奥の細道：The Narrow Road to the Deep West

179/365: Once in a red moon...

Wow, I've been blogging way more than usual lately.  Tonight I took a nap, which explains why I'm awake at 1 am with no plans to get to bed anytime soon.  I was eating some cereal for dinner and decided to open my picture files and see what I could edit - I'm trying to get more in the habit of doing that, and next month I think I will finally plunk down the money for a Flickr subscription, because it would be awesome to have a place to share/backup my photos, which I don't really have now.  Sure, I upload them here, but it's not the same - Vox significantly reduces their size and they are annoying to re-download if I need to (a problem I'm currently having...).  But, in order to actually justify paying money for Flickr, I'm going to set myself a goal of editing at least 1 photo a week. Hopefully more, but I'm also trying to add other things to my life at the moment (like Japanese/Korean study) so we'll see how it goes. 

I foresee a lot less time spent trolling the internet in my future, and honestly, I'm okay with that.  I've become annoyed with myself lately about how frequently I check Ravelry and my email - I end up reading ridiculousness just for something to do, or opening a thread that has only one new post - silly.  And I was reading an article today in the NYTimes about the effects of technology on your brain - this one talks about how your brain needs downtime from technology devices, and this one about how our technology-driven lifestyle makes us more impatient and forgetful.  Since impatience and forgetfulness are already two of the things that I dislike about myself, and I am trying to work on improving them, I think less time on my computer is probably a good thing (she says as she blogs about this). In addition to that incentive, my hard drive is dying, slowly but surely, and I'd like to prolong it as long as I can - plus I have tons of notebooks I can write in, books to read, knitting to do, watercolors I'd like to do again, and of course the aforementioned studying of languages... plenty to keep me busy that is not electronic.  And yet, somehow I always end up feeling like I waste time on the internet and considering how often I think to myself that I don't have enough time... well, something needs to change.  I know that there are a few of my flaws I'm not willing to work on yet, but I'm going to try this one and we will see how it goes!

So, on to the real point of this post - photos! Once in a blue moon I decide to edit some photos, but red moons seem slightly more common, and felt more appropriate considering the content of these.  In March I took some shots of Pluto class and I pulled one tonight of Stella to work on.  I noticed a theme in some of my work - when I'm doing shots of kids, (which is often) I tend to make them pretty high contrast/saturated.  To me they 'pop' more, (that's my amateur showing) but they also give more of a feeling of 'little kid', which, let's face it, I'm not lacking in.   I think I see the world as more brightly colored than a lot of other people I've met, my eyesight notwithstanding.

Here we go:

Pluto - Stella_orig

 

 

Picture Taken 3-8-2010

Started with this shot of Stella, adjusted the brightness a bit. 

I really liked the lines in this picture, but I cropped out JaeHyun and Lisa/far end of the table to make it more focused on Stella. 

Took me some fiddling to figure out how to get the look I wanted, but I think I got it…

Edited In Office Picture Manager, as all my photos are. (Should really get something better, but it will suffice.

 

 

Pluto - Stella_pinkdesat

 

I did this desaturated shot from that as my base.

 

I thought the amount of red in this shot was interesting, so I started playing around with the amount, saturating it more and more to see how it looked…

 

 

 

 

 

After looking at the shot a bit more,  I decided to try a tighter cropping.  The other lines and shapes were interesting, but mostly distracting. 

 

I tried me other crops too, just to experiment. 

Pluto - Stella_red_crop3

Pluto - Stella_red_crop2

 

As usually happens, I like these crops better than the first one  I did - mostly because you can see her hands.  I don't know what that's important to me, but I realized it was.  The second one is essentially the same as the first, while the third one preserves some of the (probably extraneous) lines that I had originally cropped.

 

 

As a side note, even though I didn't intend it I can totally see the use of red /female child in these shots evoking images of Little Red Riding Hood, and probably if you really stretched it, some comment on loli/child sexuality.

 

I'm interested in your thoughts, people - do you think the background lines are interesting, or do you prefer a more tightly cropped shot? At first I thought the latter, but now I'm leaning towards the 'interesting' side.  I guess it depends on the purpose of the picture - as a portrait, the more closely-cropped might be more effective, but from a more artistic point of view, the other lines add something to the photo in terms of giving your eye room and reason to travel.

168/365: On the Menu

Well here we are again.  This weekend was my birthday, and while lots of adorable pictures were taken, those will have to wait until later.  But here's something entertaining from last weekend to tide you over until I get around to putting those up... eventually.

