Tag: photography

Reflections on a busy week

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WOW! It’s been a while since I wrote. Thanks grad school for making my life insane for a bit there. It’s funny. I am done with all my qualifying exams and my classes so all I have left to graduate is “just” research. That’s right. Do enough research to be able to publish two scientific papers on new findings and then I can graduate! If only it were that easy… Sometimes the “just research” part of grad school is awesome. You go in, get your work done, you go home, no sweat. Life is great. Sometimes the “just research” part is insane… so insane it makes you wish you still had classes left because at least classes have a finite length and obvious expectations (write this paper? DONE. Study for and take this test? DONE… vs… I looked at bacteria under a microscope for HOURS and I took HUNDREDS OF PICTURES and I still have NO idea what anything means… Whyyyyyyyyyyyy?). Anyway, you get it. Plus we packed up our whole lab and moved it a mile away into a new building. There was some moving drama in there last week too.

ANYWAY – I have been really sad that I haven’t been able to write recently. So much stuff has been going on AND I got tagged by Karyl to write a post on marriage and I am worried that she thinks I forgot about it. Don’t worry Karyl, I’ve been thinking about it all week and I hopefully will be able to finally publish my thoughts tomorrow or Thursday this week! Yay! So, I talked about grad school being dumb and moving being time consuming… What have else I been up to, you ask?

Well, besides apparently freaking out small children at church on Sunday, here are a few things I did since the last time I wrote.

1) Had really good barbecue in Longmont, CO. Seriously. Amazing. Best BBQ I’ve had so far in the state. Go check them out. Obviously skip this recommendation if you are a vegetarian.

2) Moved the lab – already talked about this but here are some pictures:

Old Lab – see that big thing of pink bubble wrap? It was probably 3 times as big when we got it and then we used it and another whole roll up moving all our fragile stuff… intense… There is nothing worse than trying to get lab tape off of bubble wrap for your information…


New Lab – my new bench bubble wrap free! In other new lab news, I learned today that it is about a 2 mile bike ride to the new building and it is almost alllll downhill on the way there. Fun times coming home this summer… :-/

3) Saw President Obama speak at my school. Regardless of your politics, how cool is it to get to see a president speak in person? Obama pictures in a minute. I just want to emphasize on here that part of the awesomeness of all of this was actually all the waiting in line to get into the events center.


We had to wait for the bus…


In the line, we had a race across a random patch of grass/compared our weird feet/did other silly things. If you look closely in the top left hand corner, you can see the line behind us…


We were all distracted by this helicopter that we thought Obama was in but then he drove right past us…


Obama on the jumbo screen of the events center. I’d say that’s a typical Obama face…


Live Obama and jumbo screen Obama in the same shot! Because our lab move day was the same day as Obama’s speech and because that was the same day my boss decided to tell me how much data analysis she needed me to do in the next few days, we didn’t get to get in line until later in the afternoon so we didn’t get the most amazing of seats. But you can still see Obama!

4) Took a road trip with Cobalt to see his family

On the road again… Cobalt and I enjoyed rocking out to crazy mashups (courtesy of Milkman) as we drove along…

Anything exciting going on in your lives? Do you obsessively photograph everything like I do? Discuss!

On the docket for tomorrow (hopefully… or Thursday… sorrrrrrrry) – What do I look forward to in my marriage? Stay tuned. It should be exciting… I have been thinking about what to say for a week now…

Shark Photographs

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So yeah…. I know I usually post a wedding Wednesday post today or actually on Wednesday but this week you are getting shark photos instead. Yeah… I know… not as cool… But I have been so busy helping pack/clean our lab for our big lab move next week that I haven’t even had time to think about a wedding Wednesday post or even think about our wedding. Craziness… All I know is that I have spent waaaaay too much time packing boxes of stuff/cleaning items in the lab with 10% bleach so the movers won’t be afraid to touch them (we have to decontaminate all our instruments and put a green sticker on them to prove their cleanliness before the movers will move things)… but at least the packing is going well. I think we’re ahead of schedule!
In slight wedding news, our invitations are coming along nicely. Our friend T has been making progress and the invitations look awesome so far!!! :D

Anyway, without further ado, sharks! I took these pictures with my new iPhone! First is Gustav and second is Scrarmpl:

Which is your favorite picture? I think Scrarmpl looks annoyed about being second… What is your favorite app for the iPhone if you have one? What is something that takes up all your time so you feel like you can’t focus on the stuff that you want to get done (*coughs* for me it’s cleaning/packing/lab in general getting in the way of wedding planning/sleeping/lurking *coughs*)

One year and a letter

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Dear Cobalt,
As you know, a year ago today (April 16, 2011), you proposed to me! I can’t believe it’s been a year. It seems like it was just yesterday we were standing on that mesa in New Mexico, me thinking about lunch (>_<) and you nervous about the proposal. Then you started to talk and I was so clueless about what was going on until halfway through and then so !!!! about what was going on after that that I don't remember what you said! You told me later that you don't really remember what you said either so I guess it's up to the winds of New Mexico to remember that part…
Anyway, you proposed and I said yes and then we sat there on the edge of that mesa feeling nervous but also excited as we planned our future together looking out as far as the eye can see at red New Mexico…
I just want you to know, despite how stressful planning this wedding has been and despite how crazy our jobs are making us, how much I love you and how excited I am for August 4th. I am so excited for us to be together forever and for all the fun adventures we will have in the coming years. :)
Love,
Potassium

Picture by Holly Carlyle Photography.

