theology&geometry

I am having a super productive run lately. Got several commissioned photography projects I’m working on — including my first official Etsy sale! — that are keeping me occupied. I’m putting new and interesting things in the ground thanks to saraclark, and I can’t wait to see them shine next spring and summer. I am seeing more of my friends these past few days than I have in the past half year. I am behind on phone calls and finding the urge to write but not the time. October has almost gotten out from under me and I’ve not yet visited a single haunted place in this city, as was my intention at the end of September. I don’t know when I’d do it, or with whom. Any takers? I need to feel the goosebumps of Halloween every year or else I don’t quite start the steady coast into the festiveness of Thanksgiving and beyond. Superstitious, maybe. I just have high expectations for the last quarter of the year, that’s all, and a spooky October is my lucky gameday sock, so to speak.

This time last year I was waiting to close on my house, and stressing out to high heaven about it. Work was insanely busy (and has been this week, oddly enough) and I was run ragged by last-minute loan finagling and the notion that everything I had been working for could crumble at any second in part because I had lost my wallet and license on a road trip. Dumb. I see that I posted a Promise Ring video this time last year, too. How weird is that? Incredibly weird. Who’s running this show, anyway, and why do I even bother trying to control it?

This October has had its moments of pure humiliating suckitude but so far it’s been markedly better than 2009′s October, which eventually put me in the ER with some crazy allergic reaction that kept me out of work for a week with an ongoing migraine and hive outbreaks. I am lucky that nothing has ever put me down like that before or since, but it still freaks me out to think that my body can break down like that under just the weight of mental pressure. I have to remember that I have limits. And I have to learn how to respect those limits because they will kick my ass if I don’t.

Anyway, back to editing photos. I can’t wait to share some from my photoshoot with Jerm and Krissi and Piper at the Botanic Gardens. It feels nice to feel like I’m learning and growing as a photographer and artist, but it also feels really nice to be able to help people capture moments in their lives that they will cherish forever. I’m pleased with how things are going lately.

Finally, after wanting to do so for a long time and just never really being able to pull the trigger on it, I’ve opened an Etsy shop. Right now there are photo prints available as well as one framed collage-type item, but I’m busting ass to add more things that, hopefully, people will want to buy. Eventually I want to add customizable stationery designs, but that’s going to take some time since the few designs I had started prototyping disappeared in the Great Hard Drive Crash of Aught Ten (Back Up Your Files, Please). Still, I’m excited about the possibilities and having fun figuring out how to set up the shop and price and market stuff (and reading about self-employment taxes, whee!). I’ve got lots of little creative projects kicking around in my head lately and it feels good to be working on things again after a museless (but still really awesome) summer.

So please mosey on over to the shop and have a look. You tried and true Etsy buyers and sellers may have tips for me. I’m all ears. And forehead. But ears too.

I’ll be at Cooper-Young Festival Saturday with my camera. Men of Memphis, if you want your picture on my widely read and highly influential blog*, please wear your finest banana hammock and come find me**. I don’t want pictures of tube tops to be the only gratuitous game in town.

* this claim is in no way factual

** please do not actually do this, for the love of all that is holy and decent in this world

I don’t dabble in black and white photography much. These shots sort of make me want to do more.

I don’t wanna brag or nothin’ but look what Mz. Melissa Sweazy sent to me for this bit of internet interactivity (seriously, it’s hard for me to understand how that thing is a shoe; I have seriously imprinted it in my memory as a cast). I am super excited to frame this print and pick out the perfect spot for it. That is, of course, assuming I don’t gobble it up entirely.

Thanks, Melissa! And for the rest of you, if you’re not already following her excellent photoblog, might I demand politely but demandingly that you do so immediately? She is the rare photographer who actually makes me want to get engaged.

Up early, the Brooks, rock ‘n’ roll photography, Italian boot envy, inappropriate giggling, sunshine, stromboli, messy hair, naps, rushing to be late. Goodness.

My parents’ place has its share of dragonflies, and my favorite thing about them — aside from their obvious awesome weirdness — is that they just sit there even if you get up in their faces with a camera. I can’t even imagine what I could do if I had an actual macro lens and some actual patience.

Memorial Day weekend was also the weekend my grandmother turned 78 years old. She’s my only remaining grandparent and I am working on the technology to allow her to live forever.