Author: iampotassium

I said, didja hair me?!

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Typical Potassium hair (flower not guaranteed)…

So let’s try a slightly less photography related entry. Weddings. Oh man… Wedding planning is unlike anything I have ever experienced. Every day there seem to be more details I realize I should be thinking about. I mean, generally they are actually important (like shoes for the bridesmaids and such… probably pretty important…) but I just am not used to planning basically a huge party where I (or me and Cobalt… or just Cobalt) have to make all the decisions. So the other day, my friend asked me how I am going to wear my hair and I realized I should actually probably look into that seeing as my hair usually sees two different styles: up (ponytail or bun… sometimes two buns when I’m feeling especially awake in the mornings) and down (straight or curly, mostly curly because I have a lot of hair and it takes hours to straighten).

Anyway, after feeling panic/confusion (trying to imagine what my hair would look like “fancy”), I decided to check out some websites and look up wedding hair.

It’s a fairly new territory for me. Also, a territory that seems to omit people with my kind of hair (the crazy curly kind, which is why it usually remains contained and hidden in a ponytail), which worries me slightly. Most bridal pictures I see have girls with their hair straightened and then recurled. This style confuses me because my hair is already curly. Why would I straighten it just to curl it again? That sounds like a lot of work…. and hours in front of a mirror. And the other thing is that I am weird and I actually LIKE my curly hair. Now that I actually know how to contain it, I think it’s pretty easy to get it to do what I want. So again, not really feeling the straightening just to recurl thing. I am worried I would lose some part of me in that whole process…

And then besides the curly vs. straight question, there’s up vs. down! How do people choose these things? I feel really ungirly right now… :-/ Does anyone have any neat suggestions for naturally curly hair?

Lights and Darks

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One of my favorite things about living in Colorado is that sometimes we get AMAZING sunrises and sunsets where the whole sky looks like it’s on fire. Here’s an example of an incredible sunrise we got a few weeks ago. I woke up because my whole room was bright red!
Anyway, this picture also brings to mind an idea I learned in photography class – about photography being a mission to capture the contrast between light and dark. I like this picture because I think it effectively does that – the bright and dark spots in the clouds and the dark trees. Looks neat I think.
Speaking of missions – I am thinking about changing the focus (hehe photography joke) of my blog. Maybe making it more general. I haven’t been posting as much recently because with work and wedding planning and life, I have not had very much time to go out and take pictures, much less organize them according to the rules I am supposed to be following every day. I am thinking of just making it more general (a broader focus if you will) to include other aspects of my life – such as: planning my wedding (I am sure you are all thrilled about that), other artsy things I have been up to (a lot of crochet mostly), etc so that I will be able to post more. Thoughts?

Tale as old as Time

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Cobalt and I saw Beauty and the Beast at the movie theater tonight. It was amazing, particularly because it has been over 10 years since I last saw it. With that movie and Cobalt and I working hard on planning our wedding, love has been on my mind a lot. Apparently love has also been on the mind of our insane Mayan Love Pepper plant which didn’t decide to sprout fruit until long after it started snowing outside. We’ve been dutifully taking care of it, letting it sit in the sun inside our warm house and putting it outside during any warm days. Cobalt even took it home over the holidays to make sure it was happy! Then yesterday, we noticed that one of its only two peppers had turned red, a sign that it is ripe. Just goes to show that you can always find love in the most unexpected of places, in the form of a beautiful girl falling in love with a hideous beast or even in the form of ripe heart shaped peppers in the middle of winter…

Fourth Week of Advent

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I know… it’s been a LONG time since I wrote in here. I apologize for that. Grad school sucks up your creativity and time sometimes. Sad days.
Anyway, I am incredibly proud of this picture. So proud that I got on here and posted it for you all to see! Basically, I’ve been playing with the shapes of out of focus lights. I thought of it last week when we were at Denver zoo’s ZooLights and I had the f stop (depth of field) set very very low (higher sensitivity to light but very low depth of field… means that things not directly in the field of focus are not very much in focus). I noticed how easy it was to get any lights in the background to be big round dots and I thought it would be fun to try to change their shapes! So here we have all four advent candles lit and shining in the shape of stars… Stay tuned for more starry pictures…

Who goes there?

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One of my favorite things about the day after it snows is how shiny and pristine the snow looks when the sun finally comes out. This morning, I looked out my bedroom window to look at the prettiness that is our backyard covered in snow and noticed these tracks! Who crept through our backyard last night?! Was it our neighbors’ friendly cat Henry? Or was it some other creature of the night, creeping around in the snow drift? :)

So warm…

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Apparently we decided to skip a proper fall season this year in Boulder. The trees finally turned yellow and orange and then it promptly snowed. We got another chance at fall weather this weekend but now it looks like we’re going to get more snow tonight and tomorrow. It’s sooooo much colder today than it was yesterday (70 yesterday, 36 today) so I had to get all bundled up to walk to the bus stop. In honor of all the bundling, I am posting a picture of one of the crocheted creatures I’ve recently made. This is my whale amigurumi (Japanese for a knitted or crocheted stuffed animal!) all curled up in the hood of Cobalt’s hoodie from a few weekends ago. Maybe I will post more amigurumi pictures later in the week…

Happy Halloween!!

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Happy Monday. Today’s pictures: pumpkins. Yep. It’s Halloween. This one on top is my T-rex pumpkin. He is just so cute that I had to take a BUNCH of pictures of him. To be fair though, I also posted the pumpkin that Cobalt carved because it looks AWESOME all lit up…

Happy Halloween everyone! I hope your day/night is filled with ghosts and ghouls and BATS!! :):):)

Halloween wedding

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Halloween’s coming up so I thought it would be fitting to have a Halloween themed post today. Also, I thought it’d be kind of cute if my Tuesday and Thursday posts (my “free” days) were wedding themed this week. So we get this picture, taken at The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO (known for its association with The Shining), which is all decorated for Halloween. There were pumpkin scarecrows everywhere! These two were my favorite because 1) yesssss I am planning my own wedding so I have a strange affinity for weddings right now but mostly 2) the sun was shining down on them in such a neat way that I just had to take a ton of pictures of them. So cute… Halloween bride and groom! Congrats guys! ;)

Black and White: Snow Shark

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First snow storm of the season rolled in last night and continues right now! It is always so crazy for me to see the trees all bent over due to all the weight of the snow! Actually, the first snow is kind of a conflicting experience for me. On the one hand, I am mesmerized by the beauty of white flakes everywhere. I love to curl up with a book and some hot chocolate and watch the snow swirling around outside. On the other hand, SNOW IS COLD. AND WET. And makes the buses run late. So as soon as I have to go outside in it to get to work, my love for it quickly dwindles… Sad…
Anyway, this is my shark Scrarmpl enjoying the first snow…