New England

New Eye Day!

Posted by Ivy

This is me, 22 years ago!

The photo was taken the day I got my very first fake eye. I didn’t get another one until I was nine. And after that, I went fifteen years without a change. So it had been a while.

But I have a new one now! I went to my ocularists in Boston today, and decided I wanted to take photos during my appointments (Joyce and Kurt probably thought I was crazy). I actually made a job profile video of the eye-making process (at an office in St. Louis) for Picture Story, but a) the video is not very good at all and b) I wasn’t a patient then.

I usually don’t like turning the camera on myself; it makes me feel like a serious egomaniac. But I really wanted to show this process the way I experience it, not the way somebody doing an actual Journalistic Story would shoot it…so l didn’t ask to go watch some parts of the process just to photograph them (if you’re curious, you can watch the bad video), because that’s not what I would do during a regular appointment. All of the photos were taken while I was sitting in my chair watching the magic happen (except the last one, which I took just outside of the office (hence the odd lighting)).

Joyce and Kurt made the new eye by building around the first one, so I went without for a while (got to walk around with a badass patch on when I went to get coffee). It is a very strange sensation, like the feeling you have when you lose a tooth and that gaping space is left behind.

They didn’t have books like “Monocular Max” when I was a kid. I feel old.

I’m still deciding how I feel about this eye.

The old one used to be a bit too small for the socket; it would get all squinty, and my glasses prescription was adjusted so that my useless left lens has a magnifier in it to make the eyes look more balanced. Now that I have a larger eye, it looks huge through my glasses (then again, I’m probably the only person who notices these things). Time to get a new prescription, I guess!

Also, the toning on a couple of these images is driving me crazy. I’ve given up for the time being, but will probably update later when I get the color balances more in sync.

Even More Snow!

Posted by Ivy

I know New England winters are far crazier than Missouri ones, but I haven’t been here through the entire season in six years and so forgot just how bonkers they can get. I’ve already blogged about the post-Christmas storm that messed up my friends’ travel plans, but December was, apparently, just a warm-up for the main event.

This January has been the snowiest month in Connecticut history. Not the snowiest January…the snowiest month. Ever. I haven’t been to the gym in months, but am nonetheless staying in shape because of my regular snow-shoveling regimen.

Last night the weathermen predicted 9-12 inches of snow overnight. My parents and I woke up at 6:45 this morning to find…eighteen inches of fluff (and fortunately, it was fluff, not the icy kind of snow) piled all around our house like a lumpy comforter.

Good morning!

There are a couple of problems posed by 18 inches of snow. The first one is that my parents had to go to work, forty minutes away in Hartford…but the car can’t get out of the garage with, well, *that* in the way. We’re also running out of places to put the snow- those piles off to the right in the above picture are the result of every other snowfall this month.

The second is that our dog O’Lio, while he is a pretty tall dog (he’s a greyhound), couldn’t ford his way through the piles on the back porch to get to our backyard and do his morning thing.

Fortunately, my parents’ office called to let everybody know they didn’t have to come in until noon, which gave us time to clear the driveway and free the car from the garage. Meanwhile, I tackled the back porch. Once I got to the bottom of the steps and the backyard, I dug out paths for O’Lio to use…it’s like his own private maze out there now. He’s happy.

I should point out that all of this shoveling was done before 9 a.m. After finishing, I immediately went back and curled up in bed for a few hours…until I had to go back out again in the afternoon to take care of the other side of the driveway.

Northeast Roamings: On the Freedom Trail

Posted by Ivy

It’s no big secret that I love Boston. David and Halley, my friends who came up to visit from Texas (and got delayed by the snow), already knew this, but had never actually been to the city with me; it was a ton of fun exploring all over with them. We kept ending up on the Freedom Trail, but then again, that’s not all that hard to do in Boston.

Kiddos going sledding in the Boston Common [cropped; I liked the panorama-style composition better even when taking it].

George Washington statue in the Public Garden.


Northeast Roamings: Snowy Rhode Island

Posted by Ivy

Last week, New England and New York got shellacked by a blizzard (this week, we again got ten inches of snow, with another few expected tomorrow. Hello, winter!). Normally this would not be a serious problem, and I would just hole up inside and read books and do nothing (and, indeed, I actually did do that)….but two of my friends from Texas were planning to come up and visit right about when all of the snow came, and they had to delay their flights by two days because of it. Argh. C’est la vie.

However, the blizzard did make for some good photo ops!

My cousin Lucy shoveling off her front porch in Pawtucket, R.I.

Aftermath the next morning.

Mainescapes

Posted by Ivy

I meant to post this first one when I took it just before Thanksgiving. The others were taken when I went back up to Maine a couple weeks ago for Christmas at my grandmother’s house.

Taken through the window at 6:20 a.m….when I had to wake up to take the dog outside. The blue light was great, though.

A Christmas Present

Posted by Ivy

My best friend Tegan came to CT last week!

She brought me a few early Christmas gifts, including a handmade dodecahedron die (this, incidentally, is one of my favorite words). Each face had a quote from the family Cape Cod trips that we all took from 2000 to 2005. I don’t think Tegan and I started writing down quotes until ’02 or so, but I’m very glad we did. There are real gems in there, and I love rediscovering them.Semi-coincidentally, the dodecahedron is sitting on an old grocery list from Cape Cod that my mom found earlier this month, which I brought out as soon as I saw the die. We had about eleven people in one house, so grocery time was taken very seriously.

I also got a little baggie of those “grow-a-zoo” capsules you find in your stocking when you’re little. We decided to test them out.

Presto! Instant zoo (I think the green one is supposed to be a hippo).

Choate Sports: Water Polo [lots of photos]

Posted by Ivy

Went back up to Choate today to practice some water polo photography. This is yet another sport I had no experience shooting, but I have (sort of) played before, and I know the basic rules, so it was pretty easy to adjust to shooting. Water polo is an intense sport; not only are you treading water or flat-out swimming the whole time, but you have to fend off fouls from the other team. The ref was pretty good at catching them, but I had a far better vantage point than he did (the viewing area for the pool is elevated, which was great for nice clean backgrounds), aaaand he missed a lot.

The lighting in the pool area is awful and dark (and red- what?), and I was already intentionally underexposing in order to get the shutter speed I needed…so there was a lot of color correction involved in these. I know that in a perfect world you’re supposed to shoot correctly in-camera, but it was more important to me to have that shutter speed (I was using 1/250, and in some cases even that wasn’t fast enough) than to listen to my light meter.

It’s basically an advanced game of “Not touching! Not touching!”

After several failed attempts to actually get the ball in mid-air, I had a brainwave and decided to try shooting vertically instead. This led to a couple of compositions that I liked (I’m a big fan of busy compositions), as well as a freaking photo of a goal save, which I had also been trying to nab.


Color-corrected for the pool…not the sidelines, which remain bathed in red (why red? can some swimmer help me out?)