I just finished up Caroline’s amazing workshop last week (Communicating with Color and Light). I’ll have to come back sometime and post a review and before/afters of it, because it has totally changed my editing! I used to use PS solely.. now I only pull my photos into PS if I need to do some advanced cloning or extension of the canvas. Anyhow, I am finally taking a break between workshops! Ever since I took FAVE in July, I have had workshop after workshop. FAVE in July/August, MNLI in August/September, AO in September/October and CCL in October/November. They’ve all been wonderful and I feel like I have so much more confidence in my photography now. I was sorely tempted to sign up for Sarah Wilkerson’s Elements of Design, but I was in Australia during the sign up period and missed the full participation seats. Having heard of the amazingness that is Sarah’s critique, I decided I couldn’t miss out on it. It’s a good thing anyways because it’s definitely time for a break. I have CJ’s Art of Self Critique in December though, and then I am hoping to get into Kate Densmore’s new workshop in February and Composition & Creativity in March. Yeah, I’m addicted to photography workshops!

Not being in a workshop, however, means I have more time for my other hobbies! I bought Thuss & Farrell’s paper flower making book, Paper to Petal, way back when it came out, but had been putting off actually making anything. I finally sat down the morning of our housewarming and made some flowers. I discovered that floral tape is /not/ my friend! Haha! I had to reinforce all of my taping with some craft glue. But I got two flowers out of it and made a third a week later.

I also finally got around to pulling out my calligraphy stuff again! I have mostly been just practicing. I want to get in a habit of practicing for a few minutes every couple of days. I finally, finally, made Lisa’s plaque for her! I promised it to her before Australia… oops! I haven’t taken a photo yet, so I’m just going to show you the plaque I did back in June when we were on the cruise for the cutest old couple ever.

I have also been playing around with diluting my colored india ink to get a watercolor-y effect! I still haven’t quite found the optimal dilution — I ended up with ink that was wayy too watery, meaning it spread while I was writing — but I am loving the effect and think it’ll be really cool when I get it right! Pictures to come when that day comes around.

This weekend I also made it out to the Ferry Building! I absolutely love it there. The Farmer’s Market is so much fun (despite being ridiculously overpriced. Seriously. Who charges three dollars for one pear?!) Bhembe and Lysh met me there and Bhembe bought an entire roast chicken because… how can you resist an entire chicken?! Chris joined us and the four of us feasted on chicken, potatoes and pears. It was a breakfast of champions. We then went to refill my jar of garlic basil yogurt cheese and proceeded to completely blow Bhembe’s mind when we made him try it.

I also got to meet up with Ashley for dinner! It’s been months since I’ve seen her. We had a lovely dinner at Fang filled with lots of catching up and then ended up at my apartment for some ice cream and sorbet. An altogether excellent day!

A couple of weeks back, I was asked to write a blog post on therapy through self portraits for The Photographer Within. Their site should be launching soon, which I am super excited about. I will try to write up another post when it happens. In the meantime, I will leave you with the self portraits I managed to take yesterday.