Snowed In.

Winter has finally visited Michigan land. Seeing as it is January 12th I probably shouldn't complain too much, but I'm going to anyway. Not a snow fan. It's just cold and makes my life more difficult. I do want to get out and take some cool winter shots, but it's supposed to keep snowing all night and I'd rather not risk any water damage to my camera so it will have to wait. So instead of putting on as many layers as possible and trudging into snowland, I just searched around in my room for something interesting to photograph. I didn't find much, but I had fun.

Clearly I've been pretty bad about posting since my last post was in November. In lieu of not actually taking photos, I've been doing a fair amount of reading about photography. Really gearing myself up to try out some new things. For a while I was getting slightly bored/depressed with my photography because I felt like I lacked equipment, but I've come to realize equipment doesn't make a photograph. I need to learn to work with what I've got and that I can still make sweet images without all the fancy tools. I've already read my camera manual more times than I care to count and I have a good understanding of it's capabilities. I just need to get out there and practice the techniques I've read about with what tools I have(basically a camera and a tripod...so much equipment...). I'm attempting to discipline myself to just take a picture of something. Tonight I was feeling pretty lazy and just wanted to watch netflix, but I forced myself to find something interesting in my room and just photograph it. This is not a new year's resolution, I don't do those. I just decided I needed to better myself in photography and this decision just happened to come around the same time. I think I'd actually blame my motivation on college. I'm in my last semester(whew) and I'm feeling very "Get stuff done"-ish.

Ok, now after all that stuff that you most likely skimmed through because you're thinking "Hey, I come to this blog to look at your pictures Erica, and not read whatever you are blabbing about."
Picture time:
(as always click on them to go to Flickr for a larger, better quality images)

[This picture is actually old. It's from my trip to Boston fall 2011, but I edited it recently and really liked the result and now that I'm finally posting, I can actually share it.]

[These are some hand-carved wooden dominoes that I got on a vacation to Aruba back when I was in high school and had braces...]

[One of the things I found in my room and decided to play around with was a slinky. In this shot I actually put the slinky over my lens]

[Slinky over the lens take 2]

[So while looking for cool things to photograph in my room it became clear just how five years old I am, because basically all I had was this slinky, action figures, legos and various toys. But I put this little clone trooper figure inside the slinky. It looks like my lens is in the slinky, but it's not, the small depth of field helped me get this look.]

[View from the top of the slinky]

[This is an adorable Jawa toy that Lee gave me. I nicely placed him in front of my Star Wars book collection.]

[This image better illustrates just how adorable this thing is. It cracks me up.]

Progress! I am making progress.

Now I want YOU to make comments. Comments!

And this wouldn't be a typical blog post if I didn't include some random thing from the internet that I find absolutely hilarious. So here is the man who is getting my vote in the upcoming election:

Then I also want to include a song by some guys I found this fall on youtube and I think they're just awesome. They cover songs using just piano and cello and they are fantastic. Generally I could care less about Coldplay, but this cover is sweet.