Sunday Coffee – End of another RIP season

Posted on October 30, 2022 by Thistle

Technically, there’s today and another day left to finish up RIP, but it’s unlikely I’ll finish another book by then, so I’m going to wrap this up now. As has become my norm these last few years, I had good plans and then just stopped reading regularly come mid-September. I’ve said in other posts – other things have just been occupying my brain lately. In any case, I read seven books for RIP this year, if you count my two pre-September reads:

  • The Clackity
  • The House Across the Lake
  • Miss Moriarty, I Presume?
  • The Ink Black Heart
  • The Change
  • The Kiss Curse
  • Ghost 19

Several others from my original list of options turned out not to be RIP-ish even though I did read them for RIP. Several still haven’t gotten to me from the library – very long hold lines! And quite a few were culled once I tried them and decided they weren’t for me. Honestly, I wish I’d been able to get to those few library books, plus two more from Book of the Month that I simply haven’t gotten around to. Then again, I kinda read RIP-ish books year-round, don’t I? So I’m not going to save them until next season!

It’s been lovely, even if my list was very short and actually didn’t include either of the books that I’m most likely to reread during this season (Gentlemen & Players, and The Night Circus). I enjoyed most of what I read, and that’s what counts!

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Goodbyes: The A Team

Posted on October 28, 2022 by Thistle

Wednesday morning, it was time to finally say goodbye to Austin (Gremlin), Abilene (Abby), and Amarillo (Rillo/Willow). This batch of fosters had been with us for about 5.5 weeks, and we’d nursed two of them from the brink of death due to calicivirus. All three had grown happy and healthy and friendly and sweet. Abby loved to sit in your lap, while the other two scrambled up to your neck and shoulders so they could be right up as close as possible. (In this pic to the left, you can see the two boys simultaneously fighting for my cuddles and cuddling with each other – this was a daily thing!) All three were very attached to each other, and would tangle about in piles when they slept. They were also extremely attached to Jason. Whenever he got home or would walk into their foster room, all three would go from dead asleep to excited in an instant, running off me with their tails up high so they could go to the door to greet him.

(Anyone who says cats aren’t affectionate has never really known a cat!)

As you might be able to tell from the photos I’ve put up of these babies in the past, our foster room isn’t the brightest room in the house. There is a lot of detail missing in the photos as you zoom in, and I could rarely get photos that showed true color. I really wanted to capture some good photos of these darlings, so on Wednesday morning, I brought my camera into the room instead of just my phone. The good news: My camera has a range of adjustments that can help it to work in lower lights. The bad news: Those adjustments give me a very shallow focal area and only barely long enough a shutter speed to get non-blurry photos. More bad news: The two boys decided that Wednesday morning was Zoomie time!

(Pure personality: Gremlin looks like you need to get off his damn lawn. Rillo can’t be still for a quarter-second. Abby says she’s through with their nonsense and she’ll watch them from a comfy chair.)

In other words, 75% of my photos came out blurry and useless. Rillo, the most chaotic of the three, was definitely the worst at this, and I got zero solo photos of him without some blur to his face. Halfway through our impromptu photo shoot, I brought in a handheld light cube, which helped to bring in more light, but also meant that I was shooting one-handed, which sometimes caused the shots to shake even when I managed to keep the kittens still for a split second. Argh! In the end, though, I managed to get some good photos (or in Rillo’s case, at least one decent photo).

Miss Abby, queen of sleep, will snuggle but only if you let her put herself in your lap herself, is especially in love with Jason and will groom him if he lets her, loves strings and zippers on Jason’s shorts, demands beef baby food at least once a day. Slightly stingy with purrs, but once you’ve got them, she chirps as she purrs to show she’s blissfully happy.

Rillo, the boy who exudes every characteristic you’d expect in an orange kitten with a shared brain cell (iykyk), who has run headfirst into poles and walls because he was too focused on something else to notice them, who has to be picked up when you enter the room and cuddled on his back for belly rubs, and will lick your ears if you don’t stop him. Constant, nonstop, loud, instantaneous purrs.

Gremlin, the tiniest boy, looks like Gizmo and earned his nickname, eyes that slant in a way that makes him look like an angry, cranky old man even as he’s purring and licking your fingers, who must perch up high and so he’s an instant shoulder-kitten, has a silent meow (ulcer damage or just the way it is? we don’t know), the most laid back and tolerant boy you’ll ever meet despite his grouchy face. It was particularly hard to say goodbye to this little guy as he stole my heart from Day One. There were tears, and I am not normally a crier.

