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

lame quotes on pictures i took a long time ago

title says it all. i'm bored and unemployed so I was spending too much time online on wannabe hipster websites and then this happened and... i apologize. i hate me too. 

here's the hero picture and the free picture on my flickr and the original diamond picture in an old blog post

Melt Me

Short acoustic guitar original by me
melt me

butterfly photo

Aaaand you should check this out too :)

Come As You Are

song

https://soundcloud.com/570rm/come-as-you-are

step by step tutorial

New music. Partly inspired by a book (Mindset, by Carol Dweck) and partly inspired by this picture 

http://lesaventuresdelamode.tumblr.com/post/14008921960

It started out as this

And I think it ended up sounding like a weird mix of these 2 songs