catherine buca: nom nom nom-ing her way through it all
[catherine buca photography] • [catherine buca @ flickr] • [hello at catherinebuca . com]
I said I was moving nom nom nom, and now I have: new and improved nom nom nom. It’s still ‘under construction’, with lots of content to add, and maybe a little design cleaning-upping too.
Plus, i need your help. Good people of the internets, help me decide what to do. I need to make a decision soon or I know I’ll be attempting massive website restructuring just around the time that my first dissertation draft is due.
The title is the worst part of anything for me. I can’t think of them. For words or pictures.
Exam was awful yesterday. I got 80 for my written essay on that module though, so taking into consideration my earlier short paper, I should only need about 61 in the exam to get a first in that module. Which is comforting.
For anyone who looks at my blog or flickr stream, normal service re: photos will resume shortly. I’ve barely picked up a camera in the past 3 months what with uni, but I seriously want to rectify that once my exams are over.
A recent photo I managed to take, despite the academic anxiety:
I’m also probably going to be getting rid of ‘nom nom nom’ (although I might hold on to the name) and go to wordpress. I’m planning on post-grad study, MRes and PhD, so I want to cultivate my writing skills. Something over at wordpress will be a more appropriate place to do that. It’ll also enable feedback, through comments.
Although I know not many people ever look at this anyway.
Srsly Catherine, revise more.
And stop thinking browsing Flickr is a substitute for taking your own photos.
And feel remarkably lucky you got a good first on that essay you didn’t start until the night before it was due. Don’t do it again. You do not have a teflon coating, despite your luck of late. Eventually you’ll come to a sticky end.
Get off the internets!
I’ve just changed the layout to my flickr stream and it’s made me realise just how few photos I’ve been taking over the past months.
I resolve that in 2008 I will try to take more photos. Phil is buying me a tripod for Christmas (we buy each other presents after Christmas in the sales - we’re cheap like that), so hopefully I’ll be spurred on to do more ‘studio’ work, which I love.
Some other resolutions:
• get healthy (I have a plan for this, which, scarily, involves exercise as well as dietry changes)
• do my university reading in a timely fashion
• do my university assignments and revision in a timely fashion
• make an effort to socialise more
• work on the house a little bit at a time to make it more habitable.
Those are doable resolutions. I’m not setting unrealistic goals, like “lose a stone a month” or “get down to a size 10 by next Christmas”. Hopefully the lack of specific targets will make it easier to stick to them, unlike in previous years.
Here’s to a productive (and healthy and happy, of course) 2008.
Any of you who visit my website might notice I have a spiffy new link at the top to my etsy store.
I’ve been a member of etsy for a while now, but I’ve only just decided to start offering my work for sale. Hopefully moving to etsy will make it easier for me to co-ordinate my sales in the future. I still want control over printing and so on, so I didn’t want to opt for one of the companies that handles everything from taking the order to printing and shipping. They make me nervous, to be honest.
Anyway, the store is still very much in its early baby-steps stages. I’m still trying to get to grips with etsy as a buyer, let alone as a seller.
It does make me itchy to start making other things too though.
The council is sending a contractor around tomorrow to put in new windows and a new secure back door. I’m very happy, although wary about the few hours upheaval.
It will be nice to go to bed without a chair wedged behind the door.
I’m almost exclusively shooting film now, and almost always medium format. It’s way more expensive than digital, that’s for sure, but despite my hand-to-mouth student existence that doesn’t seem to bother me (too much).
*typo intentional. I’m feeling flighty.
It would seem there is a holy grail, and it is spelled like this:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.*\.stumbleupon\.com/.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F]
Thank you to the good people of Utata for their help :)
Seriously, lots of traffic is supposed to be what we bloggers crave. And yes, it is lovely to see those stats go through the roof. But not when it’s random people from stumbleupon and they couldn’t give two hoots about my photography, and not when they are threatening to use up my monthly bandwidth allowance in just 2 short days.
So I’ve been surfing around asking a few people trying to ban the stumbleupon referrer. So far I’ve got it down to this in my .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
# Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} stumbleupon\.com* [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]
I’m not sure that will work. I’m relying on others to tell me what to put because I’m an xhtml/css monkey, and not really up on my apache commands. Just specifying stumbleupon.com doesn’t stop the traffic, so I’m hoping the * will include anything originating from an url that begins stumbleupon.com. Will that work? Does the fact that most of the traffic is coming from the stumbleupon toolbar script confuse matters? Will I need to specify every last individual referral? Will Lassie ever come home?
I can never decide whether I like toned b/w images or just vanilla b/w.
Two pictures I love from my second roll with my Diana+:
I love them both. When processing them I tried toned or not-toned for both and decided on the above. This was within 5 minutes of each other, and yet my preference for the aesthetic changed in that short time. Sometimes plain b/w looks too cold, sometimes toned b/w looks too harsh.
Why do identical things take on such different meanings for us? I can understand if there were weeks or months between the change, but just minutes?