Take Me Out to the Ball Game

@the Mets

400th Post!

This is my 400th post on this blog!

POPCORN

Who doesn't love a giant tub of golden, buttery popcorn?

Flight Pepsi-Cola

We were recently at a Mets game, which happens to be right next door to La Guardia airport. There was a ton of air traffic during the game, which was pretty neat.

Summer Blooms

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturbed.  ~Walt Whitman

Faithful Recreation

Well, I figured it out! The last time I tried this the sun was not in a good position because it was a little late in the day.

Attemped Recreation

I've been seeing the same kind of cool flower picture on Instagram lately, so I decided to try it myself. Below you can see the vastly superior inspiration photos:

Instagram

I recently upgraded my five year old flip phone to a modern smart phone. It's pretty cool, all the stuff it does. One of my favorite apps is Instagram. All you do is upload a picture, crop it square and if you want, apply a filter and BAM! your photo is shared. I've nearly forgotten how to use my Nikon, since my phone takes pretty good pictures and I can share them very easily!

A grid view of my latest Instagram pics

Happy 4th!

Gov Ball 2012

I was invited to attend this year's Governor's Ball on Randall's Island. It was a awesome, 2-day concert with a bunch of famous acts: Beck, Modest Mouse, Fiona Apple to a name a few. There was a lot of dancing and everyone looked cool. I walked around at one point randomly taking picture of people in the crowd.

A Real Rabbit

I've seen more wild animals in this state than anywhere on earth, even zoos. Ok, maybe not a zoo.

The Speed of Pete

We took Petey to a dog park and he hated it. So we walked around the park the dog park was in and Petey liked it much better.

Growing Up

Since a bird is always on the nest, it took us a little while to actually find out that the eggs had hatched. They got big pretty fast! This one baby curiously poked his (or her) little head out to get a look at me. In case it's hard to tell, the baby is facing left. Next to its eye, you can see it's little baby bird ear. (it's not often you get to see a bird's ear!)

The Bird Family

I like checking on the mourning doves every morning because I'm able to get a really good look and they let me! A parent dove stays with the baby birds, no matter who may be watering their nest (me) or who might be poking their face through the flowers to take a peek (me again).

The parents usually switch off. First, one of them will call out the distinctive mourning dove call once or twice, fly away and after a few seconds, the other parent swoops in to take over. One day I was lucky enough to hear the hooting before the switch-off occurred and I watched as a parent landed on the nest with the rest of the family!


They patiently waited for me to take my pictures until I crept back inside, then the bird who needed a break took off.

Famous People

Fleet Week brought me in contact (or very close proximity) to some famous people. Katy Perry, you can see above, in her American flag outfit. She gave a free concert to the Navy and the USO volunteers. It was pretty good!

And then, of course, there is Mark Sanchez. To be honest, I didn't know who he was. Dad stopped in his tracks and said, "You want a picture with him." And I was like, "Uh... ok?" But when dad tried to take the picture, he instead turned the camera OFF and I started to leave. But Mark stopped me and told dad to take an actual picture. So I have two pictures with the handsome Mark Sanchez.

Mark: Wait! Don't leave....

Amanda: If that's what you really want, handsome sir, of course I will take a photo with you!



Also, I saw Wilmer Valderrama. I could have taken a photo with him, as he was about an arms length away from me, but I did not! Here he is on the jumbo tron, introducing the 47 people who spoke before Katy Perry performed:

Robin Photo Op

We've been taking pictures every day of these little guys when the mama is not around. The robin parents will leave the nest if anyone gets too close, and chirp angrily at us from a nearby branch until we leave!

Hatched!

Newly hatched robins are a little bit scary. Look at those eye balls! Also, notice how small they are....

Fleet Week 2012

My dad and I volunteered with the USO at Fleet Week! We saw Katy Perry on Wednesday and then Friday, we got to board a ship and built bikes for the kids of Navy parents. We put together about 100 bikes and wrote messages to the kids who would get them in the near future! After the bike-building, we were given a private tour of the USS Wasp, which was pretty neat.

