the experience of having that much open space around you in every direction.  

I usually am at home, on a couch, and trying to edit pictures into coolness. Finally I had taken pictures that actually were cool and even had an adventure to match, but since mountain pictures are so naturally cool and easy to snap with a cellphone, they're so common. And that means that everyone has seen or taken mountain pictures at one point and now they've become pretty boring. Mine could not compare to any of the top ten Google image search results, so I didn't want to post yet another set of mundane mountain photography. You've seen that before. 

And everyone in my generation can easily run it through a filter before posting it on Instagram. 

Or a billion creative people around the world have already taken decent pictures and added text. 

But these deserved better than any of the available options. I felt mountains under my feet and in my hair and in my lungs when I breathed in the icy mountain air. It felt uninspired to just throw up the unedited pictures because relatively they are nothing special. But being there was special and I wanted to communicate that. And that's how this happened. 

 

and then I tried to edit this eleven times and failed miserably

 

and here's my flickr where you can find the raw, sooc photos if you want

Adventures

I took pictures with my friend and it rained so we went inside and took some more. Yeah.

Find these on my Flickr

This is my gorgeous friend Kelly who you can find on Instagram being famous here (she takes incredible pictures so you'd be missing out if you didn't check her out!)

Actually, this is a variation off the body ink theme which I will one day get my shit together and do. I've been obsessing about it since sophomore year of high school... and I'm about to be a junior in college in a month. 

The Beach Fiasco

This is the tragic tale of the time I tried to go to the beach.

Friday through Monday went according to plan, but this bliss was short lived. 5:30am on Tuesday morning found me (and not my family, who were playing on a beach somewhere) frantically writing a lab report I'd been procrastinating on. By 8am, I was sitting in ochem lab, which ran over time and I didn't make it home until 1pm. At home, I was delighted to find that the cable, wifi, and phones were out from a storm. The refrigerator had already been broken. The cable guy came, fixed stuff, and then left an hour before another storm so we lost power again. I wrote my lab report by candlelight. I couldn't google the answers so it would be safe to say I probably did not get an A on that. (Update: 36%! Go me!) I eventually decided it wasn't fun pretending to be smart so I went to bed. The air conditioning didn't work so it was like 200° and I couldn't sleep. At 7am on Wednesday of my "vacation," I couldn't toast my breakfast and the garage door wouldn't open because the power was still out. Then I messed up on every single step of the lab. Even if it's not possible, I will always find a way to do it wrong. It's a real talent.
After this struggle, I went back to the beach after class on Thursday. That was fun because I got the worst headache of my life the night we went out to dinner and while I was busy looking like death, our waitress happened to be a girl from high school. Luckily, she was probably never aware of my existence. When I finally arrived at the beach, thinking I was safe from calamity, I sat down to enjoy the sun and promptly got pooped on by a bird. I went into the water to wash it off, dove under a wave, miscalculated the depth in front of me, and face planted. My sister laughed at me. I got a mouth full of sand and a huge scratch on my forehead and the side of my nose. Yay.
This is the story I'm going to tell at parties when people ask me how my summer was. I'll probably make a lot of friends. But good news! I took a picture!

&

see the second one bigger and better here

Side notes: On move out day, when everyone was panicking to get out by the deadline, my friend's car broke down and we had to go jump it... we didn't make it out by noon. Also, the time I brought my camera to the beach to take this picture, it didn't turn on. 

fourth of july fireworks on the beach (flickr)

driving home