To Be Announced...

If you're coming here for the first time, I regret to say that I've pulled all of my posts for a while. I apologize that I have nothing to show right now. I'm at a crossroads. Perhaps I'll put them back sometime, but I've made no decision yet.

Thanks for your visit and also for your understanding.

~Velvet

More Nudes

I've wanted to shoot nudes for ages, but have been finding that it's not always easy to get people to sit for you, even with all their clothes on. Still, this is a start.

Climbing Photos for Dan

Dan from Dan's Blah Blah Blog asked to see some climbing photos, so here they are. It was kind of hard to find any good photos because I'm the photographer in the family and on any of the more impressive climbs we're too busy paying attention to safety issues to be snapping photos (which is as it should be; we're nothing if not safety conscious). So, for what it's worth, pics of me climbing.

I was ice bouldering with a buddy. I loooooove ice climbing.

Safer bouldering. Don't make any assumptions about the hat because:

1. I don't follow baseball therefore I have no team that I root for.

2. I wear it because I was born in New York State.

Short climb, sweaty mid-summer day. Top-roping to clean the route (collect the gear that was used to protect the leader as they climbed up) and break down the anchor and rappel so that we could move on to another climb.

A cold, November day. I remember my fingers being rather numb.

This time, leading (putting the protective gear in as I climbed).

I'm up there. Just follow the rope.

Update: Oopsie! I forgot to credit these photos because they were obviously not taken by me. These were all taken by The Mister except for the ice climbing one. That one was taken by my friend, Jeff.

Happy Memorial Day Weekend!

Scenes from the Back Yard

More shots with my Holga, this time scenes from our back yard. I was just exploring the late afternoon sunlight coming through the trees.

forsythia in bloom before the blossoms dropped

some of the fruits of our woodchopping labor

hand-me down from a neighbor whose daughter is now in college
(grass just starting to green up)

I Heart My Holga

I shot these photos in the past few weeks with my Holga, which is considered a toy medium format camera which'll set you back a whopping $25 or so. (The link at the bottom of the page has a photo of it... minus the rubber bands that *ahem* some people use to hold the back on.) I swear that I haven't had this much fun with a cheap, plastic, "Made in China" toy since I was, oh, seven years old. Each Holga has it's own personality (read: defects) thus their unique "quirks". Aside from the vignetting which is one of the normal beauties of the cheap, plastic joy that is a Holga (note the black in the corners of the shots), I'm noticing that mine tends to do a double exposure of sorts in the lower right corner. But enough of my enthusiastic blather (did I mention that I love playing with this thing?).

Below is a picture of the magnolia tree in our front yard (see my other blog for a photo of the tree in color and in the context of the front yard).

This is at a park down the street from our house.

For any camera/photo buffs who haven't been introduced to the Holga yet, take a few minutes to read the Holga link above... it's funny and it might just make you want to hop online and order one. If you do, happy shooting! Oh, and though most of the modifications are no longer necessary to make it photoworthy (the Chinese were actually paying attention to the online modification sites) some of the tips are handy to know.

Snaps from Shanghai

Several years ago, we took a trip to China with my husband's family and my mother. I'm going to throw a few handfuls of photos from that trip up here for fun and I'm going to start with a few snaps from Shanghai. The first three photos are from one of the gardens (or just outside the entrance in the case of the first photo).

These next photos are both from the same temple.