Found a WordPress app for the iPad. I still can’t seem to find anything that will let me insert photos from flickr and format them, though.
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Vermont Craft and Cuisine – Day 4, Part 2: The rest of our day
After our hours at the Shelburne museum, we met up with our group in the parking lot. Alanna, our fearless guide, had made a side trip to the hardware store while we toured the museum, and greeted us with a very welcome spray bottle filled with cold water as we loaded back into the van. From there, we drove over to New Haven, VT to visit the Lincoln Peak Vineyard and Winery for a wine tasting.
vineyards from the winery porch
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Vermont Craft and Cuisine – Day 4, Part 1: The Shelburne Museum
The first thing we did on Thursday was to head back to Shelburne to visit the Shelburne museum. I don’t actually have any photos of the museum. It was hot, I was still sort of sleepy, and we spent much of our time in exhibits that didn’t allow photography anyway.
Going into it without having read much about the museum, I was expecting it to be sort of centered around recreations of old Vermont historic sites. I figured out pretty quickly that I’d completely underestimated the place as I looked over the map. The museum itself was founded in 1947 by Electra Havemeyer Webb, and actually consists of 39 buildings. Many of the buildings are actual historic buildings that were relocated to the museum grounds and arranged in a sort of village complete with rolling landscape and gardens. Others are recreations or built to house specific collections.
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Vermont Craft and Cuisine – Day 3
Wednesday was set to be the longest day of our trip, with a bunch of driving and a selection of stops sure to please a whole variety of people. We all got a lot of knitting done on Wednesday, and my post is shorter than for other days because we spent more of our time driving than on other days, but we still managed to fit in multiple interesting destinations.
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Vermont Craft and Cuisine – Day 2
Tuesday dawned a bit hazy, and even hotter than Monday. Matt and I both woke up unusually early, so in an unusual fit of vigor we hit the gym before breakfast. I figured half an hour on the elliptical machine was a small price to pay for not allowing myself to feel guilty about the gorging I was planning for the rest of the day! After we’d worked out and showered, we headed to the tavern to trade in our breakfast vouchers for continental breakfast. I had a very tasty granola prepared by the chefs at the resort, plus toast, coffee and juice. The granola was so filling, full of toasted nuts, seeds and oats, that I was barely able to finish half of it! Matt had toast with a yogurt and granola parfait with his tea and juice.
Then it was back to the van, and off to our first stop of the day. For Tuesday, we rearranged the seating in the van a bit so that our hop aboard tour guide, Lillian, could join us for the day. We knit our way through the drive over to Shelburne Farms, while Lillian told us a bit about the history of Vermont and I wondered whether I’d survive tromping around the farm all morning in the heat that was growing steadily more oppressive. On our arrival at the farm, Lillian switched out with one of the farm guides and to my pleasant surprise we embarked on an air conditioned driving tour of the farm.
view of the farms from the family manor
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Vermont Craft and Cuisine – Day 1
For vacation this year, Matt and I decided to latch on to a tour being organized by one of my acquaintances through a local fiber guild. She runs a small-scale tour business called Tactile Travel, which specializes in tours geared toward textile hobbyists and food enthusiasts. When we heard that she was planning an excursion to Vermont to sample local cuisine and explore the history and fiber offerings of the area we said (quite literally), “Sign us up!”
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My Personal Cat
One of the nice side effects of Project 365 (into month 3 now, and still going well!) is that I end up with a lot of photos that don’t make the blog that I wouldn’t have taken if I wasn’t spending a lot of time with my camera every week. Claws is easy to photograph, and quite personable, so I end up with a lot of pictures of him. Tabi is harder to take photos of; her all-black fur casts weird shadows and reflections, and shows every bit of dust she picks up rolling around under the bed. She also has a naughty tendency to run at me and try to put her nose all over the lens when I want to take her picture!
