While washing dishes the other day (a lengthy task, as we do not have the luxury of a dishwasher), I reflected on the unspoken principles of food that I have nurtured for goodness knows how long. I write them here because they interest me, and I'm curious if others have similar principles by which they conduct themselves and their kitchens.

1. Food Tastes Better When Prepared by Others

This is a general truism, and I think it stems from a heightened sense of eagerness and anticipation when you get together as a group to share a meal. Possibility and mystery reside in the occasion, especially if one is eating out. What will I choose to eat? What will others choose? What will we talk about?

These questions can, of course, be a source of anxiety on a first date or the first time you bring home a significant other. But for the most part when you indulge in the luxury of having your food prepared by another, the ease, relaxation, and anticipation it encourages heighten the enjoyment of the meal.

Even when one participates in preparing food at another person's house, a sense of mystery remains. You are communing with the person, with their unfamiliar kitchen, and entering into a world that closely touches on the way they sustain their existence.

2. Coffee: Not Just Another Caffeinated Beverage.

Coffee is a complicated beverage surrounded by an almost magical ritual--pouring hot water over roasted beans hardly seems like an activity that could provide comfort or excitement. Yet for me, it does.

What I enjoy so very much about coffee (and even tea) is the gentle but daring combination of flavors that can be brought about through different roasts, adding varying quantities of sugar

Some may abuse coffee for its caffeine content. That is understandable, but in no way detracts from coffee's sophistication or dignity.

Therefore my working principle is that coffee is among those items (like good-quality shoes) that you should never skimp on.

3. Satisfy Chocolate Cravings with Darker Varieties

Never one to pass up an opportunity to consume more chocolate, I confess to being rather rabidly addicted to the bittersweet varieties. Those who stand united with me in craving chocolate should heed this principle: it is wiser to consumer darker varieties instead of "milk" chocolate, because it's the cacao you're craving, not the sugar.

The weather here in Baltimore has been swinging more wildly than a moody teenager. Last week temperatures were balmy and spring-like; even some of the local forsythia bushes were tricked into budding.

But yesterday we had ear-biting cold, light drifting snow, and icy stoops. "Winter storm warning," said the radio.

Today the snow is melting. The sky is cloudy but the temperature is warm. Everything is early-morning damp. It will be spring soon.

The above photograph is of a homemade windchime made from salvaged chimes, twine, and a chopstick.

It's always great to see old friends. Every few years, my college roommates and I get together for a week or so of visiting. Raina flew in from Washington state, and I traveled up to Harrisburg, where we met Sonja.

We met our friend Jenny at a diner to catch up.

Jerrold, Sonja's friend, wandered around Harrisburg with me and took photos of us meandering.

We wound our way through alleys and around abandoned buildings, overrun by plant life.

We passed by a dumpster where we found this amazingly decrepit couch. The sky was overcast and dramatic; the dampness really brought out the colors in this shot; perfect natural lighting.

We finished the evening off at a sushi restaurant, with an enormous selection and lovely wine.

After sushi, Sonja's band Smoke the Groove tore up an art opening. This shot, while a little noisy, has a lot of color that I really like.

I love what I do. I love what I do. I LOVE what I do.

And it's great to get paid for what I do! But every photographer, at some point, will be asked, "Why do you charge so much?"

It comes down to a few simple things: costs associated with equipment, services, and running a business, and the time required to execute a skillful photographic product.

I have the fortune to be able to play with a lot of expensive equipment and software: fancy cameras, fancy computers, and fancy photo-editing tools are a joy to work with. But those fancy tools come with a hefty price tag that must be insured, replaced, and upgraded periodically.

Prints and other photographic products may be cheaply found at your local grocery store, but getting archival paper, color-correcting services, and quality display products will run higher than that.

And I take pride in my work; every photograph that I turn over to a client has been "touched" by me; I color-correct, lightly retouch, and edit my work so that you get beautifully documented moments. That takes time: for every hour that I photograph, at least another one to two hours is spent on the computer editing and perfecting the final product.

Michelle Burke, an Oregon-based photographer, wrote an excellent article, breaking down the costs and work associated with photographing a wedding. She sums it up well like so:

"Rarely will a photographer accumulate great wealth from wedding photography. Not without writing books, conducting seminars and inventing new gadgets, and even then, well. But every full-time professional wedding photographer, in order to continue to do what she loves, must be realistic in her pricing so that she can remain competetive in skill, customer service and workflow."

I didn't get into this business to make buckets of money. I got into this business because I LOVE what I do and the people I get to work with.