But not to worry. What better way to drown your tears than introduce new love into your heart? The shelter had several other calicivirus kittens that desperately needed foster homes, so we took home a duo. Dexter and DeeDee are about 4-5 weeks old, but I’ll leave their introduction for another post. Here’s a teaser photo, though.

Here’s to the next month of meds, socializing, nursing, cuddling, feeding, playing, cleaning, and bringing new babies into our hearts!

Posted in Personal | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Ghost 19, by Simone St. James (audio)

Posted on October 25, 2022 by Thistle

It’s 1959, and Ginette has been sent to upstate NY by her doctors “for her mental health,” where she becomes trapped in a house haunted by its past.

This is another story that leans heavily on the trope of watching the neighbors and a stylized version of agoraphobia, not to mention the whole “crazy woman put out of sight to avoid publicity” thing. However, St. James takes this from what’s normally thriller territory into ghosts, hauntings, and paranoia, until it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. Both Ginette and the reader will eventually start to blur on what constitutes reality. In that way, this story came to remind me of The Yellow Wallpaper – not to say that they’re similar, but they have the same kind of trapped-room undercurrent and “women’s hysteria” gaslighting. Because this takes place fully in the past, it’s unlike other books I’ve read by St. James, but I still rather enjoyed it.

I’m not sure if Ghost 19 counts as a short story or novella, but the audiobook (read by Brittany Pressley) was just shy of three hours. Since that’s actually not my shortest audio in 2022, I decided to count it as one of my reads. (I don’t normally count individual short stories.) It was quick, well-read, well-paced, and captivating. Great for Halloween time!

Posted in 2022, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Sunday Coffee – An Unacceptable Book

Posted on October 23, 2022 by Thistle

One of the books that I planned to read for RIP this year was a short nonfiction book called Haunted History of Old San Antonio. It was written by a married couple who run ghost tours in town, and it included both places I know well (like Comanche Lookout Hill) and places I didn’t know at all. Given that I love all things spooky and supernatural, I thought this would be a good fit.

Let this be a lesson to my future self: Do not buy books sitting on grocery store checkout shelves. This book wasn’t just bad, it was horrendous. As in, so disgustingly offensive that 1) I had to check the copyright date (2011) and 2) I threw it in the trash rather than putting it in the donate pile after I abandoned it 40 pages in. No one needs to read this kind of whitewashed, racist, white-glorified garbage. To be honest, some of the phrasing and “history” in here is so offensive, I refuse to even include quotes here, because I’m just that horrified with the way this was written.

And beyond the racism and whitewashing, half of what I did read was completely made up and inaccurate! For writers who claim to be interested in the history of San Antonio, the authors don’t seem terribly concerned with accuracy or facts. There’s one line in the section about Comanche Lookout Hill that says, “From Loop 1604 today, when the wind blows right, the tower can be seen where it still stands.” First, the wind would have absolutely nothing to do with the visibility of a four-story medieval-style tower in ruins. Second, while 1604 is close by, the tower is not visible anywhere from the highway. Nor is the highway visible from any of the lookouts near the tower. That is pure fancy, and yes, was pure fancy when this was published, too. Then there was this little tidbit:

Unfortunately, this tower has been broken into and vandalized many times by juveniles throwing large parties and holding seances. Some of these vandals have even practiced witchcraft near [the] tower, trying to call back the dead on spooky Halloween nights.

That quote makes me want to die from secondhand embarrassment. Has the tower been vandalized? Yup, though not just teens are the culprits. No one is holding seances. I mean, come on. Most of what happens in the park is stuff you’d find in any area of dense woods – people doing drugs, having sex, drinking – silly, stupid, and/or reckless stuff. The book claims that people who walk around the park feel like they’re being watched or followed, and that’s again a load of bunk. That park has hundreds of folks that hang out there, people of all ages: families and school trips and seniors groups and Pokemon Go players and dog-walkers. Many of them come several times a week. I promise they’re not feeling all spooked out all the time. I’ve personally walked, hiked, and run around that park thousands of times over the last 16 years, and have only felt creeped out twice. Once was when I was off-path and came across a cache of pills and syringes – not spooky, just a big fat nope I’m outta here. The second was while listening to a ghost podcast as I jogged through a tunnel of trees that consequently felt spooky for the first time ever.

