It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year

So I am very horribly late on this post. That's because my last week looked like this:

Disaster area

That's right. It's grant writing season around here for us academics. (Read: Time for all-nighters. And you thought having a degree meant we would have learned how to avoid that in college. Really it just means we have a degree in being proficient in it.)

Self-portrait in what remains of my coffee

Unfortunately, grant writing means I read a lot of articles. (Read: I stare at anything except what I'm supposed to be reading.)

View from my stationary post of two weeks.

But I still managed to squeeze out a few pictures. In this last week's photos, I tried to be more cognizant of my framing. My friend Darwin and I must have been on the same wavelength, since he talked about the rule of thirds on his photography website's blog last week. Please go by to check out his amazing photographs and support his new venture!

The cloud formations also reminded me of Alfred Stieglitz's Equivalents.

Sometimes you have to take what you can get. But even with the ability to easily retouch digital photos, it's still better to get it right the first time. Especially with the last photo, I should have been more aware of how tilted the photograph was. I love the color of the sky in the last one, but I feel that the floating chandelier effect is ruined from being off-centered. Another photo did yield a more centered floating chandelier and was able to be cropped and tilted, but the sky had already changed dramatically by then.

Some rudimentary post-processing in Photoshop to reproduce the original sky was unsuccessful, but I like the result that did come out of it. I do plan on revisiting this photo though when I become more versed at post-processing photos. (Read: When I get the grant *crosses fingers* and have more "time.")