For further reading, Professional Child Photographer offers a consumer's guide to the costs of custom photography.

Lately the weather here in Baltimore has fluctuated between Extremely Awesome and Very Blah. Today, unfortunately, it is the latter.

But cloudy days have a quiet mystery about them. I feel less energetic when the sun's not out, but sometimes an overcast sky can remind me to slow down, to be more observant of my surroundings; with no dramatic shadows to create high-contrast imagery, one has to find other ways to make a photograph interesting.

This particular image was taken while wandering around with a friend on a cloudy day. I noticed the newspaper, shredded and clinging to the fence. As I passed by, the bike lock, grill, and newspaper aligned like an astrological event.

I like it when things like that happen; incidental objects creating an interesting pattern.

Last Tuesday evening, National Fatherhood Initiative hosted its Fatherhood Awards Gala in Washington, D.C.

I've photographed this event since 2005, and always enjoyed myself. Photographing an event like that presents a technical challenge and unique pressures, similar to that of a wedding: low light, active subjects, and a one-time-only chance to catch the moment.

Taking pictures of people while giving speeches presents a unique challenge: you want to catch the person talking, but not in a part of a sentence where their mouth appears odd or makes them look awkward. And some folks have more dynamic speaking faces than others, which you want to exploit whenever possible. This requires listening to what they're saying, and also reading their body language to anticipate when they might next move their hand a certain way, or even turn their head towards or away from the camera.

Event photography, for me, is people-watching on steroids.

For those who are interested, you can view a small gallery of the photographs, and see for yourself!

In college, I discovered a beautiful little plastic camera, called the HOLGA, which enabled me to explore medium format film without investing $500 in an expensive camera body.

Always, my photographs had to involve people. I recruited roommates, myself, my family, and friends, to take part in what would eventually make up my senior art show. This self-portrait that you see here above would go on to be displayed in the Fraser Gallery in Bethesda.

As always, children were a favorite subject of mine, too. Their innocent and unselfconscious kineticism made for great gestures.

And Stephen was a willing experimenter, too.

I love how these photographs stop time, but simultaneously feel like movies because I blended frames together in-camera (simply by not advancing the film properly).

To a degree, I am able to control the outcome of my HOLGA photographs. There's a great deal of unpredictability, of course--where will the light leaks be? what if the film gets stuck in one of the plastic mechanisms? But I have a habit of putting it all together in my head--a series of three shots--before I orchestrate what people do in the frame.

It's beautiful controlled chaos.

I hope to explore other kinds of cameras in the near future, like the Lomo.

Ladies and gentlemen, my choices for PURPLE:

In this set, I decided to take my feelings of dance and movement literally. I struck a few poses that I remembered from my 10 years of ballet as a child. The shadows on the purple wall were a part of what I enjoyed about moving my limbs in unusual angles.

I'm not sure how I feel about the color purple. It has a regal quality, and to me is neither specifically feminine nor masculine. Rather, it is generally elegant and rich. Purple has, of course, been a symbol of wealth. To me, it is a strange, otherworldly color, despite the fact that it's found in nature very easily. Something about it seems odd; unlike red, yellow, white, or green, it's not a color that you would be inclined to eat, I think.

My brother wrote me and said that he noticed this set had the most implied movement in it. He liked "the idea that each color has its own key feature like that"... which has made me have to up the ante concept-wise, and think of what possible "key features" could be contained in BLACK, ORANGE, and YELLOW.

See my other portraits: RED and BLUE, WHITE), and GREEN .

It's roasting out today. I hope that everyone is keeping healthy and cool! Here's how I'm surviving:

ICED COFFEE

12 oz. freshly brewed hot coffee
4 oz. cold milk (or cream)
2 T sugar
1 T cocoa powder
3 ice cubes
whipped cream

Pour freshly brewed coffee into large thermos or mug. Add sugar & cocoa powder, stir until dissolved. Pour in cold milk, then add ice cubes. Top with whipped cream.

Delish!

This summer is going to be a fun one. I get to teach photography at Park School Camps in July.

I have a digital lab and a darkroom. I hope to teach film, digital, and cyanotype to a batch of about a dozen kids.

My class syllabus is complete, and I'm about to order supplies for camp; I'm drooling with anticipation!

