Angela J. Hill

Mina’s moving to Chicago, and I couldn’t be more irritated about it. Fortunately we have some photos from her going-away drinkfest last night to remember her by.

A few photos from the wedding I shot about two weeks ago…

Back in college, I created a piece of music by splattering paint on some staff paper and then transcribing the dots. Dot size corresponded (roughly) to dynamics; placement determined pitch and rhythm. I sort of just “felt out” where the bar lines should line up. Once you start analyzing like that, things start to fall into place.

When I performed the piece (at my senior recital), a copy of the painting was included with the program. Turned out people were pretty able to follow along. Unfortunately, the recording didn’t include the beginning of the piece, and it’s not the sort of thing I can just re-perform to record now. (Especially with a broken finger.)

The painting:

The sheet music (handwritten):

…and the recording, which starts on measure 6. You should be able to find that in the sheetmusic, then find the corresponding point in the painting and follow along if you like:

I’m slightly obsessed with spats. I made these for Katie for some occasion (Christmas? Birthday?) not too long ago. I’d kind of like to start making (and selling) more. They can be worn around the arch of the foot, or backwards around the ankle.

As a classically trained pianist, this is my worst nightmare.  As a catcher, it’s a rite of passage.  This is probably why you don’t see a lot of people doing both.

Our championship game was yesterday–sadly we lost, but the next best thing to playing & winning is playing & losing, as they say. I’m sad to see baseball season come to an end…but it would have been hiatus time for me anyway with this finger. Going for a play at the plate in the 4th inning, I got a ball directly to my right middle finger. Had to take a minute to tape it up and shake it off, but I still caught the rest of the game. This morning my inner pianist got the best of me and I decided to make sure it didn’t need any serious attention. A couple of hours later, I have x-rays of my hand and the assurance that the break will heal up nicely on its own (it’s just the tip, so all of the knuckles, etc. are ok). Most of all I get to feel really, really tough.

Depending on how you look at it, things are A-OK. Also, a big shout-out to Gabe for taking photos at the game.

I’m almost not sure where to begin in recommending this book. It’s an exploration of the parallels between modern physics and eastern mysticism, as it says in the tagline. This book feels so familiar to me–I wonder if I read it when I was much younger and couldn’t understand it, which is just the kind of thing that my brothers and I used to do, so it’s entirely possible. It’s a best seller from the 70s and has since been translated into 23 languages. A great modern physics primer wound together with an overview of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Zen, and Chinese thought. I’ve been aware of the similarities in processes and thought between these for as long as I can remember…but again, maybe I read it as a kid? In any case, I’m halfway through (or so), making slow progress as I simultaneously read bajillions of photography books.

Working from home and/or in an office where I only have one coworker (shoutout to Kenneth), my fashion quality has taken a dive recently. Today I’m meeting a friend for dinner so thought I’d ramp it up a bit. This look includes:

• Diane von Furstenburg sweater
• Printed skirt with pockets from Target (love the bright floral on a black ground)
• Fancy birthday shoes (birthday gift to self last year)
• Belt from a leather store in Tibet, where John and I got saddle bags that I’m converting to more usable leather bags–to come in future posts
• Earrings made in St. John (US Virgin Islands) from Skyy vodka bottles, by my cousin Jared

My favorite thing about this outfit is that while I think the patterns on the belt & skirt complement each other nicely, the colors are very dissonant together (though harmonious within their own palettes). Yay tension!

At Christmas last year, my gift to my brother Adam was that I’d do a painting of any number he wanted. Since he’s a nerdy (read: fascinating and cool) guy, I thought that might appeal. After several months he settled on a pretty nerdy number indeed: 256. After several more months, I’m finally working on the piece:

I’m not sure if this is done yet. I have to live with it for a bit to figure that out.

Unnecssarily Epic kicks off with one design: “live curiously”. After my trip to Tibet, I decided to call this year (hopefully the first of many) “the year of living curiously”. It means that I’m elevating curiosity as a driving force in my life; that I’m going to follow my curiosity wherever it takes me, on a much bigger scale than I have in the past. Frankly, curiosity has never steered me wrong. So I’m taking it as a guiding principle.

On Saturday, after shooting Ann & Matt’s wedding reception, I did a shoot with Nidhi, of Nidhi & Nick’s wedding fame. We did a couple of location shoots that are providing fodder for some Photoshop work–Nidhi is a super-talented illustrator and I want to show her at illustration-size. At the end we drove to three different grocery stores looking for proper cupcakes so we could realize my vision for a shoot of Nidhi eating a cupcake. I’m not sure why…maybe just because she’s fun, and cupcakes are fun.