Asbury Park

Asbury Park, where I took this picture, is a shore town with a boardwalk and the site of the music festival Bamboozle. On a related note, did you know that you are charged to go onto the beach? YOU HAVE TO PAY TO GET ON THE BEACH!!! I was so stunned by this fact, I spent the first hour on the boardwalk being outraged and arguing about how unfair this was with my NJ-born boyfriend. He was resigned to it, but I thought it was (one of) the craziest things I've ever heard.

Only in New Jersey.

Bird Alert

On the front porch is this hanging pot of lovely petunias. Mom went over to water it one day and a bird flew out of it! After restarting her heart, she peeked into the pot and noticed two little white eggs. So not only are there robins in the back, there are mourning doves in the front! It's bird central over here!

Robin's Egg Blue

This is the "before" picture. Mom found the nest by our back porch recently with these little tiny eggs in it. It's not hard to guess what type of birds will hatch from these!

Beauty

One of my challenge words is "fade." I was mesmerized by the way the color fades from the petal tips to center.

Get Ready for Flowers

There's going to be a lot of flowers posted pretty soon. C'mon, it's spring!

Cell Phone Art

These phones are about 5 years old, which means they are ancient. Too bad none of my challenge words are "obscure" or "old-timey." Arrangement is on my list, so I'm crossing it off!

Photograph These Words

I've given myself an assignment. I found a big list of photography-related words, chose 78 of them and I want to challenge myself to take a photo that represents each word. I tried to pick a mixture of words that seem straight forward and some that are a challenge.

Let the challenge begin!

Spring Has Sprung!

There are so many flowers blooming, and it was just the official start of spring a few days ago! It makes me really happy to see the trees starting to green up and flowers starting to get colorful. Does spring make you happy too?!

Baby Plants

I'm growing pepers again this year. I planted seeds just recently and they're already sprouting! Yay for spring and new plants!

Clovers

There are no four leaf clovers in this bunch, but that doesn't mean I can't say Happy St. Patrick's day!

Mod Mirrors

Recently, I was able to visit the Met (AKA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art). We started out in 19th- and early 20th- century paintings but spent a big chunk of time going through the modern and contemporary section. There were a couple of reflective things that I felt like I needed to take my own picture in:


I forget who the artist was of this one, but I know he was very old and from someplace warm, like Italy or the Middle East. There was some very intricate work going on with the curved and cut mirror that was really cool to study.


This was a giant bowl of little hexagons. It felt like looking through a pair of glasses that aren't meant for your eyes. The room that both of these mirrors were in was the best part about the modern art. The rooms we went through later made me angry, as modern art tends to do.

Concrete Jungle

They say if you want to act like a real New Yorker, don't look up at the buildings and marvel-- only the tourists are amazed by all the skyscrapers. A "real" city dweller is so unimpressed with the concrete jungle, they walk around staring at the ground.

I'm not a city girl, so whenever I can (and if it doesn't embarrass my city bf) I take a peek up up up and sometimes, you can catch the full moon resting right next to the Empire State Building.

Road Trip 2012

On Mardi Gras, I got up, tossed a few bags in my car and drove 600 miles to Ohio. I spent some time with my older brother and his wild dog, shot a few guns and "won" my first ever game of credit card roulette. (Winning credit card roulette means you get to pay for everyone!) I played poker, ate Brussels sprouts and had an Irish car bomb. Or two.

On the 10 hour drive back home, I was fortunate to spend a few hours with my Grandpa, tour his new house and eat a GIANT fish sandwich. I passed through four tunnels, saw one Amish buggy driving along and cows, sheep and goats. I only spent about $90 on 25 gallons of gas (way to go, Corolla!) and got very familiar with cruise control and the song "Houdini" by Foster the People.