Getting ready to teach photography also lit a fire underneath a small pet project of mine. I've been working on a general "how-to" photography syllabus for awhile now, and the first edition is complete. My hope is that eager-beaver shutterbugs can use it to teach themselves a few things. It covers exposure (f/stop, ISO, shutter), composition, lighting, subject matter, and offers a few suggestions for take-home lessons:

Basic Photography (1.1 MB)

Enjoy, and please let me know what you think!

This summer is going to be a fun one. I get to teach photography at Park School Camps in July.

I have a digital lab and a darkroom. I hope to teach film, digital, and cyanotype to a batch of about a dozen kids.

My class syllabus is complete, and I'm about to order supplies for camp; I'm drooling with anticipation!

Getting ready to teach photography also lit a fire underneath a small pet project of mine. I've been working on a general "how-to" photography syllabus for awhile now, and the first edition is complete. My hope is that eager-beaver shutterbugs can use it to teach themselves a few things. It covers exposure (f/stop, ISO, shutter), composition, lighting, subject matter, and offers a few suggestions for take-home lessons:

Basic Photography (1.1 MB)

Enjoy, and please let me know what you think!

Yesterday, Stephen got it into his head that we simply had to have meatball subs for dinner and fruit pie for dessert. After a successful trip to the library (Steve: 20 CDs; Me: 3 books), we trekked to the grocery store, baby in arms. I had a WIC check ready that would let us get tuna fish on the cheap, along with a few other delectable, nutritious things (Number of full grocery bags: 3; Money spent: $12.08). In the stifling heat (no air conditioning in the kitchen), we broiled the meatballs (according to Steve's recipe), made the sauce (from scratch), baked the pie (again, Steve's recipe), and got a salad together. We feasted royally (as you can see above), and with bellies full, put the baby to bed.

Boy, am I ever glad that I married someone who not only likes to eat, but who likes to cook as well. In the midst of stirring the sauce, Steve pointed out that when you do it all yourself, it comes out pretty inexpensively. I nodded, and thought about how fortunate I am to still be breastfeeding Ruthie, which is also an inexpensive way of keeping the family fed. In a few short months she'll eat nearly everything we're eating, and probably twice as fast, since she'll be growing too.

After little growing baby went to sleep, we watched The Big Lebowski on Hulu (free television and movies!), and then curled up in the bedroom with our window A/C unit on. Cool air wafted over us, with warm pie in our stomachs, and sleeping baby nearby.

I've made a resolution.

Throughout the month of August (a quiet month for me, photographically speaking), I'm making it my goal to post one photograph a day and talk about it. These photographs will be brand new, taken within the last three days (or so--I'm being loose about it).

The purpose is to challenge myself, and hopefully break some new ground. Perhaps I'll even peek out of my little introverted bubble and get a few new faces around here, besides my own.

This particular photo is a self-portrait, taken yesterday in the atrium at Park School. A ledge across the room served as a tripod. I pre-focused, set the timer, and then leaned up against the bright white wall.

I remember hearing once that you should fill your house with nothing other than what you believe to be useful, or find to be beautiful. So, I like surrounding myself with original art by people I admire and know. The other day I noticed that an illustrator I admire, Ramsey Beyer, was offering her artwork for sale. Being strapped for cash at the moment, I offered her a print trade for her. Lo and behold, she accepted!

I am so thrilled with my new piece of artwork, which hangs above my workspace in my bedroom. It inspires me now every day. I'm so happy to have added it to my collection.

I didn't stage this photo, I swear.

One of the benefits of running my business from home is that I get to be around my daughter a lot. She's an endless source of entertainment, frustration, fascination, learning, and love. Her latest craze is to tear all of the letter magnets off of our refrigerator, one by one, munching each before they get tossed into an alphabet-soup like chaos on the floor.

R is for Ruth, but R is also for reckless abandon!

The discipline of posting a photograph each day stretches me. In the past week, my reading, thinking, and personal conversations have led me to sit down and sketch. Today's shot is an example: I noticed this heart-shaped box in my apartment, and thought that it might make an interesting prop for a portrait. After a few sketches, I was ready to try it.

As with many of my shots and projects, it looked different in my head than how it came out in the end. I usually start with a few certainties about a shot, and then work through a number of variables until I end up with something I like. In this case, the end result was further from where I began than is usual for me. I may try it again to aim more towards what I was hoping for in the first place.

To further myself in yet another fashion, I've ordered several new toys from Lomography.com with which I can experiment further. I'm crossing my fingers that they will arrive before the weekend, since I'm photographing my cousin's wedding in Barnstable, MA, and would love to try out a few new gadgets with her.