Even the history of the park is glossed over and glamorized in this book. The scant factual details are easily found in a quick google search. As someone who has hosted many hikes in the park, both regular and haunted, I know the history well, because someone always asks about the tower, or the name of the hill, or some other detail. And if I can get more info from a google search than an entire chapter, albeit short, of this book, not to mention more reliable info, how can I then trust the veracity of any other chapter?

I’ll admit, it was disappointing. I would have kept reading if it had just been a sensationalized account of the spooky bits. Honestly, that’s what I expected. But once you start adding in the parts that are too offensive to even quote? I can’t. I just can’t. Into the garbage it goes.

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Wellness Wednesday – Not Well

Posted on October 19, 2022 by Thistle

I don’t process emotions the way most people do. This is likely because I grew up in a household where free expression of emotion – particularly negative emotion – was discouraged or even punished. Combine that with a long period through adolescence where I thought the only way to survive depression and bullying was to withdraw so far into myself that I didn’t feel anything at all, and you have a recipe for poor coping skills. And the problem is that no matter how much therapy you go through and how much work you do, you can’t outrun the biological instincts that take over “for your protection.”

Example: When my grandfather died in 2007, my internal voice scoffed and scorned me each time I shed a tear or expressed an emotion, telling me that I was faking it, and disrespecting those around me who truly did feel grief. I recognized the defense mechanism, so I paid no attention to it, and the next time a family member died, in 2009, I disassociated altogether. I remember the funeral the way I remember dreams, floating above and behind it for the most part. I couldn’t cry at all, couldn’t force a single tear. When it was all over, I went home, and shortly afterwards, read a book that just happened to involve the unexpected death of a character I loved. I broke down completely, just bawling at his death, and then I read the book a second time, and the series all the way through, just to “spend more time with him.” That’s how I mourned this second family member, shunted sideways into an “acceptable” expression of grief.

So what am I feeling now? Uncomfortable. It’s like all my mom senses are up, knowing something is wrong, something is about to happen…except it’s not. The thing that is wrong is nothing more than the kids are no longer here. I spent so long and used so much mental energy on making sure schedules ran smoothly and chores got done and warning signs were watched for etc etc. And at first, when the house emptied out, it just felt like the kids had gone to a friend’s house, or to spend a week with their grandparents, or any number of temporary situations. Now, it feels like said temporary situation has gone on too long, so that my mom senses are acting as if something is wrong. My mind knows that everything is fine, just different. My nervous system has yet to adjust.

Yesterday was my oldest’s 22nd birthday. Three years ago, on his 19th, he was at Navy boot camp and I experienced this same uncomfortable something-is-wrong feeling when I realized that 1) it was his first birthday that I’d ever missed, and 2) I couldn’t even call him to say happy birthday or check in with how he was doing. Then the two younger children both left within months of each other this summer, so it wasn’t even a gradual change. Yeah, Laurence will be home over Christmas – note: a roundtrip flight from Canada cost well more than a month’s mortgage payment, heh – but I still just feel weird, weird, weird. Uncomfortable, like missing a tooth that’s always been there and you haven’t yet adjusted to its absence.

I did finally put up Halloween decorations, a thing that had lost all joy once the kids were gone even though I was the only person to ever get joy out of it! I felt nothing at all doing so. I’ll probably be more excited to put up the Christmas stuff simply because Laurence is coming home. I’ve lost interest in most things, and at the same time, have been obsessing over Projects. This is another thing my brain does when it can’t deal with grief or change or whatever else it’s suppose to cope with: it creates and hyperfocuses on projects. Right now, I’m in the process of transferring the important info from 13 past bullet journals into a master journal so I can get rid of all the little ones. I spend hours each day doing this, alternating between the journal project, creative photo editing (pics in this post), and staring at houses for sale in different parts of New Mexico, trying to calculate how soon we can afford to move and the best timing for that. Those things may seem from the outside to be pointless, but internally, it’s all about trying to avoid a feeling of uselessness (given that my job/identity of 17 years is basically gone) while also desperately trying to feel some sense of control now that I now have a big, yawning gap of possibility and uncertainty in front of me.

