Self Portraits: My Attempt at Modeling

WARNING: This post is admittedly a little self-centered... I think? Probably. Anyway, we all have a right to be self-centered sometimes!

Katarina and I were supposed to do a photo shoot this past weekend in Hawthorne. It was going to be so much fun, Katarina is really pretty so the pictures were to be gorgeous, but this air-headed dweeb left her camera battery charging in Vancouver. So.. that's rescheduled to the middle of January. And my Nana bought me this wonderful tripod for Christmas that I've been trying to find reasons to use! Well, today, it miraculously started snowing (and hasn't stopped) in this wonderful place of Vancouver, so I decided to take crazy weird pictures like this one: 

Hair not did. Make up not on. In the clothes I slept in. Oh so charming. So, I then put a few on facebook and immediately thought "people think I'm weird, lazy, and uninhibited," which is generally all true, but I felt the need to get pretty and take some photos of myself. I was not at all hopeful that they'd turn out okay. I've never "modeled" in my life and just don't really know what to do in front of a camera except put a huge smile on my face or look really... really weird. So, I shall share a few of my favorites. In an amateur photographers perspective, I like the angle and location that I set my camera up and I didn't edit any of these because the lighting was either pretty okay or pretty good and I actually liked the unfocused falling snowflakes. Sooooo. Here are some.
SECOND WARNING: Some of these pictures clearly expose my stomach. If it offends you, scroll past them. It wasn't quite intentional. Also, my stomach looks less than attractive in at least one photo. It's the season of "eat so much more than your body can accommodate," so get over it. :)

So.. easy on the criticism. ;) But let me know what you think! And tell me your favorite!

Why I Question Media, Teenagers, and Humanity

I feel the need to vent. If I keep posting Facebook statuses in order to vent, I'll just annoy. So here is my full vent, unedited, all out. Here are the reasons I am completely livid with humanity at the moment:

1. There are some cold, heartless people out there who simply disgust me.
2. The media, and the news specifically, employs some of the most vulture-like, fame hungry, money-grubbing, completely thoughtless individuals I've seen in my experience.
3. As a country, we need to figure out this gun control issue. 

In detail:
1. I don't consider myself the most emotional person in the world. I consider myself compassionate and caring, but on "normal" levels. As soon as I heard about the shooting, I wasn't quite scared or worried at first. I was disappointed. My first thought was, "Another one? It is really unfortunate that I react to a shooting with 'another one?'" Immediately after this thought, and as soon as I heard people had been shot, I began to worry. I have about five or more friends who work at the town center, let alone about a dozen who are still young enough to be addicted to frequenting the town center daily, whether that be for shopping or just hanging out. Oh, and this is Christmas season. A season I usually spend locked in my house because I know the amount of people out and about buying gifts and such. The point being that there are countless amounts of people who could have happened to be at the mall who would have been in danger. Not just people I know, but people my friends know, and people their friends know, and their friends, and so on. We are all connected and related and similar and are all effected, in however large or small a way, by what one of us does. As such, neurologically, we should respond by subconsciously mirroring the emotions of those around us. This is called empathy. 
As I read through my Facebook newsfeed, I became increasingly concerned with my friends, family, and the members of the community who had gone to the Town Center today. Most statuses were shocked exclamations such as "there was a shooting at the town center!!!!!" or concerned statuses such as "I pray that everyone gets out okay!" but one status stopped me in tracks. A girl who is about my age, who I've maybe talked to once or twice (we share a mutual friend), to her eternal credit said,
"Can we stop posting about the mall now? Everyone knows not to go there, someone's shooting people. We get it."
Now, this would have been easy to ignore, except that upon reading her justification for saying such a thing,
"I'm not talking about the people who were shot or killed. But everyone is blowing up about the same thing. It gets old. There are shootings all the time. Just because it's at the mall, people are freaking out."
Umm...
Excuse me?! OF COURSE people are freaking out, you self-absorbed teenager. People were hurt, people were scared, and a status like that demeans the compassion the rest of us decent people are trying to express.
I scrolled up from her status, completely disgusted, only to find another, closer friend with a status near verbatim to the last. So I posted a polite, but hopefully pointed paragraph on how I felt. Several more from other friends of mine showed up so apparently I wasn't the only person with cold, disrespectful friends, which makes it all the more heartbreaking.

2. I was watching Fox 12 covering the shooting this evening. They said the same things over and over: "shooter at large, 2 dead, 1 injured, the situation is contained but no further information."
They started interviewing witnesses after they said the same thing in a loop a few times. The first witness was calm and collected. The first interviewer was concise and didn't ask stupid questions. The second interviewer, however, didn't know how to lead the interview and was completely fake. The interview I witnessed went a little something like this:
"Did you see the shooter?"
"No, I was on the other side of the mall."
"Could you describe the shooter?"
"No. I didn't see him.."
"How did you feel when you heard the gunshots."
"Well.. I was scared for my life."
There were two interviews that went like this. Again... OF COURSE people are scared, you thoughtless newscaster. May I mention that before the first interview started, it looked like he was declining to speak on camera, to which she shook her head, waved her arm, and introduced him anyway? I could be wrong, but it looked pretty suspicious to me. And during the press conference, all of the news people would not let it go that the police officer would not be more specific. I realize it's their job to get information, but it's his job to keep sensitive and/or questionable information to himself. Their pretty reminiscent of  vultures, in my opinion. Hey, I have an idea! Instead of sending pointless interviewers out to bombard and practically coerce poor fresh-out-of-tragedy witnesses, let's put a few trained counselors/psychologists on the site. Let's offer, say, fifteen minute counseling and a referral outside of the crime scene. It may not be practical, but it would be so much more helpful than some interviewers looking to get a raise.

3. Okay, I'm not very educated on this gun control issue. However, it's obvious that if unstable individuals can easily get their hands on firearms, something needs to change. And that really sucks for everyone else, but it's better safe than sorry. I'm not saying make it impossible to get a gun, but maybe require a psychiatric evaluation first.. Which of course would be impractical, but would we rather have people shooting up our malls some more? I don't think so.

Experimental Art

So finals went okay, yes I'm glad to be on break, last term was extremely exhausting. But I don't want to talk about school! Instead, this is another post of new photos.

Now this time, it wasn't exactly planned. I went to Levi's Christmas concert at George Fox and decided to take pictures just to try to catch Levi in one of them (remotely successful, as the only Levi pictures were too blurry to be good pictures). So, I ended up taking pictures of pretty lights and decoration. One of the photos is actually of the band as well as decoration, but the three others I'll put on here are just different lighting affects and/or decoration. So I refer to them as my first "experimentally artistic" photos.

Here's the photo of the band+decorations and such. They really go all out. It isn't just a choir concert, it's definitely a full-on show!

Lighting affects. Kind of cool. 

This one is my favorite. The ceiling looks like clouds and stars (which, if I remember correctly, was the point).

Pretty colors!


Thoughts? :)