Lastly, I will point fellow photography enthusiasts to the work of Evan Baden, who has a very interesting set of shots called "Illuminati" that highlights our need for constant connectivity through contemplative, peaceful, and haunting portraits (via Conscientious).

It's fun to play with props. When selecting jewelry the other day, I wondered what kinds of pictures I could take of jewelry to make it look like something else, a la Michel Gondry's crazy videos, but not even close to that kind of amazing.

As with yesterday's photo, I think further exploration of making things into other things needs to happen.

Remember that cardboard box in the back of my fridge? Well, quite a bit of film has returned from the lab, most of it medium format black and white work. It's been such a trip looking through it and seeing my old subject matter with new eyes. I'm a big believer in learning from one's past and reviewing your work frequently. I ask myself, what do I gravitate towards? What do I seem to have a knack for? What do I fail miserably at? Am I relying too heavily on a certain technique to make up for my own technical ineptitude or lack of ideas?

Well, one of the things I gravitate towards without fail is children. And luckily, I seem to have a knack for them. My favorite thing about this shot is that even though I obviously shot these two images from slightly different vantage points, the horizon line remains exactly the same in both frames. For me, that makes the diptych sing.

Back when I was teaching at Park Camps, we took a few field trips. Once, we went to Patterson Park, and the last trip we took was to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore.

Down by the Federal Hill area is the Science Center, along with a very old-fashioned merry-go-round. It wasn't functioning when we visited, so I simply decided to snap some pictures of it while the kids were running around accumulating pictures for their assignments.

"Creepy carnival" is kind of an old trope to play with, but I think this works. I like how the arch of the circle swings upward, then is disjointed in the middle, interrupted by the galloping horse, and then continues around. It implies a much jerkier ride than what I'd imagine you'd experience on the actual merry-go-round.

As an aside, I owe a great deal of thanks to Severn Graphics for developing all my film so wonderfully. With Ruth running around all the time now, and not napping as frequently, I don't have the ability or spare time to develop film in my bathtub!

For our honeymoon, my husband Stephen and I decided that we would make our way to the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester, TN. With the exception of this past year, we've made it back every summer (Steve went solo for '08). One of the things I love about the festival is that there's plenty of free water, in both drinkable and drenchable form. It gets HOT out there, and so the central fountain is always an excellent spot to stop and refresh yourself.

To top it off, though, each year they redecorate the fountain in some fashion. My favorite year so far has been their crazy checkerboard pattern, which made you feel like you were a part of some psychedelic Alice in Wonderland event.

A little HOLGA action always helps to enhance it, of course.

In this shot, the subject matter is interesting in itself; the challenge was (and always is, with things like this) to make a photograph that incorporates a little something extra. I almost find those kinds of challenges more easy than trying to make an "everyday" object interesting.

One of my dear friends, Sonja, hired me to do her headshot before she moved from Harrisburg to Philadelphia. I had a blast, not only because I love spending time with her, but also because I got to play with my then-brand-new PocketWizards, enabling me to cast light at will via radio transmission. They're awesome. And Sonja is too. So with her permission, ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Sonja Bontrager, the Music-Maker!

I've known Sonja since being in college with her and watching her grow there (in addition to many other fun times) obtaining her B.A. in music composition. But Sonja has been making music as long as she was old enough to speak, making up songs in the car and devouring her parents' record collection (where both of us independently of each other discovered the Beatles' greatness, actually). After 12 years of piano lessons (starting at age 7), four years of vocal training, and her degree, Sonja learned the business of being a professional musician while working as the Director of Education at the Harrisburg Symphony. It was great to have her just a stone's throw from Baltimore; every now and again I'd travel up to see the symphony perform and keep tabs on her latest activities.

But that was not to be forever... just recently in May of this year, she daringly decided to strike out on her own and moved to Philadelphia to find work as a musician. Cat-sitter and dog-walker by day, Sonja teaches voice and piano lessons around the city at night. She writes her own songs, and currently performs on keys and vocals with The Marc Lomax Band (a reggae-blues-rock experience), and in her Harrisburg-based band, Smoke the Groove.

With a penchant for analog synths and circuit-bending, Sonja has incorporated these electronic delights in projects for Moviate (film screenings, art festivals, and more) with the Mystery Frogmen's Orkestra (also based in Harrisburg). I had the wonderful privilege of hearing their original soundtrack for Moviate's screening of Nosferatu, which was as strange and creepy as the movie itself. Her appetite for music is as vast as her range of influences, all of which I have heard blasting from her stereo in our dorm room and vehicle -- concert music like Beethoven, Krenek, Weill and Rachmaninoff, choral music & oratorio, reggae, trip-hop, indie hip-hop, opera, musical theatre, post-rock, experimental & noise, jazz, blues, world music and good ol' piano rock all have a place in her lexicon. I can always count on Sonja to expand my musical horizons.