Last weekend was Tim's leaving Seoul/birthday party, so we went out to this cafe/hookah bar with a big group of friends.  Now, granted hookah bars aren't all that common in Seoul, but this particular cafe, aside from having awesome decor (which I really need to go back and take pictures of some other time) also had some pretty special menu items.  See below:

Seoul 2010 - Orgasm Sausage

Not only could you order staples of the cafe world such as a trumpet shell salad (no clue) and flower special dish (?), there is also the famed 'orgasm sausage and potato' for a mere 14,000 won - for you US folks, that's roughly $11 with the current exchange rate... We were going to eat dinner somewhere else, but I totally would have ordered it if I had a chance.  After all, where else can you get an orgasm for that cheap?  And it assuredly would've tasted better than a $10 whore. I hope.

157/365: Use protection!

I thought I had given up doing Photo365, but then I remembered I have a whole folder of funny picture I have found here in Korea, and those are just as good for Photo365 as anything else. Sure they aren't the most artistic photographs you have ever seen, but whatever.

I'm going to be perfectly honest - I'm completely exhausted. It's the week after break, and I'm so glad it's Wednesday 'cause it's all downhill from here.  I was cheerful enough for the fieldtrip this morning - we had a lot of fun, but even 2 cokes and one of my coworker's energy pills is barely keeping me awake - I seriously wanted to go to bed at 830, but I forced myself to stay awake by cooking dinner and downloading all of the Fruits Basket manga to put on my nook. My arm's bothering me, so I should give it a rest before Namu Keuneul tomorrow, so I ended up rifling through picture folders.

Anyhoozle - here is today's picture.  My friend Robin showed me these - she won them in a contest, and I thought it was a funny thing, especially considering all the issues Korea has with sex education (namely, a lack of it) and how most Koreans won't use condoms.

I feel like this picture could probably do with a witty post, but I'm just too tired. You'll have to make up your own commentary.

Seoul - Robin's Love Rubbers

18/365: Hyo-na

This is actually a picture that I took last September, but in the interest of editing the pictures I already have, I decided to clean it up a bit.  I liked the original picture pretty well, but I decided to play with the colors  a bit and make them brighter to get a bit more contrast than the original. 

 

I really like this picture of Hyo-na.  It's interesting to me because she is the only still place in the photograph.  She's very outgoing, but here she seems shy and uncertain - which is a very childlike quality, I find - the mutability and shift from confidence to vulnerability and back again.  It's one of the things that makes children fascinating, and one of my favorite subjects.

18/365: Hyo-na

Sep 15, 2009
Taken with my Panasonic DMC-TZ3
Edited with Microsoft Picture editor for contrast and brightness.

I liked the original picture, but I felt like the colors were a bit cloudy, so I upped them a bit. The resulting picture is almost neon, but I like it the same.

18/365: Hyo-na_bw

Sep 15, 2009
Taken with my Panasonic DMC-TZ3
Edited with Microsoft Picture editor for contrast and saturation.

And of course, a black and white version.  I think the lines in this one are interesting, since they draw you back to the wall where Hyo-na is, and the sense of distance is easier to feel without the distraction of the colors.

11/365: Nikki's First Sale

I actually took these photos last September, but I have so many photos on my computer that need to be edited and sorted that I will probably be posting newly-edited photos quite often this year.  I think it's perfectly acceptable, since my goal is to work on that aspect of my photography too, not just to take more pictures that never get processed.

So here are these.  They were taken at an Itaewon SnB meeting, the night our dear Nikki announced that she was finally ready to start selling her hand-dyed yarn.  Of course, we all love her stuff.  Abbi, however, got the distinction of being the first one to purchase a skein, and I caught it on camera. 

11/365: Nikki's First Sale

Sep 1, 2009
taken with my Panasonic DMC-TZ3.
Edited with Microsoft picture editor for contrast and brightness.

I really like the color version of this picture, although I don't like the orange-ness off it.  I feel like maybe the color palette in here isn't varied enough? And I really wish I could have fixed the orange glow, but I'm not so great yet with messing with color settings.

11/365: Nikki's First Sale_bw

Sep 1, 2009
taken with my Panasonic DMC-TZ3.
Edited with Microsoft picture editor for contrast, brightness, and saturation.

-sigh- There is a part of my heart that will always love black and white photography.  And I really think the bw version of this shot has more interest to it.  The color diversity (lack thereof) isn't as distracting, and I like the lines of Abbi's and Nikki's arms, the way it goes from Abbi's very clear face to Nikki's blurry face. (I tried to get a shot of her that wasn't blurry. She kept laughing.)