I learned about the history of flight at the Air Force Museum and that my ideal road trip length is 5 hours. I also learned to double check that a cd you burn with a couple of hours of music on it actually burns correctly. Unless you don't mind listening to only one song, and then 20 seconds of every song after that (I do mind. Luckily, I had tons of back up music.)

The good thing about having a flexible work schedule (um, no job) is that it's easy to pick up and drive anywhere in the country you want to go. By the way, if you want to drive through Pennsylvania be prepared-- it's is a huge state.

Tunnel Vision

C'mon, you knew with that title, it was going to be a picture of a tunnel!

Video Series - Foster the People

"Houdini" live on SNL



I listened to this song on repeat on my road trip. Foster the People is great band live.

Double Exposure - St. Paul's

Another photo of a photo I took while studying abroad. The photo is of my favorite building in London, St. Paul's Cathedral. It's been framed and hung in a stairwell of our house, which is reflected in the glass.

Reflections - Window

When I traveled in Italy, I took this photo of the poppy field and landscape. When I got home, it was printed, framed and hung up on the wall. Recently, I noticed the reflection in the glass of this photo and thought it might be a cool, layered picture. Things would start to get weird if I ever printed out the above photo, framed it and then took yet another picture of that. The Inception of photos... within a photo, within a photo....!!

Water Marble

I can't stop looking at this manicure blog! This lady loves to do her nails and she takes pictures and videos of all her manicures. A lot of what she does is water marbling (which is what I attempted on my nails in the picture) and it involves dropping nail polish into a cup of water, making a cool design then dipping your fingernail into the design. You will be amazed at what some people who have practiced this art can come up with!

I've been longing to try this out on my nails, so one day, I painted my nails white, combined some pink, red and (what ended up looking like) clear polishes, swirled it around in the water, and when my fingers came out of the water, this mess was the result! I thought my pointer finger came out pretty neat, but my mom just thought my hand was bleeding!

I decided I didn't like my first try but before I took off the polish (I didn't even bother to clean up the edges of my nails) I decided to document my experiment. I will try this again at some point.

♥machine

Happy Valentine's day!

I ate a Hershey's kiss and bunched up the wrapper and I thought, "hey, that looks like a heart!" And that is how this photo came about.

Mr. Pete

Why do dogs have wet noses? Petey's been to the vet a lot lately (for him) in the past year, but he seems to be back to his mean, squirrel-chasing self. Did you know that some dogs have lived until they were in their mid-20s? I can see that being our dog.

Technique

I had my camera with me on a day of errands and I took a bunch of random pictures as I drove around. This is a photo of nothing in particular, but I do like the light... it's probably around the Golden Hour, which makes everything look wonderful. It's also got some strong leading lines and if there had been something interesting to look at at the intersection, that would have been good.

Spingtime Background

I'm getting tired of winter and am looking forward to things being green again! I really wanted to change my desktop background to a picture of crocuses blooming in snow and I found (through Google of course) the center image below. I didn't like it floating in a black background, so I made a border of MORE crocuses!

Hurry up, spring!

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Tilt-Shift:: Nets Vs Celtics

There was a tilt-shift craze last year that I really wanted to try out, but my photo editing software was too basic. Today, I found a website where I could edit online, free, because I needed to blur the background of a photo for work. Once I was done, I couldn't wait to get home and try some more editing on my own pictures.

This is my first attempt at tilt-shift, which is basically editing a picture of a wide shot to make it look like it's a macro of a miniature model. Basically, you blur almost everything but the part you want to focus on. I'm going to try this again soon!

My muse: 50 examples of tilt-shift photos

Zippy

Another speed walker.

I thought about cropping this, but I kind of like it the way it is. While taking this and other photos like it, I very simply tried to hit the shutter while a person was in the frame (without stopping-- it was cold out!). Most of the time it was messy, but I adjusted my timing and got a couple of good ones.