For this portrait, I wanted to catch Sonja's quietly (but furiously) burning energy and professionalism. She does as she pleases with her compositions, but maintains a high standard for herself, which carries through into everything she does. Surrounding her with light on all sides and ratcheting the contrast serves to emphasize her rock star hair and accentuate the beautiful mixtures of color in her eyes.

One of the things I usually try to avoid when using flash is mirrors. Not so this time! And what's more, it's all fogged up and smeared from a recent shower.

This shot was taken with my brand new fisheye camera, and the film was developed at a local one-hour place nearby. The interesting thing about this shot is that I've put colored gels on the ring flash on the camera, which creates the strange colors.

Having a cheap plastic 35mm camera feels very freeing. I can be more cavalier when taking pictures, and the ring flash and colored gels makes me more playful, less serious, less intense about things coming out a certain way. The fact that it's film helps to add mystery and novelty, but also reveals that having a primarily digital workflow has made me impatient and perhaps a little less thoughtful than before.

I'm enjoying the return to film.

Well, I'm sad to say that I missed blogging my "one a day" portraits the past few days. However, it was for the absolutely wonderful reason that my cousin Martha got married in Barnstable, MA (Cape Cod) on Saturday. I was lucky enough to be both a guest and the photographer, so you'll hear more about that later, for sure!

And now, business as usual:

Again with the "film stuck at the back of the refrigerator" trick, I've managed to find a few more interesting diptychs. I like the differences between the frames here: one on land, one in the sea. One child clinging to its parent, the other independent. Male and female, old and young. The light artifacts from the HOLGA are also quite charming, I think.

At the time, I'm certain I wasn't thinking all of those things when I took those frames. One of the happy things about analog shooting is the mystery of what you'll get in the end. And because you're forced to view the pictures in a certain order (the order you took them), the progression (or lack thereof) between each frame feels highly significant.

While my brother Kevin visited last week, we had a little fun with our feet in the fisheye department. A colored flash helped make this shot even more strange.

My husband, Stephen, is a music aficionado. Graduating from UMBC with a degree in Musicology, he's amassed quite a collection of CDs for himself. I vividly remember the day when his collection outgrew the two small bookshelves he had bought to house them. Needing a good solution for our tiny apartment, we mail-ordered a massive-but-efficient piece of furniture, with the promise that it would hold 1500 CDs--room for him to grow.

Thus, whenever I enter my house, there's a neverending stream of music coming from our stereo system. Things I like and things I don't. New things he's trying out, and old familiars. Music is such a vital part of my husband's identity, I decided to take a portrait of him in front of his collection.

I also took some time this afternoon to ask him about his collection...

Take a look at this picture. Exactly how many CDs do you own, right at this minute?
I think it's around 850, maybe closer to 900.

What genre or genres predominate?
As much as I'd like to be more of a cosmopolitan, i have to admit that rock is the dominating genre, but there is a good amount of jazz and experimental music in there.

Why did you start collecting music?
That's a good question. There are other ways to enjoy music, but gosh, I'm not sure how to answer that! I honestly don't know if I can say what got me started, just that I'm in the middle of it now.

Well, then why music?
Because I'm not very athletic, and I'm a slow reader, and I have poor penmanship. Music was the only thing left.

Name your top five latest new artist finds in the last year.
Battles--they released the best album of 2007. Robin Williamson--one of the founding members of the Incredible String Band. The last few albums he's done on the ECM label are just astounding, the most sophisticated and beautiful folk music you'll ever hear. Jaga Jazzist--a democratic synthesis of jazz and electronic music, very European. Not too long ago I fell in love with the Brandenburg Concertos. Lastly, Lyle Lovett. Just recently it's dawned on me what a superb and utterly unique songwriter he is. He can be so charmingly cocky and turn around and be equally poignant.

People seem to say you have a broad taste in music. Is it really true?
I'd like to say objectively that I have a broad taste in music, but I could never say I listen to "all kinds" of music. It's a pet peeve of mine when people say they do, because it's patently impossible to do. While I could confidently say I'm willing to listen to any music whatsoever, there are things I don't enjoy and prefer not to listen to.

