Filed under: Photography by ramune

Not too long ago a friend and former coworker moved up from Louisiana with her husband and two-year old daughter, Catherine. Her husband’s birthday was last week and she asked me to take photos of Catherine as a gift to him. Since it is August and I didn’t want washed out hazy skies (or intense heat), we had to find a place that was open later than 6pm in order to get decent lighting. Luckily it was a cloudy day and we found some really lovely gardens open until sunset.

Taking photos of Catherine was fun and challenging. She is one of the best behaved two-year olds I have ever met, which made shooting her probably a lot easier than many other children her age. Having said that, two might be one of the trickiest ages to shoot. She is old enough to understand directions like “Smile” or “Look over here,” but she occasionally got antsy and tended to either look down, turn away or have that cheesy smile kids give you when they smile on command.

Here are a few of my favorite photos from the day. Strangely enough most of my them are of her not looking at the camera. It’s probably because she has a more natural expression and isn’t posing so much. More photos from the shoot can be seen here.

We didn’t realize until after the fact that we had broken several rules of the park. 1. Do not walk around barefoot. 2. Do not walk in the flowerbeds. Oops. Sometimes you have to break a few rules for the sake of photos like this . . . right?

Filed under: Ice Cream, taste by ramune

It’s been a bit since I put my ice cream maker to use and it’s already mid-August. I still have dreams of making maple bacon ice cream (soon my friends . . . soon), but I happened to have some delicious white peaches from the farmers market and found a lovely (and simple) recipe from David Lebovitz’s “The Perfect Scoop” (see my fig ice cream from last year). Although I didn’t manage to get a photo of the final product (it disappeared pretty quickly when I brought it to a friend’s place), I did enjoy learning how to easily peel the skin off of a peach. You simply put the peaches into boiling water for 20 seconds and then pour cold water on them until they cool down. It shocks the peaches and the skin rubs right off.

I plan on making the ice cream again and maybe will update this entry with an actual photo. Until then, please excuse my poor excuse for a project this week and drool over some skinned peaches.

Filed under: Enamel, Experimental, Jewelry by ramune

The other week I had my last enamels class of the summer (sadness). Because the summer session is so short, I didn’t have any grand plans for anything, but wanted to play around with a wee bit of metal forming and making earrings. I started off this particular pendant wanting it to have a nice gradient of transparent red to gray. Unfortunately while I had it in the kiln, I managed to overfire the red (this is easy to do with reds) and it became a disgusting opaque vomitous brown. I was pretty upset because before this accident the red was really quite lovely and I destroyed it so quickly. After that unfortunate moment I decided I had nothing to lose, so I intentionally continued to overfire it until it was obvious nothing else would change. It was still an object unpleasing to the eye, so I put it under the torch (weeee!). To my pleasant surprise, putting a torch to enamels in the right way gives even the most foul of colors a metallic pearlescent sheen. After playing around with this a bit I decided the piece was finally done and acceptable. This is nothing I would have intentionally created, but sometimes it’s fun to mess up and then play around with the piece until you get something else completely.