Posting Photos

I love Instagram because it's so immediate.  Click and post and voila you've managed to entertain friends and family while immortalizing a moment in time.  I've yet to venture into a public Instagram account.  I need to research how you separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of true followers.  

The problem is my inner critic.  When he gets a hold, I don't post nothin'. 

He hijacked this blog for a while which would account for the year long furlough.  

I love a great photo.  I love taking a great photo.  And I love posting fantastic photos on Instagram.  I'm just not sure everyone wants to see them.  When I get on a photographic role and it's going well, I could easily post five or six pictures a day.  Many of them would be food related, tons of my kids and the nature surrounding me.  My horizons are a wee bit limited.  Well they are and they’re not.  I have this wonderful life, And sometimes I compare.

Also, I think these photos are good.  I'm not sure they really are.  I am a noob photographer.  My good pictures are lucky pictures.  No matter how many times I read about it, I have no idea how to control the outcome of my photos when it involves exposure and aperture.  I can't even spell aperture.  And don't get me started on focal length.  I'm bound and determined to figure it out.  The going is slow.

But I realized that I had unfettered access to a fabulous place to post photos.  Right here! So tonight when I figured out I could upload photos to the cloud and then grab them from my phone to post them on Instagram I decided I'd post more of them here along with their story, how I got them and most importantly with no inner critic on either the photo or the content.

So here goes:

Bird Butts

There are a series of electric wires that cross a portion of my back yard along the alley.  In the spring they attract a lot of birds.  These birds poop.  These birds sit on these wires and poop on my fence.  they also poop on my garbage bins, and if my car is parked outside, on that too.  This is the first time I have been able to grab a photo of them.  It was the wrong angle so all I got was their butts.  And this was the best my zoom lens could do.  However, you can vaguely distinguish their little tale feathers and you get the idea. I really love that the sun is glinting of the one on the top left.  These aren't big birds. But they are poop machines.

Next:

the last key lime tart

I was grocery shopping and needed some tart shells.  I blindly grabbed some only to discover, once I got home, that they were sweetened tart shells.  Currently you can't return groceries, so I was stuck with sweetened tart shells, but my plan was to make mini quiches.  They languished in my freezer for a while until the next grocery shop where I picked up a box of key lime pie filling.  And the rest is dessert tart history.  I also bought 2% milk instead of whipping cream.  In my defense the packaging on both looks the same.  Fortunately, I had some whipping cream dregs left, that had not gone sour and was just enough to make 24 little dollops of whip cream; and now the rest is dessert tart history.

This was the last tart.  I photographed this sucker nine thousand times adjusting the ISO, the exposure, the focal length. No luck.  Then my husband suggested I use a flash and presto:  Magic.

Number 3:

Zoomed in on our peekaboo view during sunset.  I even got birds

I cheated with this photo.  I zoomed in on the peekaboo view from the front of our house.  It looks magnificent but it isn't that big.  Normal settings not involving zoom do not capture the detail.  Plus, I managed to get some birds flying by and a little pink from the sunset. Worth it!

My biggest challenge:

Evening light

When the sun sets in my neighborhood, especially in the spring, there is this golden glow that bathes certain trees and buildings.  It's phenomenal.  And I am forever trying to capture it in a picture.  And, I am forever failing.  This was the closest I've gotten.

One of my faves:

Granola, yogurt and fruit sauce

I''m really proud of this picture for several reasons.  One, I made the granola and the fruit compote.  I have lots of frozen fruit and if you throw it in a pot it reduces down and I can mash everything up and then strain out the seeds.  So maybe this is more of a sauce.  No, fruit gravy!  Yes,  I made the fruit gravy.  I also made the granola.  I am an old hat at granola now.  But it still thrills me to bits that I can make it.  If you'd like to see how I started please click here.   And I took the picture and it came out beautifully if I do say so myself.  Everything glistens, the fruit swirl is distinct and the granola is included but visible in the picture.  My only frustration is I housed it all in a really old bowl.  My yogurt, fruit and granola is housed in the equivalent of dish sweats.  sigh!  Next time.

And that concludes today's photo journal.  I really appreciate that I've found a place to post and say " Look!  Look what I did!" and I feel thrilled about it.

Binge worthy TV Part 1

I am often late to the party.  In this instance I discovered an amazingly binge worthy tv show that have ended their run.  I'm so grateful I got to see such creative awesomeness and I'm frustrated because I do not have the power to keep these shows going.

My first foray into lose yourself completely, forget the world exists, holy smokes coming up for air makes me dizzy, was the television show Newsroom. Here's the back story: I finally took the plunge and traded my kids channels subscription for an HBO and crave subscription.  It took me three years longer than it should have to do this.  My kids have not sat down and watched a children's television show for an embarrassingly long time but I held on to those channels because they embodied memories. I also always wanted shows like this when I was a kid and I fulfilled that fantasy for a good long while.

So now entering the wonderful world of  adult entertainment I began looking for shows I'd heard about but hadn't been able to watch.  And along came a little gem from Aaron Sorkin.  This man!  This man has my utmost respect.  He is a genius story teller who weaves current events and over the top dramatic personal experiences with humor, grace, wit, style and panache.  I love everything he has done.  I cannot understand his critics.  He's brilliant.

The Newsroom is  3 seasons of brilliance.

Although I'm not sure you can call 6 episodes a season. I'm feeling my age when I have this discussion.  6 episodes used to be a mini series.  A prolonged made for TV movie-esk type of show that was an event.  A series was 26 episodes that ran all year from September to May.  Now you can pinpoint my demographic.

The Newsroom had interesting characters who knew their stuff, they were cleverly acted and had magnetic personalities.  There were fabulous parables and an underlying "Don Quixote" theme.  The idea that news was not about making money but about making the general public aware of important events and political, economic, environmental and social shifts; the idea that news anchors held the moral high ground and looked after the country's values; banging up against the need for funding and the dilemmas that need created.  And then you throw in personal drama - abracadabra it was MAGIC!

Educating and entertaining at the same time is one of Aaron Sorkin's very best gifts. My favorite bit in the whole series is when the financial reporter is educating the news director about the difference between a commercial bank and an investment bank, and Sorkin has woven this through the news' director's personal drama.  I am running out of ways to say this was so damn clever!

I couldn't get enough.  And then there was no more to have.  But I am so grateful to have gotten the chance to watch.  There is something very inspiring and motivating about watching really great work.  And really great teamwork makes me want to climb - I was going to write Mount Everest but I hear that's kind of gross now - makes me want to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. And that feeling is why I go searching for more.