For instance?
I hate to say it, because it's so cliche, but mainstream country, mainstream hip-hop, mainstream pop--anything where the commercial compromises artistic integrity. It can certainly happen outside the commercial industry, but when people complain about mainstream music, they're usually on point.

Do you have a favorite music critic?
I really enjoy Sasha Frere-Jones, from The New Yorker. He's astute, although a bit of a know-it-all sometimes. I'm amazed when I go through AllMusic.com and I see Thom Jurek's name attached to a baffling array of topics.

Why do you still collect CDs when everything is digital, and you even own an iPod?
I've thought about switching over, and I may do so in the future. Notwithstanding the argument between CD and vinyl, CD is still a lossless quality compared to mp3s, in which most music is formatted digitally. There's a lack of fidelity, and a lack of packaging and artwork, that enhances a record's enjoyment for me. Like a good book, having the tactile connection, something concrete is important. I don't think that will ever be usurped, regardless of where the digital media goes, and I'm sure it will go great places.

Closing remarks?
If you want to do something good for yourself, go out and listen to an album that you would never, ever listen to. Listen to something totally different than what you would normally listen to, and see where it leads you.

Steve currently works part time for International Orthodox Christian Charities, tunes pianos, and blogs regularly about music here.

Well well well, my attempt at a "one-a-day" project has been upset by a staggering lack of internet connectivity while on vacation. Happily, we are home safe, and I return to my regularly scheduled program.

Do you all remember my first attempt at a falling star? I was playing with some objects in my house, and my fooling around led me to a slightly illustrative style of work.

Well, I gave it another go, gathering a few more favorable materials in order to create a different look of falling star.

I'm really enjoying this method, and am thinking through other possible scenes to illustrate in the future, using the everyday objects around me. I really enjoy creating things out of other things, and then documenting them in a way that maintains something of an illusion.

The goal, however, isn't to completely trick you into not recognizing the objects for what they are, but for you to enjoy that the objects can come together to create something new.

Along the lines of yesterday's post, I bring you a butterfly garden.

Again, I had a lot of fun with this, finding objects and fabrics around my house with which to create an illustrative scene. This whole thing was inspired by finding a broken hair clip on the ground--the bejeweled butterfly you see featured in the center of the photo. It just so happened that I had other, smaller butterfly hair clips that served to create a family of butterflies; I couldn't resist making a home for them to live in.

Thus, I conclude my one month of attempting to blog a photo once a day. I never ran out of material! The week or so unexpected disconnectivity (is that a word?), may have helped, but I don't think I'd have run out of subject matter either way. Maybe I'll try this again some time. Do you all think it was a worthwhile experiment? Would you like to see more from me overall? Tell me.

For those beat-you-down days: a rum and coke.

Ladies and Gentlemen, like I told you before, my Portraits of Light series, (viewable here), is now up at Yellow Dog Tavern.

So, come one, come all, to the official opening on Tuesday, September 16th, 6-8pm.

I even wrote a press release and created an Evite for people to attend. Oh yeah, I hit Facebook too. YES, I am that organized.

So I'm hoping a lot of folks will show up next Tuesday evening--it's bound to be fun. Plus, you get to meet Ruthie, who will be tagging along in the baby sling. She's cute.

Today is my parents' 29th anniversary.

Last year, they became proud grandparents.

So, their granddaughter (with a little help from mom) has a special wish for them today:

P.S. Seconds later, the message was eaten and destroyed.

I can feel the air cooling around Baltimore, and it's already making me miss the summer. When the seasons change, it's almost always a case of "grass is greener" with me. I dislike the intense humidity here, but I love being able to go barefoot and to have the light extend long into the evening.

Oh, and I'll miss swimming too!

This shot is unusually panoramic for me. Taken with a HOLGA, it has four exposures made to overlap in-camera. Usually I find I can only pre-visualize three frames at a time, but this one proved an exception. It helps to have the ocean as a wide open backdrop; which is why I think more exposures succeed here. In a more crowded environment, you might have too much going on to create a unified composition.

My daughter occasionally offers me some sand for consumption.

"Thank you, darling. I'm already full."

I enjoy the semi-permanence of sand writing. The beach is like a giant tablet, waiting to be drawn and re-drawn. On my way down to Folly Beach, Stephen and I came up with strange phrases to write in the sand that I could photograph. This one, I think, is the most terrifying, yet I find it beautiful and poignant.

