Damir and I recently volunteered for a video project with my talented photographer friend Rannie (who also did my headshots) for SXSW called 20 x 2. We just sat on the couch, he did all the work.

20 x 2 : What’s The Difference? from photojunkie on Vimeo.

Rannie was looking for 10 straight and 10 gay couples; when I asked Damir if he wanted to participate, he said “we’d be one of the straight couples, right?”

The World Press Photo exhibit is on display in the atrium of Brookfield Place (formerly BCE Place) in downtown Toronto until October 24th. I checked it out today and it’s magnificent. It’s free, and open from 7am-10pm.

Since these are photographs, the exhibit is going on in several cities at the same time, and is moving on to others around the world; the schedule is on the site.

For those of you who may have enjoyed my Flickr photos from Provence, Florence and Venice, you probably noticed that they were taken by my very talented photographer friend Pat — she didn’t have a Flickr Pro account at the time that we took the trip, so allowed me to post them on my account.

Pat also does some amazing still life photos that she reprints on canvas and sells as decorative art; she’s now offering these for sale through Finer Works, plus some landscape scenes printed on fine art paper and suitable for framing. The pear is my fave.

…and all I got was this photo credit.

I’m having a lot of fun watching how my Flickr photos pop up in different places around the web.

Okay, so I’m not a professional photographer, and most of the time I shoot with a pocket-sized Canon. But someone liked my geese photos, and now someone likes my shots of Deerfield Beach pier in Florida.

Okay, I didn’t get paid for it, so maybe it’s not really professional, but the author of a driver’s education course in California saw my photos of geese crossing the road (taken early one Saturday morning in eastern Toronto) and asked to include them as illustrations for the course. She just sent me a draft of the section that includes them:

NASA’s Earth Observatory issues a weekly newsletter with links to the most interesting satellite photos of the week. This week, one of them showed how a piece of Greenland that was previously thought to be a peninsula was revealed as an island due to the melting ice cap.

You can subscribe to their weekly newsletter here.

In Austin earlier this year, I went for a walk by the river and saw some really interesting cypress knees, the part of the root of the cypress tree that extends above the ground/waterline. These don’t grow this far north, and I’ve always been fascinated by the structure.

Last week, I received a request via Flickr:

Hi, I’m an admin for a group called Cypress Knees, and we’d love to have your photo added to the group.

A Flickr photo group just of cypress knees? How weird is that?! The group is already up to 22 members (not including me, since I didn’t join the group, just added my photo) and 118 photos, and the group admin has done something quite funny that I didn’t realize was possible in Flickr: when you go to the group members page, the tabs have been renamed. “Admins” is now “Kneebones”, “Moderators” is now “Anklebones”, and “Members” is now “Kneedys”.

Rannie (a.k.a. photojunkie), a talented local photographer who I met through the TorCamp community, came over on Friday to shoot me. Photos, that is. I need a real headshot for my blogs and various speaking engagements coming up, rather than the current shot that was taken while on vacation in Murano.

I scrubbed the obvious bad ones — mostly the ones where Rannie couldn’t get me to shut the fuck up while he was shooting — but that still left almost 100 to choose from. Since I hate pictures taken of myself, especially those terrible posed family photos with rictus-like smiles on all faces (the result of “overexposure” while growing up with a father who worked for Kodak hence had nearly-free film), I asked the opinions of a few people who know me best for their opinions:

My sister Betty picked five that she liked, although didn’t specify any particular reasons:

My boyfriend Damir picked his fave:

Rannie published what I assume to be his faves in his Portraits 2.0 set.

The best response came from my friend Pat in Ottawa, who works in PR so presumably sees a lot of headshots:

They evoke different reactions so here’s how I lined them up with what I got and you can decide if the pictures and the gut reaction are appropriate for what you are trying to communicate with the picture. I tended to pick ones that I thought focused on your best features; got the light in your eyes…I was looking for good lighting, flattering focus, no distractions. Now you know my criteria.

“Do not fuck with me and do I ever deliver the goods”:

“Seriously competent”:

 

“Softer, gentler, guider and mentor”:

“Fun to work with”:

 

“Competent, experienced and gorgeous”:

After going through the list myself, I narrowed it down to five (one of which was on Pat’s list, and one on Rannie’s):

Turns out that I do like the smiley ones after all.

I’m not a Photoshop user, but my friend Pat is an amazing hand at it, having won at least one Worth1000 competition with her creations. Of course, she’s a technical writer for Alias (now part of Autodesk) and has been using some pretty amazing graphics software for years, which probably gives her a leg up.

Because I’ve been seeing the things that she does, I tend to notice cool things that you can do with Photoshop, such as this tutorial on how to turn a photo into Lichtenstein-like pop art, or this one on adding hair and beards to photos — something that I might have done on a photo of Damir for a present, since he always looks at photos of himself and grumbles about his thinning hair ;)