Holgafied--Artificial and very artificial

moon and church, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

I am carefully making the appearance of accidents.
This picture has a very different kind of wandering viewfinder--taking each small picture in a panorama obscures how the final product will look. The perspective seems as though it was shot through some special lens because all of the objects sort of lean in towards the nodal point (the camera.)

Shitty photo, revisited

PICT1406, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

Making the fake lomo thing happen is a lot of fun for me. Maybe this style appeals to so many photographers and wannabes because they get a sympathetic masochistic thrill when everything you can plan for has gone wrong in a photo. But when just one thing or two is wrong with a photo, it's not miraculous, it's just the usual, so we delete it or set it aside, without the notion that it could be pink and green and flying through an aquarium, beautiful or terrible or both.

Quality V. Density of pixels

Melody, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

This was shot with the old Gateway digital camera. The over exposure is interesting, I think, but the image is no good for blowing up, really. There are many situations similar to this one, where I like the capture in every way except that the fidelity is not where I want it. So I choose one of the correct answers, and forget about it. The other digital answer is the vexel, with curves and gradients making a labor intensive photorealistic illustration. However, I have been so loathe to use the pen tool, that I never realized that my home Photoshop Elements does not have it.
So I've decided that the "path selection" tool is close enough to the pen tool, although easiest of all would be to just project this image on a big piece of paper and splat ink in the appropriate areas.

Hip junk

clutter, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

If there's anything I seek in life, it's more junk.
Maybe deep down I want a career, but on a day to day basis, I spend a lot of time thinking about things, in my relationships, I spend a lot of time talking about things.
My love of food is largely my love of cooking, which really comes back to thrift store junk: pasta crimping wheels, cast iron pans and kettles, relics from things people used to care about.
Miniatures are one way to have hundreds of design and retro household items while only owning one full size house, then there's digital junk, like the fake flashes and lenses to collect on the iphone hipstamatic, or gui skins, or in-game items.
And photographs.

The Weather

PICT1444, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

With Photography, every day is a unique and perhaps irreplaceable opportunity. It won't be as clear tommorow, it won't be as beautifully hazy by noon, soon there won't be another opportunity for winter photography when the snow melts, but it needs to be warm enough for a digital camera to work. It forces me to place myself in time and space.

Fake lomo temptations

skyride cars, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

We recently shot a roll of film at a class with a pinhole camera, which requires a little guesswork with regard to the viewfinder. I shot the rest of the roll after class and got it developed.
The whole roll had someone's vacation pictures on it, with some interesting results, but now I have some interest in getting similar results without the crushing heartbreak.
And I have, of late, become interested in finding some use for my very large collection of pictures that have some quality that I like.

Arisaema triphyllum

CIMG0586, originally uploaded by lotusduck.

For a brief while, we could blame every smell in the kitchen on this fly pollinated plant, which is understandably not a common ornamental. Probably only one strange smell originated from the plant. We do not know how it got there, but seeds, you know? They get around. It's a deep forest plant, which makes it strange that it probably got inside the house due to an industrial mistake at a garden center.