I'm not sure what provoked me to pick this phrase; perhaps the loneliness of it attracted me. I've gone through periods in life where I've felt terribly lonely, despite being surrounded by friends, or loneliness where all my friends had indeed left for elsewhere. These words capture those feelings for me, and I photographed them one by one to emphasize how pounding and relentless and all-consuming every moment of loneliness can feel. Each word takes up an entire frame, as each lonely moment feels like it can stretch on forever.

When they're not falling from the sky, they're gracing our lives in decorative ways.

a variation on this photograph

Break the rules: shoot into the sun. Sometimes it's worth it just to see what comes out.

This is why I'm such a huge fan of toy cameras. If I could shoot an entire wedding using toy cameras, I think I'd have a field day. The light effects and quirky lenses have their own magic, not to mention the lost texture of film. And what a compositional and technical challenge to meet as well!

As long as there's film to be had, my toy cameras will be at my side.

Every now and then, a little fooling around frees me, lets in some fresh light, and helps me not to take everything too seriously.

"Steve rocks" indeed, and now we discover just how horrifically distorting a fisheye lens can be.

I'm glad I wasn't wearing stripes at the time!

One of the most beautiful things in life are those tender moments between parents and children.

Of course, it's always more tender when it's your own child and your beloved husband.

I love you, darlings!

I've slowly but surely been wading through the scads of family photographs piled up on the shelves in our apartment. You'd think that being a photographer would mean that your own life has been cataloged quite nicely.

Not so, of course! Like any family, documenting and tracing history as it's happening is hard to do. But when you do, it's a blast to look back and see how things have changed.

What is plain to see through my family photographs is an ever-changing photographic approach. What a kick to see some of my very first photographs, taken upon receiving my first SLR, a Pentax SP1000 around the age of 12. It's plain to see that in spite of my dad's careful explanation of the light meter and exposure, I didn't know what I was doing.

Whoops, in my misguided attempts to get the exposure correct, the shutter speed was too long!

What's with that huge ugly shadow across mom's body? Ah yes, flash is a whole 'nother beast.

And lo and behold, the strangely uninteresting group shot at an ice rink. No composition whatsoever.

It just goes to show that you've got to start somewhere, and that practice is such a critical tool. Part of what gets me excited about photography is that it's a democratic medium that most anyone can pick up--widely available, widely popular, and wildly interesting.

Of course, the flip side of that is that there's always more for me to learn. Back to practicing, folks!

Anyone who's been to the Inner Harbor in Baltimore may have seen the strange lattice sculpture down by the Maryland Science Center near Federal Hill. I have no idea who made it, but it sure is a visually interesting element. I whipped out my HOLGA awhile ago to see if I could take a few good photographs.

This is my favorite out off the three rolls of film I used trying to capture the thing. The distance between what was in my head and what came out on film was pretty wide, all said and done, but looking at my work gave me a few ideas. Next time, I'll try a different time of day, or perhaps when the sky is filled with interesting clouds, or maybe rain!

While my family was on vacation at Folly Beach in South Carolina, I had the chance to spend quite a bit of time with my nieces and nephews--always a joy. Eudora, the fourth of five, was thrilled to discover that each night crabs created lovely holes for her to fill with sand.

I followed her around from hole to hole, and eventually discovered that, given a little time, the crabs would kick the sand back out of their holes again. Eudora didn't know, I'm sure, that she had a never-ending stream of work ahead of her.

My favorite little tidbit about this shot is the contrast of her braided hair amidst all the sand; such a lovely texture to devour with your eyes.

I love breakfast. Love it. My favorite food for breakfast is eggs, almost any style. I think that by far one of my favorite breakfasts ever was at One Centre Street Inn when I photographed my cousin Martha's wedding on Cape Cod.

Now that I'm home, of course, I fry eggs, scramble them, poach them, or what have you, and indulge in my other favorite breakfast food: home-ground freshly brewed coffee.

Plus, the light in my kitchen is so romantic in the morning. How could you not love breakfast?

Even the smallest everyday things can inspire me to set up a photograph. The other day while cooking I noticed that some of Ruth's wooden blocks I had found at a thrift store matched this apron I bought at the dollar store. Add salt & pepper shaker monkeys from my sister-in-law, and there you have it.

Strange, no?

I have a collection of old things. Some are meaningful family heirlooms, others are old photographs or interesting pieces of junk I picked up at antique and thrift stores. Things that are worn and used feel loved to me. I don't think I could ever have a house with completely modern design in it because of that--I would find it attractive, but it would lack the texture and variety that I like to have in my visual environment.