Easter Balloons

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For Easter Sunday this year, we were invited to my friend J’s family’s house. We had a really nice time. The best part was of course seen J’s adorable niece A. When we got there, A and her daddy were blowing up balloons. Daddy was working on A’s shyness by having her give each one of us a balloon (shown here: instructions on who to give the next balloon to). It was fairly dry so we all ended up looking a bit like this with our balloons (shown here: my friend M!):

Hahaha… It was kind of fun. Anyway, below is my favorite picture of A playing in her sandbox after dinner:

It was sooooo fun taking pictures of A! I felt like I really got back into my photography groove. What’s something that you enjoy doing to relax? Do you like doing things that challenge you? Or do you like being lazy? Or both?

Seeing Stephen Hawking

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Seeing Stephen Hawking on last week’s Big Bang Theory episode reminded me that it’s been five years since I had the privilege of seeing Stephen Hawking speak in person. Craziness how much time flies… Here’s my picture documenting the incident. I was pretty much in awe the whole time; Stephen Hawking is kind of like a rock star to me… Sadly, unlike Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory, I didn’t get to talk to Stephen Hawking about my theories on the Higgs Boson particle… ;)

I hope you all had awesome weekends. Did anyone do anything awesome for Easter? Who is one of your personal ‘rock stars’ (or real rock stars)? Have you met him/her?

Four Month Update

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Crazy that in 4 months it will be August and 4 months from today, Cobalt and I will be married for one day! That means we have a little over 3 months left to prepare. So I thought I would discuss some of the things we have been working on lately. Most of the big things are out of the way so it’s just on to the little details. THERE ARE SO MANY DETAILS. Just letting you know in case you didn’t already know.

Details (in no apparent order):

  1. Where/when to have the bachelor/bachelorette parties
    Our wedding is pretty much a destination wedding for most of the guests, excluding anyone who actually lives in my home town, so we thought it would be mean to have a separate weekend/location for parties. We’ve currently planned to frolic in San Francisco with our guests at our respective parties (we have yet to determine whether they will meet up) a few days before the wedding. That way everyone (including Cobalt and me) only has to travel once. As for the details of the parties… eh… not so much yet. We just wanted to nail down a day at least so our guests could start to book their plane tickets/hotel reservations.

  2. Where Cobalt and I are staying the night of our wedding
    Yeah… we really should figure that one out…

  3. Registry
    This one is almost done. In fact, I even posted our registries on the wedding website… though we are still updating one of them as we remember more things. Whew. Thanks Lauren for suggesting Myregistry.com to us! :)

  4. Rings
    Are still driving us crazy. We have decided to get matching titanium rings from Minter and Richter but we have had a hard time deciding exactly which rings we want and an even harder time getting sized for them. Since they are titanium, they can’t really be resized (but they will make you a new ring for 50% off if you need to change your size) so we really want to have the rings fit (well duh…). Back in February when we were visiting Cobalt’s family, we went and got our fingers sized at the local jewelers. Then a few weeks ago, we went to a jewelers here because someone (me) forgot their size (sorrrrrrry). They measured both of our fingers again and the sizes were completely different than the ones we got earlier. So yeah… Mysterious. Minter and Richter actually sell a ring sizer. I think it’s time we buy that guy!

  5. Ceremony
    Actually is outlined! We have a good idea of how we want it to run and we have two offiants (cuz we’re special like that. ;)). Now we just need to figure out the details (sooooo many…) like vow-writing, songs we want, what to do about music (live vs. recorded), etc. Woot.

  6. Flowers
    Cobalt and I are getting married in a garden (see above picture – that’s what it looks like in August… and why we pretty much fell in love with the place instantly) so we are not investing too much time and energy into flowers. I have contacted a florist about the availability and pricing of the flowers I want in my bouquet (anemones) and the flowers I want my bridesmaids to hold (Stargazer lilies) but they are not responding… So I think I should probably get on that…

  7. Gifts
    Cobalt has ordered his groomsmen their gifts but I am still having issues finding the perfect gift(s) for my girls. I just want to get something both special and meaningful but also useful/something that they will actually wear/use, you know? Blahhhhh… Back to the searching. Sorry I can’t talk much about it but I know that some of our groomsmen and bridesmaids actually read this blog (hi! and Thanks for reading!). We also need to put our heads together about gifts for our families. Ooooo…

