Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

I Finally Get To Take Graduation Photos Of My Kid, And I Have So Many Ideas!

This tiny little environmental scientist is about to graduate college!

Neither of my homeschooled high schoolers wanted any part of the cap and gown, pomp and circumstance aspects of high school graduation. They each just kind of... got to a natural end point in every subject they were studying, decided they were done, and went on with other business while I trailed after, saying things like, "Should we do a proper graduation ceremony? No? Maybe just some photos? No? Okay, how about just a pretty diploma? An announcement, at least? No? Nothing? Not a single thing? UGH!"

So my older kid's upcoming college graduation, AND the fact that she has agreed to let me walk around campus with her and take some proper cap and gown photos, is sending me, Artemis-like, over the Moon with excitement...

...which I will, of course, do my best to tamp down to something that appears more like vague interest, lest the kid decide that graduation photos are actually cringe.

She might anyway--that's always the risk with these kids!--but I've upped my odds by purchasing a preschool-sized graduation cap and gown from Facebook Marketplace for eight dollars (my first Facebook Marketplace purchase! I'm what's known as a late adopter), putting it on the dog, taking a photo, sending her the photo, and telling her that on this upcoming visit I am bringing the dog, AND the dog's very own graduation cap and gown, so that they can take graduation photos together.

Dog tax attached, but be warned that it's not a good photo, but more of a proof of concept:


I need to add some black elastic to that cap so it stays on her head, but otherwise, it's totally gonna work, right? Mental note to pack alllllllll the dog treats...

This pic should be super easy to pose, and it would work in a variety of locations. There are tons of steps on the kid's campus, so I could see it happening on any of the endless flights of stairs, or going through some of the decorative gates at the edge of campus, which, my local university has so many of those, too. What is up with colleges and their universal obsession with decorative gates?


Walking away is the best, because you don't have to smile on command!


Just the cap with street clothes is VERY cute. It would also work with her equestrian team gear:


How cute would this be with some of the kid's collection of 5,000 well-loved stuffies?

OR, how about she's walking away wearing the cap and gown, but she's also carrying the most-well loved of the bunch, Diplodocus?

And now I'm off on a tangent imagining a studio photo shoot just for Diplodocus...


I like this idea for a close-up:


This next one is a nice way to show off an iconic campus building, but it does require a lot of room, since the subjects, themselves, are in the middle distance. The kid's campus does have some iconic buildings, but the college is mostly on top of a hill so I'm not sure how much distance you can really get in a photo:


School name visible in the background is iconic!


I don't know how I'll actually take this photo, since I wasn't anticipating putting a tripod and a remote shutter on my packing list... but maybe!


This would be another good photo for a vista!


In this next one, I really like the flowing, open gown, and how it would also show off the steps of the campus library, one of the kid's favorite places and where she's spent a ton of time. I think the cap would work being held either on her head, as in the photo, or down by her side. Not having to look at the camera and smile on demand is a plus:


I bet she's got a favorite bench somewhere on campus, or even just a picturesque flight of steps to sit on. Did I mention that her school has a LOT of steps?


This is the kind of dog content I'm imagining. Basically, take every one of the photo ideas I've already shown you, and then simply add a dog in matching graduation gear!


I thought these three and a half years would feel so long, but now that I'm almost on the other side of them, they were actually so short. It's weird how life keeps doing that, passing by without you noticing. But pretty soon I'm going to pack the car and the dog and drive over to Ohio. I'm going to convince the kid to put on her cap and gown, and then probably convince her to take it off again so I can iron it really quickly (only iron your graduation gowns on warm, because they're polyester!). We're going to walk around her campus, I'm going to take a million photos and ask a million questions, squeeze a million stories out of her about this short, precious time, and I am going to notice EVERYTHING.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page! 

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Thursday, January 30, 2025

I Learned a New Trick, and Now I'm Going to Film Myself Crafting Everything

I have been wanting to figure out how to do the thing that all the cool craft TikTokers do, in which they film a hyperlapse of themselves creating a project from start to finish.

