mud pies to medicine: New Light

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

New Light

I found a little post on via pinterest ~~that I, of course, cannot locate at the moment~~ that I just relocated on ApartmentTherapy. Although it didn't teach me much I didn't already know (use indirect sunlight), I'm writing about it because 1. It may be helpful for anyone looking to take better photos on anything from an iPhone to a dSLR and 2. It have me great idea on backdrop. I am constantly using the underside of an old Coca-Cola crate because the old dark wood makes a good vintage feeling negative space, but I often find it really darkens the photos. A lot of photography these days is super bright and slightly overexposed. That's hard to do with ark wood. Possibly the best $5 I have ever spent on photography was on a 2 ft x 2ft piece of light wood that I picked up from the lumber section in Lowes. The men in blue vests were happy to cut it in half for me and now I have a great little base and background that I can easily move around and use to find good light (which is exceedingly hard in an apartment because my windows only face 2 directions). So if you're keeping score so far, for around $25 at Lowes you can get a decent light and a backdrop. Not bad! Especially considering what some people pay for big backdrops. I took this photo using my new setup. #44 Bright white light!

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The inspiration you ask?

I miss making mud pies. There is this huge rock in my front yard. To call it a rock really does it a dishonor. It is a boulder, brought home by my father on a huge dump truck after he blasted it out of a work site. My mom one day told me that even though it is nearly 2.5 feet high, 6 feet long, and 2.5 feet wide, that it was, in fact, only half-showing. The scientist inside of me was disbelieving and set out to get some proof. Clad in a dress, bow in my hair, and my best accessory, a shovel, I trudged outside ready to prove my mother wrong. That is when the digging began. I dug, and dug, and dug, and nearly all 3.5 feet of Danielle fit in that hole when I had reached the bottom of the rock. That became my digging spot, my mud pie kitchen. Each day it was dug, and each evening it was filled back in. Sometimes the holes were small, sometimes they were enormous, and most days the hole was turned into my mud mixing bowl with that rock as my counter. The novelty never wore off. The ebb and flow of my childhood was, in many ways, measured by the ever-changing depth of that hole in the front yard, the hole that never really disappeared even each day after it was filled in. Even though the grass has grown back in that spot, there still remains, an indentation, the scars of a childhood well lived and the disbelieving scientists I have always been.

So, you ask me why I want to be a doctor? I do not want to be a doctor. I want to open a mud pie bakery with the cash register on that rock in my front yard. But, somehow, I doubt I would stay in business long, for the world seems to have lost its taste for mud pies. I guess being a doctor will have to do.