In the spirit of having SOMETHING on our blog, even if it isn't our own photography, here are more cameras made out of other things!  This time it's soap:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/50105925/mini-cotton-candy-camera-soap-set

Who Gives a Fuck about an Oxford Comma

This post is my official return to Juan in Meta.  I am ready to start posting again after the epic hiatus, and this week is the perfect time considering Jasmin's impending visit next weekend.  So here are some new shots; not my best by a long shot, but the feeling that I had when I was shooting these matched so well with the challenge that they answer, that I couldn't resist putting some of these images up.  So here's my response to boredom:

Waiting in line for almost two hours trying to get into Sasquatch Music Festival on the first day.  Agh!

And to answer your question, yes, that is a portable hookah.  Here is a clearer picture of it:

Another Camera Cake!

via PDN and Pretty Foods & Pretty Drink

completely unrelated to anything photo, but also an AMAZING cake!!




 via Pretty Foods & Pretty Drink

new camera + new film = happy accident

this happened as a result of me not totally knowing how to unload film from use my arbus-esque box camera but i kinda love what happened. more of these photos to be continued....

happy birthday to me!

Last week I turned 22 and celebrated it with a palindrome themed bday party! Birthdays are my favorite holiday. Not just mine, but birthdays as a general holiday, so here are some snippets from mine!

Kaitlyn celebrated in SF by sending me this awesome gold, animal filled birthday card.

and a copy of Giant Robot, which I haven't delved into yet, but I'm it will be a good time.

Here is one of the funniest bday cards I got from my friend and awesome adventuring photographer, Lauren Pond.

and here is my bday cake!

Enough about me...countdown to Kaitlyn's bday in about a week!

merry belated christmas!

mega apologies kaitlyn...i have been ever so terrible with keeping up juan in meta in recent days and with sending you mail. no apologies, just trucking ahead with 2 big blog posts!

here's my answer to the norman rockwell challenge!

i spent this past christmas day with my friend julia's family. they are pretty much my new adopted socal family. julia has the cutest grandparents...see below for julia's adorable grandpa. ADORABLE. you know how much i love old people. give me a room full of old people and fake food any day and i'm pretty much in heaven : ) anyways, we had a swedish themed christmas with glogg, swedish meatballs & lingonberry sauce and mashed potatoes. YUM!

Photo Telephone with a grumpy man

noticin.gs

It's been a while since I moved to SF and I haven't posted anything yet, but soon soon soon I promise!  I have a potential HDR I'm working on.  In the meanwhile, I found this website which is like our projects and looks like fun!  I think I'm going to open a flickr account so I can start one.

Salt Mountains

These photos really have nothing to do with anything, except that they conceptually remind me of the photographer Jin Lee (I love the name of her website- 'Jins' with an 's' http://jinslee.net/saltmountains/index.html) who we saw when we went to the museum of contemporary photography.

Challenge: Night Photos!

I've been obsessed with southern californian flora for the past few weeks. First off, the landscaping is fascinating...probably 80% of houses have some sort of shrubbery that has been snipped, trimmed and humanly shaped into a ball, a dolphin, you name it. Check out the best house I found when I was in Sacramento! I would totally live there!

Then mix that with the fact that southern California is just home to oddly shaped plants in general. Lots of cacti, overgrown plants that look like they could eat you, trees that look like Lady Gaga hands and finally, for my night landscape entry, these trees on my block that remind me of David Lynch's hair.

Aren't they fabulous? I see them everyday when I'm driving home and I just had to show you!

Also, I wanted to share Liz Kuball's photos with you. Check out her project, California Vernacular. It definitely plays a huge part in my current fascination with Californian trees. Also, I really like her artist statement about the project. I think it's the perfect welcome to California for you.

