Photography and More!

It’s my opinion that as a photographer, until I can capture scenes from every day and capture their spirit and importance, I will not consistently be able to capture the heart and soul of big moments and events.  I also resloved to shoot at least one roll of film each week in the new year to make sure I keep my skills going strong.

Fortunately, that opinion and resolution work together hand in hand beautifully.

Here are the first few scenes of that resolution.

I reckon this will be no easy feat; I expect you to help keep me honest.

Joshua Radin at Pantages Theater September 2009

I broke the news on Facebook and Twitter: barring some kind of unforseen financial or health disaster, I am going to New Zealand for Spring Semester 2011.  That means I need to earn more money than I am presently, and quickly, so it’s time for me to dust off some of the life skills I’ve had on the shelf to earn money.

Namely, photography.

If you need an event or casual event photographer, please think of me first.  I also have experience with concert photography, and my resume includes, but is not limited to: Hanson, Jason Mraz, and Joshua Radin.

Seriously, think about it: have you ever had a party where you wish you had someone to document the event because everyone else was busy running around and living life instead of taking an appropriate amount of time to record the memories to tangible form?

Contact me, tell me what your photography needs are, and we’ll work out a price.

I also scrapbook and make cards.

One of the entrances to the Midtown Global Market: a microcosm of how the world should be

I love Minneapolis. It’s my favorite city of all those I’ve been to, and I’ve done my fair share of traveling (including, but not limited to, Alamo, TX, Tuscon, San Francisco, Seattle, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Washington DC, New York City, Chicago and St. Louis).

So this isn’t a hometown girl saying that her city is the best and that she doesn’t need to see what else is out there.  This is coming from someone who has a fair traveling resume and still loves her city the most.

After all, what’s not to love?  We’re known for our culture (the most theater seats per capita after NYC), we have lots of parks, lakes and libraries, music venues of assorted sizes and levels of classiness, great public transit and a moderate cost of living.

The only real drawback is how inhumanely cold it gets (really, imagine taking a deep breath and feeling like your lungs are freezing or the icy chill of the wind making it feel like your eyeballs might freeze solid).

One of the things I love most about Minneapolis is that over time, people from all over the world have settled here, and that rich diversity is reflected in one of my favorite places in my favorite city: The Midtown Global Market.

The Midtown Global Market is a glorious place that houses bakeries, markets, and restaurants that draw inspiration from all over the world, happily coexisting together.  A Scandinavian bakery, a Mexican restaurant or two, one that celebrates the best of American cuisine, an East African eatery, a Mid East market, a place where you can buy humanely farmed eggs for $0.25 a piece (if you bring your own carton) and so much more.  It’s a true microcosm of how the world should be.  All of us celebrating and retaining our individual identities while blending together and celebrating not as individuals or cultures, but as people.

Where else can you buy fresh produce, eat a meal inspired by the tastes of East Africa, and top it off by buying candy from Mexico for dessert, all while enjoying a delicious cup of coffee?

 

It's like a screen capture of my childhood!

 

Good food is always a win! 

Even in a language I don’t understand it looks delicious!

camel burgers!!

Puffy suckers!!

cheese!!!

Last week, the three biggest things in my life that I spent my time on came to an end.

School, newspaper and work.  Four if you count bussing to and from school every day.

I was in a panic over how bored I thought I would be.  All of these things that absorbed so much of my time, energy and brain space not tapering off, but flat out ending.  Anyone who knows me knows that I can be a bit of an, *ahem* busy body, which puts my concerns into perspective.

Good news: so far, it’s been a refreshing surprise.

I will use today as an example.

I slept last night better than I had slept since spring semester started.  I woke up refreshed at 11:30, spent time with Chester, and caught a bus to Southdale where window shopped for Father’s Day presents and met a friend to see a movie.

After the movie, I applied for a job and went grocery shopping.  When I got home, I made dinner.

And that brings us to the present tense.  As I type this blog, I have homemade baked macaroni and cheese waiting for me to enjoy, and after I do, I will clean the kitchen and watch the Daily Show and Scrubs without feeling guilty about either while thinking about all of the other stuff that I should be doing.

Tomorrow I’m going to my brother-in-law’s store for a few hours.

More time with friends and my cat, home cooked meals and relaxation peppered with job hunting.

Panic averted.  I think I’m going to be okay, even if I do miss my former fellow newspaper compadres, co-workers and fellow students.

I can look forward to more of this and other delicious things!

Years ago I heard my oldest sister, Tricia, say something about how you have to appreciate the little joys in life because you can’t wait around for the really big, exciting stuff to happen to find reasons to enjoy life.

Something about that sentiment clicked.

It’s the smaller stuff that makes life truly enjoyable on a day-to-day basis: finding a $5 bill in the deep recesses of your pockets, discovering a new favorite beverage at a coffee shop, getting done with work or school half an hour early on a beautiful day, a surprise e-mail from a friend, hearing your favorite busker play his trumpet Downtown.. I could go on and on.

Sometimes it’s not just the smaller things in life that make it enjoyable.

Often those little joys and victories, those precious rays of sunshine are what keeps us forging on while we’re entrenched in emotional, personal and/or career based chaos.  When we don’t know how we’re going to make it through the day or week, realizing our frequent beverage buyer club card is full and that we get a free cup of coffee might be that little push we need to get going so we get to experience the next big exciting thing with our mental health intact.

The small milestones and victories are essential to recognize, too.  Learning a new word in a foreign language we’ve been studying, or finishing a spreadsheet that’s essential for a project we’re working on.

