Geneva: CERN and a carnival

Posted on by Angela

While we’re on the topic of nerds, here’s some more from Geneva. We took a tour of CERN (Best. Birthday present. EVER.), and went to a carnival. You decide which was which…






Okay, the last one was a “gimme”. In any case, if you can go to CERN, YOU SHOULD. The tour was fun – complete with a 3-D surround-sound-headphone movie – and we got to see nerds at work. You can’t actually go into the LHC, obviously, when it’s working. So we just watched people analyzing stuff in a big control room. Look how many monitors they have!

I brought nerdy glasses as a prop so we could take nerdy photos.

…and we took a group tourist shot. One of the many magical things about touring CERN was that every person on the tour was both nerdy and supremely excited to be at CERN! There is a gift shop, and we all bought things there! People wore fanny packs! It was glorious.

Nerdy Perry

Posted on by Angela

Your tiny accountant is ready to complete your taxes.

He’s disappointed that you didn’t prepare your documents!

He ponders how to proceed. There’s no use just sitting on the information he already has.

Finally, he leaps to action!

Something seems askew.

Time to crunch some numbers…

Success! You’re getting a refund :)

Lefteris and I are both big, big nerds, so it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

By the way, I’m doing everything I can not to *constantly* post photos of my (supremely adorable) son; instead I’m limiting myself only to extra-special shoots. In this case Emily came over to do a family photo session for us, and we followed it up by setting this scene up in our dining room and tag-teaming the shots. Some of these are hers, some are mine, all are fun! :)

Geneva locks

Posted on by Angela

We’re taking a trip down memory lane here. Almost two years ago now (holy crap, how time flies), for my birthday in August, Leslie, Peter, Lefteris, and I took a trip to Geneva to go to CERN, WHICH WAS SUPER AWESOME, and which I’ll do another post about shortly. While we were there, I (as usual) shot a lot of locks, and surprisingly, it was really kind of a jackpot in the lock department. The whole portfolio is here, but here are some highlights…

I’m not sure if this is a keyhole on the left, but if it is, that is fantastic.

Couldn’t have been happier with the placement of this arrow.

This was at the EU. I love how graphic it is.

A locksmith’s shop!!

We took a day trip out to Talliores…

Not sure why this instruction was required, but…okay.

And this was the only lock we saw at CERN!

Venice

Posted on by Angela

It seems like oh so long ago…

Just before our paperwork day in London, Lefteris surprised me with an anti-honeymoon long weekend in Venice. By anti-honeymoon, I mean that we went just *before* we were married, and we spent the whole time pretending we were strangers meeting in a strange city. Scandalous.

Everything you’ve heard or read about Venice is true. It’s amazing; it sort of seems like a Disneyland version of itself. Very few people actually live there – pretty much everyone you see is a tourist. But the setting is authentically, astoundingly beautiful – the whole place looks like a painting with the soft light and worn textures. The canals are dirty but it doesn’t seem to matter. I wouldn’t want to live there, but I really look forward to returning with absolutely no agenda other than to wander.

Here is a small portfolio of photos, and here are a few favorites…



We took a gondola ride at dusk.


The door buzzers looked like faces – in fact I did a whole post about that!

We wandered the canals and eventually went to Murano. I was really excited to go there, partly because I have great memories of being fascinated by a glassblower in Washington state when I was a small child, and partly because it (among many other places) features prominently in my favorite book of all time, The Solitaire Mystery.




There were interesting textures everywhere. I like to shoot these and have them on hand for later Photoshop projects.

Really, the evening and night-time may be even more beautiful than the daytime.




There were also fantastic locks everywhere – enough for a whole portfolio of those, too!





Explorer Perry Conducts An Important Expedition

Posted on by Angela

Explorer Perry sets out on an important expedition! He is excited about the prospects.

But wait! What is that in the distance!?

He crawls stealthily into the unknown…

…searches high and low…

…investigates hitherto unseen shapes and colors…

Frankly, it’s exhausting. Time to relax with his monkey sidekick.

He feels refreshed.

Poses for a formal portrait, and takes a well-earned nap. All explorers do.

But his cohort of animals can’t wait to hear his report – they gather around…

The penguin disputes his findings.

A heated debate ensues.

But all is forgotten over lunch!

See you next time, explorers!

Missoula, Montana

Posted on by Angela

Almost exactly a year ago, Lefteris and I went to my college town of Missoula, Montana for a long weekend. My jazz instructor was retiring and attending his retirement party seemed like a great excuse to introduce Lefteris to the Great American West.

This ice cream stand, The Big Dipper, is an old haunt – I used to live just a couple of blocks from here. There are few things in the world better than one of their cones on a summer night.

We took a drive out to Flathead Lake.



There was a little cabin next to a museum – I focused in on the lock, naturally.

And we had some gorgeous views on the flight out of town!

There are a few more shots in the portfolio.

Headshots of Lefteris

Posted on by Angela

Lefteris has been doing more writing lately, and he needed an updated headshot to go with a recent article. He needed it quickly, and we needed to take a minimum amount of time shooting it – minimum as in “while the baby is napping, and within earshot”. Translation: our back yard and the alleyway between our house and our neighbor’s house. Luckily he is a natural in front of the camera – probably from the years of me encouraging him to be my model. (It doesn’t hurt that I think he looks just like a Greek statue come to life.)

This was shot in front of our lemon tree, as the sun was rising behind the tree. I set the camera up to overexpose a little (since his shirt and jacket are so light, and I wanted them to look that way on the shot) at first, shooting in AV mode – but I quickly switched to manual as that became a hassle, mostly because I wanted those strokes of sunlight in the upper-left. This was shot with my 50mm lens.

After that I went to a wider lens – my 24-70 – and put him in the middle of this alleyway, to play with two things: 1) the obvious, leading lines all pointing to him; and 2) bringing him toward the sunlight but not quite into it, while the background was all in the shadow, to experiment with making him pop out against the darker alley.

In the shot above, the sun is coming over my left shoulder and bouncing off of a part of the right wall back onto him. The wall is a warm white color – making a huge, flattering light! Next, I had him move closer to the wall camera-left, while I moved closer to the reflector wall, to get a different lighting setup and a much more neutral background.

That was fun because just by moving him closer to the beginning of the alley, I could add “fill” light that was really spill light from the (unreflected) sun. Eventually that overtook the bounced light – with just a couple of steps. These were shot at f2.8, by the way – enough depth of field to keep the front of him entirely in focus, but still throw the textured wall out of focus to make a nice clean background.

All before the baby woke up. :) More in the portfolio!