"When you move out to California from back east, you come for a reason: You're leaving behind a bad relationship, or escaping your hometown, or thinking you'll be a star. And what you find when you get here is that things aren't what you thought they'd be.....And you'd think that after all this, you'd become disillusioned and go back home, and some do, of course, but many more of us stay and instead of growing bitter, we hang on--hang on to a world that, to us, is even more fantastic than the one we thought we'd find, because it's real in its absurdity and because we have stories to tell." -Liz Kuball

Kaitlyn is moving to San Fran! Hip Hip Hooray!

I got two, not one, but TWO mailings in one day! What a pen PAL! I also got some awesome news that Kaitlyn will be moving to San Francisco this coming Tuesday. Sweet. I foresee some LA/SF photo safaris as well as some central California roadtrips and wanderings. See, the thing I love about Kaitlyn is that she keeps the adventurer in me alive. I do love to explore but I'm also a nester. Kaitlyn is the dreamer. I know her photography and life will take her all over the planet and talking to her always stirs up that desire in me. So, here's to adventures in 2010 and beyond!

Kaitlyn also sent me a wonderful handmade necklace! Her etsy store will be premiering soon... www.aikeling.etsy.com. and she takes beads from her travels in China, Greece and Turkey and combine them with beads she finds in Boulder to create these awesome pieces. See? Told you she's an adventurer. (Kaitlyn, when I first read the back of your card...I didn't quite get that it was you right away...and I was just like whoa...this description sounds like Kaitlyn's doppleganger..and then a few seconds later, I realized that this was you.)

This postcard also arrived the same day. Oh, Texas. I have a special place in my heart for you.

Also, in reference to the last post, where she sent me the best gift ever, Kaitlyn also made some photo stamps for herself! Check it out below!

Welcome to the left coast, girl!

Halloo Again

We have new post-cards!  A little delayed in their being posted (at least the Christmas one is...yikes) but as amazing as always.  First, we have the aforementioned Christmas card, which is a completely Jasmin creation, semi-opaque and with multiple surfaces that can be folded over one another. 

 And then we have the Casbah Café card, which reminds me of the hookah bar we went to in the french quarter for some reason.  Which also has on it my Christmas/New Years gift to Jasmin, the personalized stamp I made from a picture I took from her portfolio.  Such a perfect discovery for the pen-palling!

 

 

This is probably my last entry from Boulder, so I am officially sent off by a postcard from Jasmin!  I will see you on the flip side, which in this case is from the thrilling San-Francisco which awaits me hopefully with not only an apartment and a job, but also with wonderful opportunities to take millions of pictures and find many a post-card, as well as the chance for a reunion of the two authors of this blog for photographic adventures!

Photo Telephone!

Happy New Years, Juan, Juan in Meta and Juan in Meta readers!



Here's a wayy belated response to your underwater photo, but better late than never!

I worked on a photo shoot where my friend Julia and her friend Carly styled and my friend Tian modeled. It was quite a production. I bought a few lights from Ace hardware for the shoot and it was the first time I played with artificial lighting. I'm editing the photos now and I'll be posting more this week on my flickr and I wanna hear your thoughts on the set as fashion photos or just as general photos and especially your thoughts on the lighting. I'll let you know when I get them all up!

I realized during this shoot that fashion is a difficult genre for me... I have to adjust to directing a bit more because up til now, the way I usually approach photos is through a more observational, capturing candids process. I've gotten better at directing people as I take their portraits for my walking talk project because I direct them aesthetically as I try to capture something I've observed of them while talking to them, but it is still me trying to capture or to accentuate what I see in front of me. With these photos, it goes a step further. The goal is not to capture the reality of the situation, but to direct the scene and the model to create an imagined image and mood, which is a different approach than how I usually take photos. I've been thinking about these different approaches and though I realize that I gravitate toward being more of a documentary photographer, I do want to challenge myself to be more directorial as I take photos instead of just letting things happen in front of my camera that I happen to luckily capture. I want to be able to create situations that allow these natural moments to happen, but to have more agency about it. Not sure if that makes complete sense, but these are just some things I've been thinking of in the past weeks.