We were invited to a very purple wedding last night and got some great purple pictures to share. Nikki (I know her as Thao, her Vietnamese name) is a friend from high school. Coincidentally, Vinh and Nikki’s first date was Jenni and my wedding, so it was fun knowing that our beginning was someone else’s beginning as well.
In June, Jenni and I had the privilege of photographing two families. My coworker’s family of girls have a wonderful home with a backyard that led into an open field. I was inspired by a different coworker’s photography work to use a reflector more and got great results using the sun that day.
The second family, or I should say families, was Jenni’s cousins in the Longview area. We did a short shoot of the youngest cousin of six months, then a mix of group and individual cousin shots. Some of the best came when we let them play outside. Whew! That was a crazy day with seven little ones (including our two) zooming around.
As I grew up, my parents did not allow me to own a video game console. Although, I eventually got around that when we owned our first computer (albeit, I had to justify that the game was educational initially).
Looking back, I’m very thankful that my parents forced gave us the opportunity to use our imagination instead of being entertained by flashing pixels on a television. I made up a lot of crazy plots while helpless G.I. Joe or Transformers action figures did my bidding.
I’ve rekindled that imagination as I watch our daughters play with the simplest of things and having the greatest joy doing so. From peekaboo with a baby wipes box to today’s tug-of-war, I’m amazed again and again how much fun can be had with simple objects.
My cousin Eileen graduated from Benson last night. It marked an end of her high school career but it also the end of Benson High School as I know it. Class of 2010 will likely be the last where Benson is a four-year polytechnic program—the program that gave me a head start in computer science fifteen years ago. My senior project was my first jump into web site design and I’m sad that the opportunities Benson offered are gone for future generations.
At Wanda’s funeral, I was initially touched that the memorial ground keepers would provide flowers for each grave since almost every grave had flowers. I was even more touched when I realized that it actually was each family’s descendants who placed flowers.
One of the sessions at a web conference last week talked about how our brains are pattern recognizers. One of the strongest patterns I’m sure our brain recognizes are faces, which would explain why there is a Flickr pool dedicated to pictures of faces in places.
One of the things I’ve learned in my design work that while it might seem instinctual to always give more choices to an opportunity, giving too many options actually is counterproductive. While I don’t lament the passing of our old washer that no longer finished its cycles without human intervention or our dryer that needed 1.6 cycles to dry our clothes, my first reaction to the “wealth” of cleaning and drying options on our new washer and dryer pair was “Hmm… cool buttons, but lots of cool buttons.”