fun with food

I have been working on expanding my food portfolio and in the process having a lot of fun. I love to cook, so when the chance comes to do both cooking and food photography I jump on it. This past weekend I was able to do 12 different set ups of different dishes and drinks. Here's a small preview of what I was working on. There will be more to come, I promise.

-Having fun with cocoa powder and truffles. This took about 45 minutes + to set up; and I'm just talking about the food.

One of my other set ups was with colorful jello. I decided to combine Orange, Lemon, Blue Raspberry, Lime and cherry. This experiment was originally planned for a plain 9x13 pan, but what fun is that when you can create a jello man instead? From there, I found the balloons that my mother had in a kitchen drawer. It wasn't completely planned that there would be two bubbles that happened to line up as if buttons. After I saw that, it all just fell into place.

-Once the photos are all edited, you can look them up on my website!

memory lane

Just some randomness that happens when I can't sleep. I do miss these places though!

Education

It has been brought to my attention a lot recently that I should consider becoming a teacher at some point in time by friends, family and those I tutor. I have always had a passion for helping others succeed so becoming a teacher would be a great job for me. I guess you can say that I have already been dabbling in it a little having worked as a Tutor and Teachers Aid for the past 2 1/2 years. I throughly enjoy being able to sit down with someone and help them figure out something and help them to realize that they can actually do it if they put their mind to it.

I have been looking into teaching English abroad in China through Buckland International Education Group. I met someone a few months ago who has been employed with this company previously and strongly recommended it. It would give me a chance to get back to China and work on my photography on my down time. Ever since my study abroad trip back in 2010, I have been dying to get back to China. I don't know what it is about that country that I find so fascinating, but I can't seem to get enough of it. 

When I come back, I would love to be able to teach here in the states. Whether that would be general art classes or photo specific art classes. It will definitely be something that I will look into.

Don't get me wrong, I will not forsake my photography, it will be something that is constantly expanding as I explore the world of teaching. These are just some random thoughts in my head that I thought I should write down and share.

New Beginnings

It's been a while since anything has posted on here, but things have been crazy. I have been busy getting ready for my up and coming graduation. So, there has been a lot of diving head first into creating my business cards, resume, postcard and other leave behinds for my business packet. In addition to that there is the ever so important portfolio that is being pulled together. To be able to bring it to a place that I am happy with more photographs need to me made. Which brings me to my "new beginnings".

I have been experimenting with the use of the Holga in the past few months. For those of you who may not know what a Holga is, it's a medium format 120 film camera. This camera has a lot of fun quirks and serendipity to it that has made it a unique way to capture images. Some of the things it's known for is the black vignetting or image bleeding onto the border of the film, the random light leaks that you can get among other things. Honestly, the reason I initially made the switch because I was getting sick of digital. I wanted to go back to my roots, where I first started, using film. I needed a new change of pace and invested in this camera. Well, I decided to test this camera out and see what I could make with it. Who knew that I would fall in love with it so quickly. Sure, it's a simple plastic camera that can't be adjusted very much, but oh the things you can do with it. I am most interested in the double exposures and overlapping of images that you can create with this camera. It pushes me to further my creative vision and really expand my ideas. I am still getting the hang of things with the camera, but in time I hope to eventually "master" it {at least in my eyes lol}. So for the time being it's a lot of experimenting and creating some pretty crazy cool images. Upon showing some of these images, people as me why I leave the film border in the image? Well, honestly I love the look of being able to see the film border. It's not about distinguishing that these are taken with film, but more the artistic feel that they give the images. Here's a few examples of the things that I have come up with in using this camera.