I wouldn't strangle a snake

... unless it threatened me.

I went out yesterday with an old friend. We went to a cafe, ate sushi, strolled on the beach and at the end of our date, I strangled a snake in a cheesy photo studio tourist trap in Salem.

New toy!

I bought a Lomo camera off a friend yesterday and gave it to Justin as an early Christmas present. We both had the day off today so we spent the morning exploring Salem with our new camera in the fresh snow slush. The format of the Lomo is pretty neat but we haven't gotten the knack of knowing exactly what we're capturing with it yet. It has four lenses in a row and exposes one negative with four shots in rapid succession. The result reminds me of film stills.

I had such a good time today going on a photo seek with Justin. It was like the "good ol' days" when we used to go out exploring with our cameras regularly in High School. We lived in Connecticut at the time and there was nothing else to do besides sneak around abandoned houses and cow pastures looking for elegant compositions. Back then, we took ourselves way too seriously and only shot black and white photos with our ancient Nikons. We considered digital photography some cheap artistic abomination. Today, we realized how long it has been since we actually shot on real film. We must be getting lazy in our old age because we used to develop and print all our negatives a few years ago and now we're complaining about how big of a pain it is to drop the film at the one hour photo place. We've been completely spoiled by the instant gratification of digital photography.

I'm hoping that we go on many more excursions with our new Lomo. The mystery of not knowing what we caught on film and the excitement of waiting for our images to get developed will be what makes us choose to use the Lomo over our digital camera somedays.

SPT!

Today is Thursday and I took my picture. I do this almost every Thursday with a bunch of other people from Etsy. We all share this random ritual and have called it Self Portrait Thursday or SPT for short. The portraits we take can be quick like a snapshot or much more of a production. It is interesting to look back on these pictures and remember just what was going on and how I was feeling at the time. The images have really been a good challenge for many of us in the SPT group and definitely can be a way to evaluate yourself at the end of the day. It is really great to see how a portrait can reveal a little secret about the person hidden in their expression. My portrait today revealed that I'm developing a lady 'stache so I will not be sharing it due to my vanity. Justin and I have always cheated at SPT and took pictures of each other instead of ourselves. We figured it was just a technicality and besides, we need to break rules occasionally so we can maintain our badass image.

The picture above is my favorite SPT shot taken by Justin. It is strange how I hate seeing pictures of myself but I love having my picture taken. I ask him to do it all the time. He is such a good photographer and I love the attention.