More Shadows

More Shadows. This staircase was my favorite.

Week 1

2012 is here and even though I don't make resolutions I've been making a few goals. Goals for life, for the year, for the semester and even for the next few weeks before my birthday. I was talking to a photo friend of mine and we both want to be more artsy this year and have a lot more photo days in our lives. So I've decided to do 3 things:

1. Take photos of one specific idea, thing, place or whatever each week of this year.
2. Blog about each of them, because one day I will wish i had blogged more.
3. Finish with one large, cohesive project that I will title later, but for now call it the 52 week project.

My photo mentor gave a few of us a project to do over the holidays but I honestly didn't spend much time on it so today I revisited what he told us to do. He told us something about how Beethoven wrote about the importance of focusing on just a few aspects at a time while creating great things. We have this whole world full of stuff to choose from and if you go out into it to capture just anything you will most likely come back with a bunch of crap. This is very true in photography. I never knew it, but to make great photographs I need a few specific things to focus on in order to know exactly what it is I want to photograph.

Shadows.Today I went out to find the greatest shadows I could. When you're not really looking, you don't notice how many shadows there are in the world. But when you think about it you can find some really great ones. Shadows can come in the exact shape of the object making it or they are often times distorted, which makes a shadow really interesting. Light is THE most important thing for photographs. Lights make shadows and sometimes, really amazing shadows.

Eggnog and Candy Canes

Texas Storm

Today we had rain in the Hill Country for the first time in months. Since we've been having so many wildfires in the area it was way overdo and it turns out that storms are pretty interesting to photograph. Here's to being the best storm chaser in the Texas!

My photos are famous.

Okay not really, but today I noticed that one of my photos is being used on the Invisible Children website. From this I learned 2 things: One! I should really start blocking my photos from photo theives, because it's obviously easy to do. And two! my photos are worth stealing :)

The Fourth Estate

So I was told that a 'blog' is what is happening at the moment. So I guess what I do isn't really blogging because I don't have the time or the patience to share each great moment I experience... I don't know who does, but they obviously have a better computer than I do!

I just came back from San Diego two days ago after being there for four days. This was the only part of the city I saw except for USD which is seriously amazing. I was a little obsessed with the plant life in Old Town where I stayed in a hotel my first night. This place was cute and historic and I had no trouble walking around by myself.

I left Texas on my own but I came back with several friends. 600 people flew from all over the United State, and a few from Canada, to come together in San Diego at the Fourth Estate. You're probably like "umm like what is that?" and I honestly can't explain exactly what we did all weekend. We basically sat in a theater listening to people speaking to us and while we weren't sitting and listening and being filled with greatness from great people, we were eating, sleeping or getting coffee.

The Fourth Estate was a conference put on by Invisible Children to bring together six hundred of the organizations members who are serious about putting an end to the longest running war in Africa. (If you're not familiar with Invisible Children, get familiar here: Invisible Children) We had speakers from Tom Shadyac to the mind-boggling Jeremy Rifkin. Kristin Bell came out to introduce us to John Prendergast and we even heard first-hand stories from Carl Wilkens, the last American in Rwanda during the genocide.

This sums up the feeling that pretty much everyone felt throughout the entire weekend. Bringing together six hundred people who all believe in the same cause that are excited beyond belief can create am overwhelming setting. There were a few puddles on the floor.

Just to add to the beauty of the weekend, knowing that we were all coming together on common ground to discuss saving the lives of thousands of people, these two shoes belong to a beautiful couple that I was lucky to meet. These crazy kids got engaged on our last night in San Diego. When I asked Zac to tell me how he proposed I had to fight back my tears so I wouldn't make the man uncomfortable.

These contracts are where we all signed away our lives; we agreed to 'be' the Fourth Estate. Upon signing we all gained super powers that allow us to always feel a connection with the people of Uganda and DR Congo. Being the Fourth Estate meant that we agreed that we were not going to allow the war to continue and we would work together to bring peace to the people affected by it.

My first and last Flash Mob was at the Fourth Estate. This was one of the most amazing moments all weekend. These are the MC's that made us laugh and cry for four days. Jason, on the right, started Invisible Children with two of his friends and is just plain beautiful. Jed, on the left, loves everyone and has a brilliant mind. A poem of his was in the notebook we all got upon arriving and one day in the theater (while we all waited for the session to start) there was a flash mob of poem reading. As each row stood, another line of the poem was read aloud. By the end of the poem everyone in the theater was standing and Jed and Jason had come out on stage, having heard us from behind the curtain. To make a completely nerdy moment even better, we all saluted each other with the IC peace sign. Happy Day.

I will never be the same again. That's such a lame thing to say...okay, my life is forever changed. Equally lame. I can't express how I feel now; people all over the place at USD were thanking me for the work that I do with Invisble Children but I can't accept it. IC is teaching me, not how to be a better person, but how to be the person I should be and the person I love to be.

Summer in Texas