  8. Centerpieces, favors, etc
    Still thinking fortune cookies for the favors but they will probably be felt instead of crochet because then Cobalt can actually help me make them. Centerpieces… BLAHHHHHHHH… yeah… that goes into the category of things that we should think about… also table numbers and seating charts. Everything table related, really…

  9. Wedding Showers
    I have two lined up. One in my home town and one in Cobalt’s home town. Getting to Cobalt’s home town is drivable so we actually have a date set for that one. Need to set a date for the other one but I’ve been kind of waiting for an airline sale so I can actually get to it… >_<

  10. Honeymoon
    Cobalt and I are too poor to afford a honeymoon after this crazy wedding. We hope that one day we can go to France and also New York City (in the same trip preferably) but for now, we are thinking about chilling for a few days around my home town and maybe going ziplining through the redwoods. Oooooo…

What was your favorite detail to plan for your wedding? Or if you’re not married, what are you the most excited about planning? Anyone want to finish planning our wedding?! :D Do you have anything you’d like us to talk about in future wedding Wednesday posts? Any questions about how we did something or how far along we are with planning something?

PS – Garden update: now we have THREE lemon cucumber sprouts and one spinach sprout!!!!!! :D:D:D:D:D:D (be happy I didn’t postpone the Wedding Wednesday post another day with more pictures of baby plants…)

Baby plants!

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Or at least one baby plant… This is a follow up to last Friday’s post about our garden. Look! A baby lemon cucumber has sprouted! Angelica the crocheted octopus is excited about it (and we are too)! It must have been all that warm weather we had last weekend (it was in the 80’s!). Too bad it was freezing and snowy yesterday (told you Colorado weather was weird)… Poor baby plants had to stay inside.

No worries all! Wedding Wednesday will be back on Thursday! Wedding… Thursday? I’m not sure it sounds that good but just go with it…

Skeleton bride head and such

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Skeleton bride head is excited about all the new friends I can make for her with all these fun pattern books. She just hopes that I make the rest of her body (and her veil) and possibly a skeleton groom first. They have a wedding to get to after all…

(Thanks to my sister and Cobalt’s family for the fun books! I want to quit grad school and crochet all the time now…)

Happy Birthday Dad!

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Today’s my dad’s birthday! Yay! Happy birthday Dad! Sorry I can’t be there to celebrate it with you in person but I love you and I hope you have an amazing day…
Today’s picture is a picture of my parents from last Christmas. You can see my Dad’s rocking his epic winter bear beard in this pic. Also you can see that I was playing with bokeh at the same time by turning all the lights on the tree into stars. :)

In other news, Cobalt and I planted the first few plants for our garden yesterday. I have been staring at the pots ever since waiting for the plants to sprout. I knowwwww they don’t sprout overnight but I still have the little kid in me who is so excited that she wants to watch the plants sprout right now!. Do you guys have gardens? Have you planted anything for them yet? Do you prefer flower gardens, vegetable gardens, or both?

Fun with High Dynamic Range

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In addition to hanging out with my mom and playing with my sharks last weekend, I also decided to play with a new form of photography (at least to me). HDR (high dynamic range) photography allows you to get both the bright stuff and the dark stuff in the frame to show up. You know, normally on a bright day to get your subject in focus, you have to overexpose the sky. Or to get the sky in focus, you have to underexpose anything else in the picture. So HDR is a technique where you take the same picture multiple times, changing the exposure time for each picture (I just walked down from 1/800 to 1/100 so I had 5 or so pictures at a variety of exposures). Then you use a fancy program like Photoshop to combine them all together into one image. Tada! Sky and subject are both viewable! Or in this case: the bark and the cracks between the bark on this tree are both viewable! That picture up there is from my second attempt – I had read about HDR and had played around with the HDR mode in photoshop so I knew what I wanted my pictures to look like.

This picture down below was from my first attempt when I just tried it out – no tripod, no reading up on how to do it/the best subjects, etc. I just took a few pictures at various exposure times. Because I didn’t use a tripod, I had to stick all the pictures into a program I generally use for microscopy images from work (ImageJ from NIH) to align all the images (note to self – when doing HDR work – USE A TRIPOD). ImageJ did a pretty good job though. The only things that didn’t get aligned were the clouds (note to self – when doing HDR work – DON’T PHOTOGRAPH MOVING OBJECTS… for obvious reasons! You are taking multiple pictures so when things move, they won’t line up right in the composite image!). So the clouds (and their shadows) look a little funny in this picture but there you have it: my first HDR attempt showing you the most well known sight in Boulder – the Flatirons.

Some people LOOOOOOVE HDR because of its ability to capture bright and dark things and some people hate it because they say that the midtones turn out so gray (my photography teacher said that). I didn’t like my pictures at first because Photoshop’s original HDR composite does turn out looking quite gray but then after playing with the colors a little in Photoshop using the Curves function, I think it turned out pretty neat (i.e. not gray). Thoughts? What should I try to photograph with HDR next?