I think that my photo class and my increasing familiarity has helped in at least some of these respects (we didn’t cover “preventing nose-prints on your lens” in class), which results in much better pictures of the cat who loves me best. I’m pretty pleased to have these, because Claws usually gets a lot of attention for his eye-catching (sorry, Claws) appearance, and Tabi tends to fall by the wayside even though she was the first cat I had that was truly “my” cat. A lot of people look at pictures of Tabi and pronounce her “scary” or “alien-like” because it’s pretty hard to capture her furry, goofy personality in photos between the difficulty of lighting her and catching her being herself without having her get distracted and run over to be petted and inspect my camera.
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A Story
For my final photography assignment, I had to tell a story in 6-12 photos. Below is my story in 9 (I like averaging).
Recipe for Lemon Love Buns from King Arthur Flour.
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Project 365: One Month Retrospective
With my photo of the sunset yesterday, I marked the successful completion of the first month of Project 365. Out of 31 days in January, I took at least one photo every day. So far, the project is at once both easier and more difficult than I expected.
Day 8 was the only day last month that I only took one photo. It was a busy day, I ended up working late, skipped a knitting guild meeting, met Matt for a late dinner and snapped one photo outside in the freezing cold while walking back to the car. The rest of the days left me with a selection of photos to choose from, even if the selection was sort of strange. I’ve learned that it’s not so hard to tote my camera everywhere, and I’m becoming more comfortable with pausing to pull out the camera when I see something interesting rather than worrying whether I’m in the way, if people will think I’m weird and touristy…or wondering if I’ll freeze to death.
I ran into two main problems while working on my project in January. The first is seasonal and, while out of my control, I probably should have anticipated it. The month of January in Boston is a pretty dark month. We have short days and long nights this time of year, and I spend most of my daylight hours in an office.
As a result, I found myself sitting at home with my camera on many an evening wishing for better indoor lighting and more hours of daylight. I took a lot of still life photos this month so that I could slow down the shutter speed and let in as much light as possible. January is very heavy on macro shots and pictures of random things around the house. I learned that I hate how my camera captures most colors at ISO 1600 (darks and blacks all seem to pick up grainy blue stripes instead of clear colors – I’m just not a fan of noise, especially in color photos), and strived to keep my ISO set to 800 or lower to cut down on unsightly noise artifacts in my photos. This meant rather slow shutter speeds indoors if I wanted to photograph anything more lively than a book.
The other problem that I’ve been working through is creative inspiration. Again, I should have known that coming up with a creative photo every day would quickly become difficult, but when embarking on this project I thought more about the challenge of learning about my camera than I thought about finding subjects to put in front of it.
I told myself that I wanted to keep photos of cats and knitting related items to a minimum because it feels like an easy way out. I’ve had more of those items than I’d like in the past month of photos, but when I do resort to the “easy” subjects I’m trying to think of different ways to see them (sometimes more successfully than others).
I’ve really been enjoying this aspect of the challenge because I feel like even more than basic camera skills, this is an area where I already feel myself growing from the experience of this challenge.
To be fair, some days when I feel uninspired, I end up with a photo of a plecostomus fish belly in the tank at the local sushi joint that just doesn’t scream inspiration to me. On the other hand, some of my favorite photos from the last month are direct results of evenings where I’m not feeling the creative spark. This is a photo I took on one of my least inspired evenings in January:
In desperation from the low-light situation, I turned on the spotlights and fiber optic lamps in our china cabinet, and started snapping anything in the china cabinet that looked remotely interesting. If I hadn’t been wracking my brain to think of an interesting shot for Project 365, I never would have taken this photo because I would have been sitting on the couch watching House instead of wandering around the dining room with a camera glued to my face.
So far, that’s the coolest thing I’m taking from this experience – I’m working on trying to see everyday items in a more interesting way through my camera lens, and I’ve had some good breakthroughs. I’m really looking forward to the next 11 months!
You can see the rest of my photos from January by visiting either my Project 365 Blog (larger photos) or my Flickr set.
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