Even some of my old mass-produced photographs from when I was a teenager are developing their own texture through degradation. These photos of my grandparents, for instance. It's beautiful to watch the silver oxidize and solarize the photograph.

My grandmother Louise (from the first photograph) has passed away, and watching her image slowly degrade is a chilling reminder of how people can fade from your memory. I sing her lullabies to my daughter, and tell her "I love you to pieces," like grandma used to tell me. One day I'll teach her how to blow bubbles with her hands, and I hope to pick up an old-fashioned egg-beater so that we can make suds together in the tub. Just like I did with grandma.

I had some spare time to continue my self-portrait series this month!

This shot sprung fully-formed from my brain. I had a sheet on which I had written my favorite words back in college, and I knew I had to use that in some fashion. Plastic wrap was used to create an interesting texture, and I gathered some fall leaves and colors to accent the whole thing.

It was important to me that yellow, like orange, be an up-close shot. I feel as though the shots I'm taking are pairing off into sets of colors that are linked, in my mind.

On the same day that I shot yellow, I noticed the afternoon light hitting my neighborhood just right, and ran outside to shoot brown.

I have walked by this spot many times, and always loved the way the sun moves across everyone's tiny fenced yard. Most of all, the telephone polls all line up together in a graphically interesting way. I like that all lines lead to the center, and that the center is brown and faded, or earthy. Earth as the center.

When staying at my grandparents' house in Texas, I took in some of the balmier winter weather, and sat in their backyard garden. Even before they moved to Texas, they kept a beautiful vegetable and flower garden--their pride and joy. We ate from their Needham tomato vines, and drank in the impatients blossoms sipping lemonade in the humid New England summers. Things haven't changed much, except now they have a lemon tree!

Family memorabilia is something I've always been fond of, but loathe to spend a lot of time creating. I've never been one for the scrapbooking movement, composing pages and carefully arranging special papers and whatnot. Instead, I pepper my albums (if any) with photographs, (obviously) and my hand-written notes.

This album chronicles my daughter's first year of life. I gave myself the parameter of "first year," so that the album would have a clear narrative and an ending. After one year Ruth is no less a member of the family than she was before, but I felt comfortable folding in her photos to the general family album. This also leaves me with a do-able goal for each child as he or she comes along.

I guess I felt like sharing this on my studio blog because it shows that there's so much more to photography than something you see on the screen. Photographs become the things that your children and your children's children use to learn about themselves and their history. I loved looking at photographs of my parents when they were young; it made them so much more interesting and human.

I made sure to save a few keepsakes, but didn't overthink it.

I gladly wrote out the birth story, and spent a little extra time making it special.

The rest of the book is made up of cards given to us, as well as a photo of her from each month--something simple that I think I can easily repeat with the next kid.

I hope one day to hand this over to Ruth when she gets older as a keepsake. It probably took me just a few hours of my time, and it's so much fun to look through again and again. For me, the album was a lesson in how a little simple planning (document the first year, mostly using photos) can make something lasting and beautiful.

As you might have guessed, with the holidays bearing down upon us, things have slowed down here around the studio, photographically speaking. A combined blessing-curse, of course, as I am enjoying time with my kin and beloved friends, but I have fewer photographs to work on and share with you all.

While things wind down, I am rediscovering the joy of bringing out my camera more often for the beautiful mundane. At a small party in our apartment this Saturday, I also discovered what a delightfully creative medium decorating Christmas cookies can be!

We started out with some traditional shapes -- stars, trees, snowmen, and the like -- but soon became bored, and whipped out a few x-acto knives in order to cut our own shapes out of the dough. Multi-colored frosting added even more variables, and we ended up with quite an assortment of the quirky and macabre:

Clockwise from top left: a pizza cookie, a man in the moon, a bra, a banana & some trapezoids; a color wheel, some eggs and toast, and an Obama cookie.

While in the process of making the cookies, I noticed that my spatula's pattern cast an interesting silhouette on the snowmen shapes:

Probably the only snowmen on planet earth that registers a skeleton.

I am so fortunate to have family that is willing to visit me on a regular basis. Our parents get along well with each other, and my brothers treat Stephen as a long-lost sibling.

We partook in eggnog...

...delicious stuffing, turkey, and a wide variety of homemade desserts cooked by my sister-in-law, Megan.

Of course, Ruthie looked absolutely charming, laughing at danger while she stood on a rocking chair.

We opened presents...

...enjoyed each others' company...

...and snapped a quick family photo before the light disappeared beyond the horizon.

A Merry Christmas to you all. tags: children, family, portrait,