New Blog: The Stairs

I'm not abandoning "from my POV" but I've started a new blog called "The Stairs" with some colleagues about being a young women in the film industry.  I'll be writing my film reviews over there from now on, but I'll still post photos, articles on media topics, and the occasional rant and rave over here.

Check our my latest post at "The Stairs" a profile of director/actress/writer Lena Dunham: http://thestairscwe.wordpress.com/2013/04/23/profile-lena-dunham-directoractresswriter/

Retouching Eyes

Okay, so I am going to take some portraits soon, so I'm practicing my Photoshop enhancing.  I used this really good eye retouching tutorial: Eye Retouching Tutorial and just pumped up the contrast and whites and blacks a little bit.

P.S.  The image came from this blog: souvenirs.  It's kind of cool.  Much prefer this stylized beauty to the nearly pornographic stuff passing as visually intriguing on fffound.com these days.

Improving Your Score on the Facebook BBC Book List Challenge

Okay, so if you are competitive about nerdy stuff like me, then the Facebook BBC Book List Challenge thing is really bugging you right now and you probably hate those smug assholes who have read all 100.  Then you pause for a minute and think, but I can live with myself if I never read Bridget Jones Diary (yeah, I can) and what normal person reads the entire Bible cover to cover? (Yeah, yeah literature references, blah, blah Western culture).  

However, after browsing the list once again most of the rest of the books look pretty good.  Obviously you could head to the library and start checking out stacks of classics, but if you are busy, and endowed with multiple digital devices that can act as readers (i.e. iPhone, iPad, Kindle) it's very easy and FREE to download many of the classic books on this list using the free apps and downloading from numerous free libraries, particularly Project Gutenberg.  It has a number of different ebook formats available for many classic works including: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; most of Charles Dickens work, which is always entertaining, such as Bleak House or A Christmas Carol; Bram Stoker's Dracula; Pride and Prejudice and most of Jane Austen's work; the Bible; The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, a childhood favorite of mine; Shakespeare, Zola, Fitzgerald, Hardy, Tolstoy, Twain, Melville, Flaubert, Joyce, all the Brontës, etc.  

I find that the free iPhone/iPad app Stanza works well for me and even includes a "night" profile with dark background and light text for reading in bed next to someone who is sleeping.  Downloading books with Stanza is the work of a moment, and it saves your place for you in the book, so when you come back the next time you don't have to thumb through it.

If you don't have a digital reading device and don't like reading on your computer, there's really only on thing you can do: go through your parents' attic and look for the boxes of books you were assigned in your high school English class but that you didn't read.  That should cover at least 10 of the books right away.  After that, just hit the library.

P.S. If you are looking for a less arduous and more entertaining way of consuming Genesis from the Bible, read The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb.  It is so entertaining.  Check it out: http://www.amazon.com/Book-Genesis-Illustrated-R-Crumb/dp/0393061027.

Inspiration: "Scissors" Gallery

Scissors is one of many collections or online galleries of photos and images collected from various sources and updated on a regular basis. It's similar to the popular fffound.com, except its images are collected only by one person instead of a social network.  I love Scissors because the curator Adam Miller usually chooses images that appeal to my aesthetic, that feel honest and visually interesting.  Like fffound, Scissors does have a lot of imagery that I consider exploitative as well, but there are some gems amongst them.  Both are a good resource for treatments and mood boards.  Here's some of my recent favorites from Scissors (talk about a meta post).

Iconic Portaits

Nice collection: http://theimpossiblecool.tumblr.com/
A good resource.  There are a lot more on the site, but these are my favorites.
McQueen
















Davis

Cash

Gainsbourg

Kerouac

Avedon