Calgary Transit

The city of Calgary - what a place!  Being a wealth of opportunity, everyone is moving in to work.  The downtown core is always hustling and bustling during the week, and the trains running through take thousands of people to their destinations every day.

I've always been intrigued by public transportation.  It's always full of a mixture of people, and it isn't often that they will interact with each other.  I'm to blame for this lack of humane contact myself - sometimes I don't want to hold conversations with strangers, which surely means other people feel the same way.  But it's weird, isn't it?  To be so close to dozens of other humans, and to pretend they're not even there.  I haven't spent nearly enough time photographing this phenomenon, but it's always on my mind to.

I feel the same strange feeling on public transportation as I do on elevators.  I hope to get brave enough soon enough to photograph the elevator in my apartment building.  Being on the twenty-fifth floor, I get to try to ignore/have too-short-of-conversations on too-long-of-elevator-rides with a lot of the residents. It's just too much for me to handle - maybe breaking out a camera is the only answer to make those rides more comfortable, eh?

Pan(or)ama

I've been chipping away at the photographs I took in Panama a couple weeks ago, and have been stitching together a lot of panoramic shots I took around the country.  I haven't done a whole lot of work with panos, but they're definitely fun to mess around with!

And here's one more I just really like...

DIY Cards

I have a love-hate relationship with thank you cards.  I find that it's really nice to let people know how much I've appreciated what they've done, but there's something about buying a pack of cards, writing out a generic message, slapping a stamp on the envelope, and sending it off to its inevitable destination in the garbage that makes me feel a little queasy.

After our wedding, my mom suggested we send a photo of the ceremony, or of Calgary, or Something, as a gesture of thanks for the gifts we received.  I liked this idea, especially since people seemed to like the wedding invitations I made.

I had to figure out a good way to go about it.  If I had a decent printer, I could just print on cardstock, fold accordingly, and have them ready to go - but I don't.  If I were just sending a few thank-yous, I could outsource the work, and have a photo place make really nice-looking cards - but I had a lot more than a few to send.  So what did I do?  Well...

First I went to a photo kiosk and printed out a few different photos I had taken around Calgary, and on our honeymoon.  I decided to go with small prints (3x4) because I kind of liked the idea of a small, personal-sized, card.  Then I got some necessary materials together to actually turn the photos into cards - cardstock, a ruler, tape, and an exacto knife.

I cut the cardstock down to the same size as the photos, and started to hinge each photo to a piece of cardstock, but quickly noticed the tape I had was pretty nasty, and transferring dirt/hair/who-knows-what-else, to the insides of the cards.

So I ran to the nearest office supplies store and found filing labels - about four bucks for 160, which was more than worth it!  Not only did the insides of the cards look nicer, but it was much quicker to attach the photo to the cardstock with a precut piece of adhesive.  

So, after about fifteen dollars and a couple hours, I had produced sixty cards that I felt good about sending out - much more personal, and much more likely to stick around a house for a little while.

This was a good experiment for me, and I think I'll be able to figure out better ways to make cards in the future.  Until then, I'm pretty happy with the way these turned out.

A few shots from Panama

Brian and I just got back from our honeymoon in Panama, which was a blast!  I came back with 2,000 photos (half from our wedding and pictures of Kimball and Tim, and half from Panama), so I still have a lot of computer work to do.  But I wanted to share a few shots, just to get them out there.