Details

My favourite kind of photos to take are the ones of the little things. I've been putting together an iPhoto album of the pictures Dave and I took in the Rockies, and the detail shots are the ones that make the multi-photo layouts work.

Detail shots from a birthday picnic in the park:

Details from out west:

Another Harebrained Scheme

I'm not a baker in even the loosest interpretation of the word. I've forgotten to put milk in cake mix and wondered why my batter is the consistency of fudge. That said, I do like a challenge and an opportunity to do something that people say is hard. (This approach didn't seem to apply to my undergraduate math classes. Calculus and algebra were not fun challenges).

One of my favourite blogs is CakeWrecks. I love looking at all the disaster cakes, but also enjoy the showstopping "sunday sweets" cakes that were done right. CakeWrecks has an annual affiliation with Threadless, the user-designed t-shirt store that made buying Christmas gifts for my brothers that much easier. The result: Threadcakes. The mission: render any Threadless t-shirt design in cake.

One of last year's winners.

Obviously, this is the sort of thing I could pull off, right?

I don't know if I'll ever do it, but if I do, this is the design I picked:

Threadless tee "No Repeats"

I'm picturing a square cake carved in half with fondant on top. I can add the darker details with food colouring paint, the highlights with a combination of icing and cane sugar for sparkle. The snowflake could be constructed by piping an icing that hardens on to waxed paper (even with a template underneath to trace) with a few stakes out the side to anchor it into the cake. No clue how I'd make little men though...

Mardi Gras...?

Mardi Gras - also known as Fat Tuesday, Shrove Tuesday, and Pancake Tuesday - is more than just a wicked party in New Orleans. It marks the beginning of Lent, a time of fasting before Easter, and so is always in the spring. Apparently, it is also at the beginning of July in Montreal.

The Festival International du Jazz comes to a close today, and they have put together a Mardi Gras parade .... because it's Tuesday? And New Orleans - which is all about jazz - celebrates it spectacularly?

I think it might just be because Montreal loves a party. I like walking home and seeing this guy driving down my street:

Followed by the biggest marionette ever suspended from a crane:

These photos were all on my phone during the last couple of blocks of my walk home. I have 20 minutes to decide if I want to grab my SLR and try to get some better shots before the parade gets underway...

I want to be a fashion photographer now

I came across this really cool video on fstoppers.com:



And then watched a bunch of the other photography shoot videos. Why are there so many cool jobs that don't make you work for five years on a doctoral degree? Why don't they tell you about them in highschool?

If you go to the fstoppers site, make sure you watch the video about shooting at a 15K-a-night suite in Vegas. Incredible.