But I couldn't quite figure out how they were doing it! One creator posted that he used a Go Pro strapped to his chest, which... that's a hard no for me. I wanted something more like a nature film, with a stationary camera mount that has my entire workspace in its field of view. I do NOT want something strapped to my body that I'm going to forget about and end up taking to the toilet with me. Just... no.

I swear I thought for months about this, wondering if I could set my tripod up on top of my table without getting too much in my way, or if I needed something more like a boom to swing the camera over my space, or if maybe I should just nail a couple of straps to the ceiling and duct tape my camera to them.

But then randomly this week, as I was about to sew a Pumpkin+Bear shop order, I was all, "What if I just stick my ring light on a shelf and hold it there with my giant dictionary?"

It's inelegant, and with the added weight that entire shelf is definitely going to come down on my head and kill me one of these times, but by golly, it worked!

And boom, that's what it looks like when I sew a custom American Girl doll face mask!

Next up, I need to make a couple of kite paper window stars in my kid's school colors to send to her in her next care package (her dorm room has a wonderful sunny window), so I'm going to film that, too! And then I wanted to figure out how to quilt a Philadelphia Flyers logo to go onto a sweatshirt, so I can film that, and THEN I want to send my other kid some DIY Ancient Greek alphabet blocks in her care package, so I can film that, too.

And then, honestly, I may film myself reading for a few hours, because if I'm not DIYing something, I really just want to be reading.

P.S. If you want to sew your own American Girl doll face mask, here's how.

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

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Friday, May 17, 2024

I Saw the Aurora Borealis Above My House

What a year of wonders it has been!

Honestly, the total solar eclipse alone would have been enough of a celestial wonder to sustain me at least through the rest of the year, but I have been spoiled with riches, because last weekend there was also the Aurora Borealis! ABOVE MY HOUSE!!!

And it turns out that the Aurora Borealis even works when there are clouds!


I mean, it definitely would have been better without the clouds, but thank goodness it still works with them. It might have even made it more spectacular in some ways, because never before in my life have I seen parti-colored clouds at night.

I used a long exposure for these photos to pick up all the Northern Lights that I could, so these photos are for sure brighter than we saw in person, but still, it was pretty bright! It wasn't so bright and distinctive that if I'd wandered outside having no idea what was going on I'd be all, "Ooh, the Aurora Borealis!", but it WAS bright enough that I'd definitely have been like, "Um, WHAT is wrong with the sky?!? Why is it pink? Are we experiencing a nuclear attack? Do we now have aliens?"

Without the long camera exposure, it looked more like this:


See? If you walked outside at 10:00 pm and you didn't know what was up you probably wouldn't immediately clock Northern Lights, but you would know SOMETHING was happening. Aliens, probably. Perhaps nuclear war. So it's nice that I did know what was going on, because instead of ducking and covering I could then be all, "Family! Come hither to experience magic and wonder with me!"

The family *kinda* experienced the magic and wonder with me for a little bit, but their patience for magic and wonder is far inferior to my own, I'm sorry to tell you. They were like, "Cool, pink sky! Someone tell Nick Drake! [two minutes pass] ...welp, now we've seen the Aurora! Bye!" and then they went back inside to their various unmagical and wonder-free pursuits. 

I, however, was going to be damned if I let a second of celestial magic and wonder pass me by, and fortunately, that's why god invented the lawn chair! It was also the perfect evening--cool and breezy (darn those clouds!), the frogs from the swampy backyard bellowing mating cries to compete with the distant sounds from the drive-in next door and the even more distance sounds of the racetrack a few miles away, early enough in the season that I didn't have to swat mosquitos--it was just about as good as springtime in Indiana gets.


The photo above is my greatest triumph--there's a little bit of camera shake, oops, but there's also the Aurora Borealis lighting up the Big Dipper, and in the bottom right of the photo I even caught a meteor!

I still want to see some proper, cloud-free, way-up-north Northern Lights one day, but these particular Northern Lights were a delightful, unexpected, probably once-in-a-lifetime-in-Indiana gift that I'm super happy got tacked onto my year.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

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