When I get these all put together into “3 Views of Nidhi”, they’ll be here.

I have:

1. A (possibly unhealthy) love of numbers
2. A photographic memory
3. A brain that likes to think about about patterns

…so, I’ve decided to see if I can learn the first 1,000 primes by printing them out and keeping them on my dresser for awhile. I want to see how well I can do at this without actually studying. I don’t intend to memorize them in a “recite the first 1,000 primes” kind of way–I would rather be able to answer “is this number prime?” up to 7,919 (the 1,000th prime). Well really, I should be able to answer it up to 7,918, since even numbers can’t be prime.

Speaking of which, the first way to narrow down the answer to that question is by looking at the last digit of the number. All even numbers are divisible by 2 and therefore not prime. All numbers ending in 5 (or 0) are divisible by 5 and therefore not prime. So all prime numbers (higher than 5) must end in 1, 3, 7, or 9. It’s also fairly easy to decide if a number is divisible by 3, narrowing it down further. I’m interested in looking at digit frequency in primes using different base systems, just because I’m curious.

The list of the first 1,000 primes is after the jump.

I’m finally getting handy with masks, adjustment layers, and hand-painting in Photoshop. Of course I’ve already been doing color/contrast correction and cropping with my photos, but it’s about time I learn how to do more interesting things via computer. Here’s one:

I’m interested in combining my background in interior design with my current interest in photography. So I’ve been reviewing books and magazines to figure out some of the elements of good interior photography. Here’s a list of tips I’ve come up with. There are plenty of tips on lighting interiors out there, so I skipped that and looked at composition and viewpoint. Some of these may be obvious to experienced photographers, but as I’m not one, they’re all news to me…

1. Feel free to overexpose and blow out the windows. It makes it look like a room is flooded in white.
2. Symmetrical scenes should be shot as evenly as possible
3. Shoot from the corner of a room, with the camera waist- to shoulder-height, to make the room look as large as possible
4. In general you want to shoot from the height where a seated person’s head would be; from the bottom half of the available height. This makes the ceiling look heigher and the floor look longer (deeper)
5. Shoot scenes with lots of right angles with the longest possible lens to minimize distortion. If you can’t get back far enough, shoot them on an angle with greater depth of field
6. Detail shots should be composed more artistically
7. Don’t be afraid to show either a) the rug, or b) the ceiling light fixture (in fact, showing the ceiling fixture is better than not)
8. If showing the view outside the windows, it should either be shot with a lower depth of field so that it’s out of focus, or bracketed to show it in focus and properly exposed, if it’s a key element in the shot
9. Only put a person in the shot if their wardrobe is perfect and if it tells a story. This should either be an a) portrait shot, in which the person is key to the story, or b) long exposure in which the movement obscures the person’s identity. In general people want to be able to imagine themselves in the shot
10. Avoid defined shadows…use fill flash
11. In a smaller space, shoot from a lower perspective
12. It’s ok to cut furniture off (not show the whole thing)
13. In general, your height should be just high enough to show the depth on the back-most horizontal surface (except high bookshelves)
14. A shadow at the bottom of the frame creates depth and anchors the picture
15. Hardware and details make great artistic closeup shots. Some good possibilities for these (there are many more): door knobs, tiebacks, drawer pulls, faucets, light switches, dishes, games, textures, chair seats
16. Generally, shoot on a tripod with a high f-stop for a high depth of field (although this is a rule that was made to be carefully broken)
17. Vary the color palette, but stay in the same family of colors within the same home (paint a palette by editing)
18. When scale is interesting, try adding a person
19. Use the rule of thirds, but if you show the ceiling/floor/wall corners, consider thirds inside those lines as well
20. If you choose an extreme angle (higher/lower camera position), use a lower depth of field to accentuate this, within reason. The far walls should be in focus
21. In perspective shots, make sure there’s something in the frame to define the vanishing point from both the top and the bottom (the vanishing point should be within the vertical space of the frame)

My big disappointment here is that I didn’t realize these things years ago. Here are some photos of my apartments over the years…which look like snapshots, because they are. Never again!

Nick & Nidhi are getting married tomorrow, so today, they had a mehndi–everyone came by and we all got our hands/feet/arms painted in henna. Nidhi’s were the most spectacular, of course. This was my first time with this–so interesting and beautiful, and great company to boot…

This is what the mehndi looks like after it’s just been painted on. After it dries, it’s dabbed with a mix of lemon juice and sugar to bring out the color; later, the henna flakes off, leaving the stain on the skin, which lasts for 2-3 weeks.