For those of you who don’t live in Brevard County, Amy and I recently entered a photo contest hosted by Florida Today, the local newspaper. The contest was associated with a photography exhibit at the Brevard Museum of Art, which featured Annie Leibovitz portraits of women. As such, the contest theme was “Women”. Fortunately for me, I am married to a woman, so we set out trying various shots. We ended up with this:
Amy has gotten a lot of flack for the photo, presumably because you can’t see her clothes. For the record, yes she is in bed in this photo and fully clothed. Her shoulder just happens to be hiding her shirt strap.
That being said, this was exactly the expression we were trying to get. Amy has this thing she does when she does something embarrassing, cute, or any number of other things. She will hide behind whatever is available, be it a blanket, hair, her hands, whatever, and slowly peaks out. That is pretty much what is going on here.
Technically speaking, the photo was taken with my new Canon XSi with a 50mm F/1.8 lens. I was also using a 430 EX II top-mounted flash that I recently bought from the soon-to-be-gone Circuit City. Other than the conversion to Black and White, the only other editing was a slightly lightening of her eye which was shadowed a bit too much.
As most everyone in Brevard already knows, we won first prize in the judged half of the contest which was fun. This basically amounts to a big photo in the paper and a year membership to the museum. The article in the paper also had a short interview from me:
Our judging panel included Steven Maklansky (the incoming president of the Brevard Art Museum), Malcolm Denemark and Pam Harbaugh (yours truly, arts writer and theater critic for FLORIDA TODAY).
Coming in first among the judges was Jonathan Goforth, 28, of Merritt Island. He used a Canon Rebel XSi, a 50 mm lens and a top-mounted 43 EX2 flash to take this photograph of his wife, Amy.
“We took a whole bunch of pictures. Probably 30 or 40 for this one. . . . It’s her expression, something she does. I find it very cute. I shot it on that white fabric, it just
stood out better. I guess the skin tone, the colors, seemed distracting to me. Her face got framed in the pure white of the fabric. It made it stand out better to me.”
He said his visit to see the Leibovitz exhibition expanded his view of photographic portraiture and influenced his own work.
Well, after 4 family gift exchanges, 2 white elephant events, a last minute successful creation of a gag gift, 1 Christmas dinner, somewhere in the area of 15 batches of cookies, 0 loafs of pumpkin bread, 35 hours of driving, 1 bad decision to trust the GPS, 6 states and a district visited, 6 hours of Bones, 10 or so hours of Playhouse Disney, 2.2 viewings of Kung Fu Panda, a poor performance of Oliver at the King Center in Melbourne, a fantastic performance of West Side Story at the National Theatre in Washington DC, an impromptu walk to the White House, a highly anticipated visit to Orlando Ice, 4 very dead paper targets by way of a couple boxes of lead by way of 4 pistols, a wedding rehearsal, a wedding dinner, a wedding reception, an actual wedding, a fast trip to Walgreens to pick up honeymoon car decorating supplies, a wedding toast, 4 car packings, the largest game of hand and foot I ever want to play, a rousing game of Bond-opoly, a traumatic wasp sting to a sleeping 7 year old, a carsick episode 9 minutes before the end of a 9 hour trip, a sad but close Clemson bowl game, 17 relaxing days off from work, and one arrival back at home, the 2008 Christmas season is complete.
So, here we go. The time has come again for me to get tired of the design of my blog and redo it all. It happens. This redo is a little more than just a different look. This one comes with a few useful adjustments. For one, the stuff that actually changes fairly regularly has been moved to the top of the front page. Twitter and Flickr are right up there at the top.
Second, the text got really big, or rather it stopped being really small. For a long time people, myself included, have felt the need to shrink text until its tiny. This makes it harder to read and is just completely unnecessary. If this is the sort of thing you enjoy, you can read more about the 100E2R idea at Information Architects. For the rest of you, just enjoy the fact that you don’t have to strain your eyes to read my stuff. I also switched to using a more rigid grid system. You notice that as you scroll down the page, certain stuff lines up all the way down the page. Isn’t typography fun?
The other thing I did was make the comments a little more noticeable. There is probably more coming in that regard, but for now, there is that big link to the side of the articles. I last change was to make a little better separation between the long comment posts and the short link posts so they don’t all run together.
Things are a little hard to test so, if you see stuff that looks wrong: overlapping text, screwy layout, non-functioning stuff, certain pages that look completely different, leave a comment and let me know so I can fix it. Have fun.
So the last couple of years, I have been going with a theme of sorts as my Christmas list. This does a couple of things. First, I know it isn’t easy to buy gifts for me, this makes it much simpler. Second, it makes it pretty easy to come up with a list that is just a bunch of expensive stuff. Third, people can go with the theme, and I still get to be completely surprised.
That being said, this year, if you are wanting to get me something, but can’t decide what, feel free to go ahead and get me a board game or two. I recently became aware that Amy and I have almost zero board games. This was particularly obvious when we were trapped in our house for 3 days by a hurricane with no reliable electricity.
So today is special for two reasons. One, its my mother’s birthday, but she lives overseas right now, so its kinda hard to call her. I tried last night, and I will try again tonight, but in case I miss her, Happy Birthday Mom! Two, this is the four month anniversery of my wife becoming my wife, and I have loved every minute of it. I love you, Babe!
[Update] Apparently, I forgot about October. It’s been five months since I got married. You should forgive me.