Such moments in life are all around us.  The way I look at it we can embrace them and cherish them, or we can spend a whole lot more time being unhappy than we have to.

So go out, experience the world in all of its glory, live life and recognize the little things to get you through.

This song is a recurring theme in my life and has reminded me of the importance of the so called “little” victories time and time again.  The song is great, but my favorite part of the video is the beginning where he’s smile-singing.  You just can’t fake that, and it makes me think that the song implies a huge part of his life philosophy, too.

Back when I worked at Target, one of my favorite customers shared this piece of wisdom with me: Travel and education are never a waste of time or money.

That bit of information always resonated with me, and after this week, I am inclined to agree with him more than ever.

In the last ten days, I travelled to New York, St. Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and a small city near Tulsa called Sand Springs. Sand Springs was unintentional (we got lost) and the only time we spent there was to get fresh socks at K-Mart. But I’m counting it anyway.

In my travels, I ate the best cheesecake I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating at Carnegie Deli in NYC.

At my journalism conference in NYC, I learned how to be a better leader, the origin of writing styles, how to pack as much information into as few words as possible, how to design better newspapers, and more about photojournalism and ethics.

Wandering around Times Square revealed knowledge that the billboards make it look like it’s always daytime- it barely requires street lights!

I also learned that half of the Loop in St. Louis is a suburb, that it’s where Nelly calls home, and got to see the Arch from afar.

Other notes from the trip: Oklahoma City is not anywhere I have any desire to live- it doesn’t have a personailty at least that I felt or experienced.

Tulsa is really cute, and is lacking in good non-commericial coffee shops. The culture there is surprisingly comfortable and relaxed, but not so much so that there isn’t anything to do. They also have an ingenius and creative way of naming streets: they do it after cities!

The main drag is Peoria (Illinois) and the main street on the west side of town is Olympia (Washington) and further east of Peoria is Cinncinati (Ohio).

If you find yourself in Tulsa, I reccomend Mexicali’s, and The Local Table (I’m told the meatloaf is about the best there is) to eat, Dwelling Spaces and Ida Red to shop and get a feel for the vibe of the city.

Oklahoma has weird laws about beer (nothing over 3.2 alcohol content!) which means no Fat Tire (humph!) and you can still smoke in bars.

So many stereotypes about Southerners are true: they’re chatty and as far as I could tell, struggle with driving in the snow. I felt like a little bit of a driving in the snow badass, even in a tiny economy car.

(Tips to any Oklahomans reading this: take it easy, go slow, leave lots of room between you and the car ahead of you, pay lots of extra attention, and don’t panic and slam on the break- depress it gently and firmly- slamming on the breaks in snow= spin-outs.)

My advice based on all of this new information? Get out and see the world as much as your time, responsibilities and finances allow. It will be worth it.

I have to write this in parts now because I didn’t have internet access at my hotel.

The journalism conference I went to was an incredible opportunity, and I packed in a crazy amount of education in a very short frame of time.  I learned a little bit about design, media law, photojournalism, being a better leader, ethics and the finer points of developing feature articles and writing news pieces.  I did some networking, too!

I’m very happy I went.  On top of learning heaps of new information,  the trip reinforced a lot of what I already knew to be true, and reassured me that my instincts are taking me in the right direction.

We did learn one very important lesson outside the parameters of the conference.  New York City can, and will, kick your ass.

We got to the hotel around 2 on Saturday.  By 3:30, we collected ourselves and decided to go to the Statue of Liberty.  Confident that it would be an easy event to make happen, we went to the concierge, got a map and information about the statue.

New York City on Saturday afternoon was experiencing nasty weather- cold, windy, rainy, generally gross.  (This is the time to point out that when it comes to weather, people from the upper Midwest are really arrogant- rain is seldom a deterrent for us, even when it should be.)

So we venture out, map in hand.

After walking the wrong way to the subway station and getting kinda wet and cold, we found our way there and got ourselves situated on the subway after some struggles with indecision and wet money.

We got on the train.  Two-thirds of the way to the statue, we found ourselves paralyzed with the concern that we had gotten on the train going in the wrong direction.  The air was filled with tension and threats of a potential nervous breakdown.

Emotional order was restored when a very kind, helpful middle aged New Yorker reassured us that we were going in the right direction, told us what stop to get off on and offered kind, idle chit-chat.

Thank God.  FInally we got something right.

We got off the train, dodged puddles of stagnant rainwater that hadn’t drained into the sewer properly (plus one dead rat that one of the group members noticed) as we walked up the stairs to where we needed to catch the bus to get on the ferry to see the statue.

We stepped onto the street and were greeted with wind blowing at a force that could knock down a small adult, cold rain that was almost horizontal and bordering on hail on top of an eerily quiet street and busses that had no drivers.  That was our sign that seeing the Statue of Liberty was not meant to be, especially after taking a second to consider what a ferry would be like in those conditions.

The weather had gotten the best of us, and we got a relatively kind reminder that nature always wins.

We get back on the subway, again dodging puddles and dead rats.  By this point, we were all exhausted, cold, hungry, disoriented and on sensory overload.  It took us an excruciating two minutes to figure out how to get back to the hotel (it felt like twenty) and loaded on the train.

Finally we made it back to the hotel- the wind and rain had become more severe in Times Square.  We jealously noticed a small child having a temper tantrum.

Thankfully, I decided not to hate NYC based on the ill-fated trip to see the Statue of Liberty, but it did make me stop romanticizing it.