I can’t believe it’s been awhile since i posted. I think things still seem a bit scattered but getting slowly back into routines. I’ve had an uninspired or hard time getting back into the picture taking groove two things i think have helped get me over that hump. Via Colori, a street painting event, how fun and ephemeral, i feel our photos at least will let the art live in memory. From the images posted, it was a huge inspiration to many.

This last weekend headed down to brazos bend. A beautiful winter light, good company and nice weather made for a very relaxing day. Good to see the park thriving if a bit battered from ike, you can see lots of trees down but the wildlife seemed to be thriving.

Good to be getting back into the swing of things.

A meme i copies from Wynk

The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The program was created in response to the National Endowment for the Arts report Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, which identified a critical decline in literary reading among American adults. In partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau, this study, with a sample size of 17,000, revealed the following about literary reading in the U.S.:

* Less than half of the adult American population now reads literature. (In this survey, literature is defined as any novels, short stories, poetry, or drama, with no distinctions made for quality or length.)
* The percentage of the U.S. adult population reading any book has declined by seven percent over the past decade.
* Literary reading is declining among all age groups, but the steepest decline is in the youngest age groups.

Look at the list and:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you own.
3) Underline the books you have seen a movie or TV production of.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupéry
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Bank
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So I had my second session of photography class with the great Mark Lacy. Just going over the basics of settings, it all makes such sense when it’s explained, just another thing entirely when i try to put it in practice! My goal is to get a real dslr by next year, at this rate, i’ll never get there, i know rome wasn’t built in a day but my brain is lousy at multitasking, especially when numbers are involved! So this is one of my efforts at being aware of settings, granted it was harsh morning light but other attempts too have either been too noisy or just blown out. frustration insues

I’m home from Boston and the HOW conference .. 4000+ designers all in one place.. it was insanity but inspirational. It’s always a comfort and validation to hear even the big guns of the design world have their fur rubbed the wrong way by difficult clients and the dreaded marketing department. Saw a great session with one of the photoshop evangelists who is also a photographer. Picked up a few tips but she mainly talked about inspiration and keeping creative. She was showing photographs she’s taken out of plane windows (she travels 300 days a year for Adobe, ouch) and how to a. get over her dread of flying and b. keep creative she gave herself a project of taking these shots. Her project has since turned into a book.

Later while walking around Boston (such a walkable city) my co-worker and i were talking and came up with the idea of a Boston alphabet for a quick and fun project, and a much more modest scale … here is my result. I’ve been amused and a bit surprised. Lots of boston viewers to it, turns out a local blogger linked to it … but they all seem to have their own ideas of what i SHOULD have taken for various letters … personally they need to get their butts out from in front of their computers and take their own! geez

the last 4 years have been a huge flip of everything i’d known and everything i thought would be in my future. having my mother pass away is of course the largest catalyst in knocking my off my feet … a man i thought would be in my life forever, picked up and left, and a job that i loved turned toxic ….

i’ve reached way inside myself with the help of some amazing friends .. i’m still overwhelmed at times but … mom, your with me always, still talk to you often and try to make you proud; james i truly hope you learn to look within yourself for your happiness; and i’ve ended up in a great, positive, appreciative environment where the impact is a whole lot bigger than my little piece of the world.

why did i end up in houston … i came here following my heart, and my gut … things don’t always turn out the way you think, but maybe the way they need to be … this i believe is true.

my wonderful creatures … i took them in to rescue them, they helped rescue me.

IM conversations, what crap …. ended a talk tonight disappointed, frustrated, angry … i don’t want to feel those feelings, on any regular basis. So on to look at something to lift me away from that…..

For today’s post i dug into the archives … film archives … for a shot i took on a trip to spain with my mom and my sister. Mom, tonight you were perched on my shoulder, whispering in my ear. thank you. These spaces made you just realize there is something bigger than yourself. Sometimes I need to remind myself to breathe, relax, enjoy the beauty and remember my needs.

I’m going to mainly posting photos i’ve taken that mean something to me or that i thought ended up somehow successful. Most importantly something that has some heart, some soul. Pictures can speak a thousand words, after all, i’m a designer, not a writer.

Dot’s — being a designer i’m a sucker for signs and for lettering … drive by these guys all the time … this is i think the first and only time i had this shot composed in my head long before i ever attempted the shot. Beginners luck, it worked.

“flipp’n bottlecaps at a ring around the moon,
all alone on a Saturday night with the stars in bloom.
I am a vision of my mother’s dreams come true,
got a house up on the hill, all by my own will.
I’ve got love enough for two, but it’s just me and this old moon”

Nanci Griffith