The good thing is that I’m aware of all this. I know what my brain is doing and I’m taking steps to move forward while simultaneously giving myself space to process this grief/change in whatever way my nervous system feels safest. Sometimes that’s all you can do.

Posted in Wellness | Tagged , | 2 Comments

A Turn of the Tide, by Kelley Armstrong (audio)

Posted on October 17, 2022 by Thistle

In this third volume of the Time Stitch series, Miranda sneaks off to the time stitch only to find herself not in the 21st century, but back in the 18th. She’s just in time to stop a murder that she’s experienced as a ghost haunting in her true time period, and she just might fall in love with the man who was meant to be murdered.

While I enjoyed the first two books in this series, this was just okay for me. I’m not the biggest fan of historical fiction, pirates, or nautical tales, and this was all three. I didn’t really feel the romance between Miranda and the pirate, whose name I literally can’t recall despite finishing this book yesterday, and there was just something missing about this book that was so bright in the first two. Might have been the audio, which was downright awful. Ava Lucas reads the British accents fine, but the French accent from Pirate Loverboy was horrendous and drove me nuts! I’m sure that affected my experience, but honestly I think this book just wasn’t for me. Oh well.

PS – After drafting this post and sleeping on it overnight, my views haven’t changed, but I did remember that Pirate Loverboy’s name was Nico. Heh.

Posted in 2022, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Sunday Coffee – Book of the Month

Posted on October 16, 2022 by Thistle

It’s been a few years now since I joined Book of the Month. Honestly, I never thought I’d join the service, because for years I never really saw any books come through it that appealed to me. But then in June 2020, they were early-releasing Home Before Dark, which I’d been dying to get my hands on for months by then. It was a hit for my first book, and I decided to continuing giving BotM a chance.

For those who don’t know about the service, there’s a monthly fee which earns you a free book from a main set of choices. Whenever you don’t like the choices, you can skip that month, and you won’t be charged a monthly fee (so it’s not just adding up on you!). You’ve always paid one month ahead, but never more than that. You can also add on up to two more books at something like $10 each in your main package, which is a great price for hardcovers! There’s no limit to how often you can skip and no requirement for how often you must buy, which I worried about when I joined.

So that’s how the service works, and because it’s so easy to just skip, I’m really, really picky about which months I choose books. There were a few months in the beginning where I chose books that looked like they might be interesting, only to be disappointed when they arrived. There are no returns or anything, so you have to take your best guess. I got pickier, and for the most part, my choices have improved. Not always, but considering this is literally the only time I allow myself to try out new-to-me books/authors outside of the library, I’m okay with the minor risk. (Not that I don’t write down plenty of options to grab from the library if they don’t seem worth the monetary risk from BotM itself!)

Lately, the quality of books seems to be improving, or at least shifting to books more in line with what I like to read. (I’ve heard other longtime members of BotM say the books have been getting less and less in line with them, so I assume it’s probably the latter.) They seem to be trending away from literary, historical, and women’s fiction into a broader variety of choices, including mysteries, fantasy, YA, etc. It used to be three more literary choices, one thriller, and one “other” each month, but now it seems to be a different genre for each book, and that makes me really happy. The shift took place around March 2022 – which incidentally was the month I finally hit 12 books chosen. That’s how often I skipped, almost 50% of the time! Since March, I’ve gotten an additional eight books, including several add-ons for the first time. I still have months that I skip, but far less frequently.

Of those 20 total books, I’ve read (or partially read) 17, with three still on my shelves waiting for me. Of the 17, there have been five that I disliked, including three that I abandoned. The other 12 split into five that I enjoyed and seven that I loved. And of those 12 books that I liked, I only decided to keep six of them: Home Before Dark, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, The Ex Hex, The Hacienda, The Book of Cold Cases, and The Kiss Curse. The other six enjoyable reads weren’t ones I needed to keep – this is why I usually use the library – and they went off to Half Price Books along with the five I didn’t enjoy.

I would say that the service has been worthwhile for me. I get excited every month when the new selections come out. A good friend of mine and her sister also participate, and we have a little group chat where we can discuss our choices and our reads. As a person who often feels a bit too constrained when it comes to book-buying and such, it gives me a little mostly-safe risk, plus I learn about so many other books (especially new releases) that I no longer really hear about now that book blogging is a dying – or really, dead – thing. I haven’t really migrated to other platforms like booktok and don’t really plan to, and I don’t have book people that I trust for recommendations in those spaces. So this is my way of coping, I suppose.

