Mom update

I haven't posted in awhile because things have just been too chaotic around here for me to keep up. I've been out to So Cal twice in the last four weeks to visit with and help take care of my mom as she recovered from the surgery to remove the tumor in her colon. She recovered really well from it and has been in really good spirits, so that's been really nice for us. After biopsying all of her lymph nodes around her colon, however, the doctor updated her diagnosis to stage three because of the amount of lymph nodes affected. This means that she will need to have chemo for longer than we originally anticipated. And while she was hoping to return to school shortly, she has had to make the hard decision to be off for the rest of the school year and having the principal tell her class about her condition. I know that she cares very deeply for her students, so this was a really hard thing for her to do, but I hope that it allows her to concentrate on her own health and recovery. This weekend I took the kids out to see her before she began chemo and she decided to go ahead and shave her head now (she has been reading that it is much less traumatic to shave it versus waiting until it falls out), so she had fun allowing her grandkids to do it for her, and of course, with the two of us being scrapbookers, we documented the whole event. All in all, I would say that as we gear up for this next chapter in her healing, my mom is doing very well and is in really high spirits. She knows that all the prayers on her behalf have really been helping and she is grateful to everyone for thinking about her.

The first assigment of the semester

Well, this is the first assignment that has to be turned in anyway. I'll have to post our first official assignment later as its due date isn't until next week so I haven't finished editing it yet. Anyhow, this is what I did for our first assignment this semester. We were given the choice of anything we wanted to do, it just had to fall into the category of fine art and not include pets or animals.

I was really challenged by the idea of not having an actual assignment, so it took me a few days of thinking to figure out what I wanted to do. I finally decided to do oranges for two reasons: they're visually stimulating and they have meaning throughout my life. When my grandparents first moved to where I grew up, it was orange groves everywhere you could see. As a child, I loved to eat any kind of fruit and oranges were in my top five favorites that I could eat whenever. The childhood home that I have the most fond memories of had an orange tree in the backyard and I remember going out there to pick oranges only to get stabbed by the thorns more often than not. We have some distant relatives who own an orange orchard and so every few years we end up with a ton of the most delicious oranges and I just can't get enough of them. Now as an adult, trying to lose weight and be healthy, I have discovered a kind of orange that I'd never heard of before (Cara Cara) and have fallen in love with this sour sweet variety. I probably eat at least three oranges a day right now, and whenever I'm craving sour candies, I can eat one of these to satisfy these cravings. Sour patch kids have nothing on them.

So with my idea settled, I had to figure out how I wanted to photograph them. I had decided to do a series, but I think you can see I was torn between two ideas and so one photo doesn't fall into the category of what the majority of them were and it doesn't fit. Although my professor didn't seem to like my second idea as much, when I have time I might have to edit some of those images and throw them up here to see if it works as a series. If I had more time, I might have tried a few more things so that all five fit the theme I was going with, but I ran out of time. At some point in the future I might try to add to the series of four I have here with other fruits and play with them to make beautiful still life photos with them as well, but that idea will have to go on the back burner for now. I also have to say that I was a bit disappointed with the one on the bottom simply because of how the orange looked when I cut into it. I shot what I wanted before class and then got feedback from my professor and there were a couple I needed to re-shoot, this being one of them. Well, the orange I used the first day to shoot was beautiful inside (it's the one right above it), and I really didn't think I would have a problem getting this shot. I had to purchase more oranges because I'd eaten all of the ones from the first shoot (getting my teased by my class mates about eating my props!). So I purchased more oranges and cut into them with that result. I thought that was pretty odd, so I cut into another one sure I would get a good looking orange on the inside. Same thing. When the third one I sliced into looked the same, I gave up and used the first one I had cut into (mostly because I really didn't think I would be able to eat four oranges in a day and I didn't want them to go to waste).

This shoot was a challenge for me for sure since I was just using window lighting. Whenever I used the flash, it blew out the orange, but in order to get the detail I wanted (especially in the really close up one), I had to really close down my aperture setting so the camera wasn't getting a lot of light. And then I had to figure out how to maneuver my tripod close enough to the table so that I could get super close to the orange in order to use my macro lens. The best part about it being a challenge, though, is that I learned from the experience and that is really all it's about for me right now is just learning as much about photography as I possibly can. I knew after the first day of class that this semester was going to be a huge challenge, but I also know that it will just make me a better photographer in the long run. Here's hoping anyway.