Good things in little packages

Thank you for all your kind words and encouragement yesterday. I haven't had a chance to respond to all your comments, but I read and appreciate every single one of them. I am especially honored to get a link shoutout by the amazing Jane of Ill Seen, Ill Said.

This past month, I participated in the spring photo swap co-run by the lovely ladies of the sweet light and lucent imagery. I was paired up with Danielle Lemoyne and it was funny because I thought I recognized her name. Sure enough, we had once interacted over Etsy back in the summer of 2009. Small photo world.

I received Danielle's beautiful package (from France!) and had to share. It was so delicately put together with a gorgeous pink ribbon, paper cutouts of cherry blossoms and a seriously heartstring-tugging sweet note. Along with her lovely cherry blossom print, Danielle was kind enough to include cherry blossom-scented L'Occitane hand cream (love this brand) and a few packets of Japanese green tea "delicately evoking cherry blossom." (Yeah... no theme here, nope.) What a lucky partner I am, eh? :)

Enjoy your weekends!

A new space to call my own

The reason for this unusually early post today is that I'm very happy to share with you the official launch of my website and portfolio. Finally! I couldn't even sleep last night, I was so anxious about it and proceeded to have nightmares about a host of website bugs.

Thank you all for your always encouraging and supportive words. Whether you've shouted out to me on twitter, or sent me a flickrmail, or chatted me on gtalk when I was feeling frustrated about my progress, or commented on this blog, or sent me an email (or even if you're just a lurker here!) - your words definitely helped push me through the some 30+ hours spent working on this over the past week. And a huge special thank you to Jimmy, who stayed up even later than I did last weekend to help me with the coding and who worked tirelessly through all the kinks to make sure everything looked perfect. When I gave up, he persisted. I really can't thank him enough.

Click above to get to the main site, or you can just direct yourself to my portfolio.

I faced a lot of challenges when I was putting together my portfolio. One was the typical photographer catch-22 dilemma in that the photos I most want to display (that is, professionally styled food and interior shoots and more official restaurant shoots) aren't going to happen until I have the right portfolio to attract those kinds of jobs. But I can't get the right portfolio without having had those kinds of jobs to begin with! And thus, my portfolio consists of rather candid, "unofficial" shots... for now, at least (I hope!).

Two was that I decided to display only portrait format shots and only shots that complemented another to tell a more complete story. Sometimes I felt I had a great standalone shot but I had to scrap it because it just didn't fit with something else. Other times I would put two shots side by side that I felt could work, but going back to it a few hours later, it just felt bizarre and not right. So I scrapped those too. I had to remind myself constantly not to get too attached to an idea or image.

Three was that I am very disorganized when it comes to photo storage. Multiple drives with multiple folders for my pictures. Things calmed down after I got Lightroom, but everything before that is a mess. Part of what took so long was painstakingly finding old folders and hunting down specific images from a few years ago that I knew I would want to visit. On a similar note, I really wished I had shot in RAW back in the day. (That is advice to you all out there still shooting in JPEG!)

I know the hard work, setbacks and challenges don't end here. I know how competitive this space is and how many stunning portfolios there are out there. One of my career goals is to shoot a printed cookbook and I will remain thoughtfully optimistic - here's to even harder work and hoping for more exciting things in the future. Hope you'll stick around!

In all their out-of-focus glory

It was a bit of wishful thinking on my part that maybe after a few months of neglect, the Canon EOS 3 would work properly again. Lemme sum up the issue - the camera took a tumble onto tile floor back in January, the 50mm f1.8 died, and the camera seemed superficially ok until I realized the focus was just a tad off in every picture. It seemed to be focusing on stuff behind what I intended it to focus on. I was feeling hopeful anyway, and I had a few rolls of 35mm film left and wanted to give it one more try.

Last Friday (a glorious day off), I brought the camera to Brooklyn and shot though two rolls of Fuji 400H (I do love this film but sadly wasted it on these OOF shots). Let's admire what these pictures could have been, shall we? Although at this small size, it's hard to really tell...

First up, we have Cafe Pedlar, a kind of bare-bones cafe with only so-so light unless you grab the tables by the windows. I was mildly disappointed because I think I had built it up in my head to be a really charming cafe with fantastic light, but there actually wasn't much that stood out there.

Jimmy orders a cortado 95% of the time, and I almost always go with a drip or cappuccino. The coffee was fine. The giant biscuit with jelly was even better. We still wanted a proper lunch though so Yelp led us to a place a few blocks away called Ted & Honey.

This place was adorable! Stray newspapers on the communal tables, wooden furniture galore, and exposed brick walls - yes, yes and yes. It was a bit crowded so I didn't go all out shooting, but it was really cute and cozy.

I noticed Cobble Hill (the Brooklyn neighborhood we were in) was chock-full of beautiful brownstones with enviably large windows. When I was a freshman in college, I dreamed very specifically of owning one of these... I obviously had no intention of being a photographer back then because I had ambitions to make millions. Oh well, sorry, Mom and Dad. :P