PS. This is not a sponsored post and don’t get anything out of it. I think there’s some kind of referral code I could pass out but I don’t care enough to try to find it, heh. I just figured that after over two years, it was probably time for me to do a service review!

Posted in Book Talk | Tagged | Leave a comment

The Kiss Curse, by Erin Sterling

Posted on October 14, 2022 by Thistle

Gwen is perfectly happy with the way life is going in Graves Glen. Magic has been rightfully returned to her family’s lineage, her cousin is happy in her new marriage, her shop is doing well, and Gwen has even started to mentor some younger witches in town. The last thing she needs is another Penhallow witch coming over from Wales, especially one as stiff and arrogant as Llewellyn (or Wells, as he prefers). Gwen already knew she could never forgive Wells for his absence at her cousin’s wedding to his brother, Rhys, and her animosity only increases when he sets up a competing shop directly across the street from her. But a burning animosity is like playing with emotional fire, and fire can get really dangerous, really quickly…

Okay so yeah, this is classic enemies to lovers romance, with magic and witchy elements. It’s Halloween and talking cats and plastic pumpkins and festivals; it’s dark magic and evil witches and torture devices and glamour; it’s edible body glitter and love potions and sex under the stars. And while I didn’t enjoy the book as much as I did The Ex Hex, I still loved the hell out of it. Gwen was a brilliant heroine and I loved getting to know her better. I also liked getting to known Rhys’ brothers better, and I wonder if Bowen will feature in the next book! My only real quibble was probably my own fault, as I was focused on the wrong red herring for almost the entire story. That made the resolution with regards to one particular issue feel a little anticlimactic for me. But honestly, without getting into spoilers, I have a feeling that issue might also feature in the next book of the series.

Anyway, thoroughly enjoyed this one, and it was perfect for the season!

Posted in 2022, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Ferals: Sunday

Posted on October 12, 2022 by Thistle

It’s never good when your doorbell rings at 7:30 am.

This morning, our neighbor found a cat stuck in our tree. After the cat got out safely, she went over to our front entry and started rubbing up against the bricks there, so our neighbor thought perhaps it was one of ours that had escaped. It was not, but seeing how friendly the cat was, Jason picked her up and brought her inside.

Meet Sunday, the sweetest little calico brown tabby ever. Of course, when we first brought her inside, we weren’t sure what we were dealing with. Was she a community cat that was friendly but could turn feral at any provocation? Was she someone’s lost pet? Was she an indoor/outdoor free-roaming pet that just happened to be at our house at that exact moment? I recognized her tail – she moves it in this double-curled way that is very distinctive – from an overnight video of a cat we took back in April. This cat had only appeared on camera the one time, but it reinforced the idea that this might be an indoor/outdoor pet or a friendly community cat.

Jason got the kitty some food and water, which she ignored completely. She was agitated, mostly staying by the window as if she longed to get back outside. The only sign of aggression, though, was a hiss at our cats under the door, and we blocked the crack so she wouldn’t be bothered by them. I tried to scan her for a microchip, but didn’t find anything, and I didn’t know if I was using the machine wrong or if she simply didn’t have one. Meanwhile, Jason called our vet, who told us to go ahead and bring her in to have her scanned there and checked for spay.

By 8:30, we were at the vet, who confirmed that Sunday had no microchip. However, she did have a spay scar and tattoo! But with no ear tip, and her being as friendly and clean as she was, we didn’t think she’d been TNRed. Which left Jason and me in a bit of a conundrum. Try to find her owner via social media? Leave out flyers and just keep Sunday in Jason’s room for now? Surrender her to the animal shelter since she was friendly and could be adopted out? Let her go so she could find her own way home, assuming she had a home?

We put her in Jason’s room temporarily, while I re-downloaded NextDoor and re-added the neighborhood facebook pages that I generally tend to stay away from. Then I began looking into surrender procedures in case my social media searches came up empty. Thankfully, though, my social media searches did not come up empty! The facebook post had been up less than ten minutes when a woman said this looked like her cat Sunday, an indoor/outdoor roaming cat who she confirmed was spayed but didn’t have a chip. She lived like a block away from my house, so her mama swung by to verify that this was indeed Sunday. To make a long story short with a happy ending, she was!

