My New Studio

It is DARK in Calgary.  The sun isn't coming up until past 9:00 and is long gone once we get home from work, plus it's been very cloudy/snowy this week.  I've been nervous about how I would take pictures without using natural sunlight, and surprised myself when I woke up at 6:45 on Saturday morning and knew exactly what to do.  After taking a few pictures of our balcony view on a wintery, foggy morning...

...I grabbed a couple lights I got at the hardware store last year and clamped them onto the hood of our stove.  I don't know why I hadn't thought of this earlier, since I have failed countless times at clamping the lights onto things like our bicycles and creating awkward tabletops out of flimsy boxes - but this setup is Perfect!

I messed around with bubbles for a little while, which are a lot harder to photograph than I initially thought, and had some fun photographing the actual lights.

I then decided to pull out some dog hair I had collected in Kansas City when I worked at Brookside Barkery as a dog washer.  I always enjoyed studying the immense amounts of hair that came off of dogs, and packed some of my favorite clumps into envelopes to photograph at a later time.  I'm really glad I did, because it is a lot of fun to mess around with.  Here are a few shots from my first dog hair studies.

Apart from a little hair getting into the stovetop (which made for an interesting-smelling breakfast), I'd say my new studio is a huge personal success.  I am glad I found a cheap, easy way to photograph things without sunlight - just in time for our first Canadian winter!