Sunday was so happy to be freed from confinement. The second I opened the cat carrier, her anxiety disappeared. She didn’t run the way feral cats often do, but instead began to roll in the grass and rub up against our legs. Sunday clearly knew her mama and was all over her, but also rubbed up against me to tell me she loved me too. (The cat seems to love indiscriminately!) Her mama and I talked for a bit and then she left, Sunday trotting alongside her happily.

Everything was wrapped up before 9:45. I called the vet to update them, and now we are done with today’s good deed! Soooo happy to reunite Sunday with her family, even if technically we could have just left her to her own devices and she would’ve found her own way home. Ha! We couldn’t know that, though, so I’m happy we did due diligence and got it all taken care of without uncertainties!

Posted in Personal | Tagged | 2 Comments

Evolution of a Photo

Posted on October 10, 2022 by Thistle

Over the last month, I’ve finally started learning how to edit photos using my editing software. My journey into photography has been very slow. I spent most of 2021 learning basics – how to use a camera in manual mode, how to set up photos (both in terms of composition and exposure settings), etc. I learned how to take pretty decent photos straight out of the camera with little editing beyond cropping and such.

But that’s only the beginning. This year, my goal was to learn editing techniques. Back in February, I learned a few editing techniques from How to Take Awesome Photos of Cats. I began to do more with my photos, using the built-in tools on my phone. Jason bought me the software I wanted for my birthday (On1 Photo Raw)…but then it took me months to open it for the first time. I was so intimidated. It wasn’t until Ambrose graduated from basic training that I decided to use the new software for my edits, and MAN those photos definitely suffer from my inexperience. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, I struggled with the software tools, and the end products feel gimmicky.

So in September, I watched a bunch of online tutorials. They weren’t “how to use the software” videos, which don’t tend to stick in my head, but rather videos that showed the editing process for individual photos from start to finish, using a bunch of the tools. That’s the kind of tutorial that helps me to learn. After each video I finished, I’d grab a new RAW file that I’d saved and go to town on it, trying to learn all the basic things I could do. A photo of an Empress Leilia butterfly on my deck is one of the shots I practiced on. The above photo collage includes, clockwise from top left, the unedited version (straight from the camera), the edited (non-creative) version, and two creative versions to make postcard-like images.

A recent online project had me itching to try my own, so I decided to make a spotlight photo (single light source, using a cucoloris, or cookie). I chose a small bottle of scent I’d bought from Turban de Moda at the Muslim Culture Fest in Austin the previous weekend for my subject. The bottle is absolutely gorgeous and I thought would make a great spotlight! Now, I don’t have a studio, professional lighting, or special tools to make this kind of photography easy. Literally, I set this up in my bathroom, an old curtain thrown over the back of the toilet, camera propped up to the right height by a tissue box, my cookie made by cutting strips out of an index card and then taped to a flashlight for my light source. I set my camera to 85mm, 100 ISO, f5.6, and 0.8 seconds, then put it on a timer so that I could press the shutter and then get the flashlight into place before the photo was taken.

The entire process was a bit ridiculous, and frankly, I wish I’d had some kind of arm I could have propped the flashlight up with because my hand is always going to shake a little, which will always cause a little fuzzing on my focus object at that long of a shutter speed. However, after experimenting with angles of light and rotation of the cookie, I got a shot that was as clean as I could manage in my makeshift setup:

Straight out of the camera, this isn’t a bad shot – but it could be better. The base cloth was too purple, the perfume too green. The orange stripe from the wall was distracting, and too much of the teal shower curtain was visible. My focus depth created a sharp strip across the entire photo, when I wanted only the perfume bottle and its immediate surrounding to be in focus. The photo also needed to be cropped, tilt-corrected, cleaned up a bit in terms of the light-shakiness, and vignetted. I don’t even know how to do the advanced things in the software yet, but even with my minimal knowledge, I was able to modify individual colors, remove the extraneous background, blur out the parts that were too in focus and sharpen the parts that needed that extra tightening. I couldn’t get the shakiness out of the bottle completely – I would have needed the flashlight to be entirely still for that – but in the final photos, it’s only visible if you zoom in real close.

As I’ve said in the past, I’m sure I’ll find things that I could have done better in the future, when I know more and have more experience. But for now, this photo makes me so happy, and I’m excited to have already learned so much!

Posted in Personal | Tagged | Leave a comment