December Desktop Calendar

The holidays are fast approaching. I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving and stuffed yourself full of all the fixings. I've been out shooting with my mom the last couple of days. Rather than go out to get the best Black Friday deals, she and I head out to take photos in wilderness and get away from the hustle bustle of busy bodies. We're not crowd people and enjoy some quality time together out in nature. Even as the weather gets colder, there are still nice shots to be had out there. Here we are out at Palisades-Keppler State Park in Eastern Iowa. These were taken with her iPhone.

Speaking of your iPhone and iPod users out there. I've got a special treat for you this month. You will be getting your very own iPhone/iPod background to use this month. Scroll to the bottom for your bonus background.

Here is one from last winter to get you feeling the winter wonderland on your desktop.
This month's shot is frozen waterfall icicles at Mattheissen State Park in Illinois from winter last year. It was a gorgeous sunny day and I remember slipping and sliding on the ice to get up to the icicles.

To get your own, simply click the size you want below and set as your background however you do Mac and PC people. I have 5 widths for you this month:

• 1280x1024
• 1200x800
• 1024x768
• 800x600
• 1680x1050

Bonus iPhone/iPod Backbround: to download the iPhone background to you pod/phone, open the link on your pod/phone. Click and hold on the image itself and when the menu opens, choose "save". Now go to your camera roll in Photos and you should see the image there. Click the little arrow out in the left bottom corner and choose "Use as Wallpaper".

Keeping it Real

Image courtesy of David Vernon - eScapes Photo

Snapshots by Stacy Photography is soon to be Stacy Hanna Photography. With this change is coming a brand new website and integrated blog.

You might be thinking that I have changed my website in the past and you'd be right. I've changed the aesthetics of my website a couple of times now looking for the right look and feel for my business. The truth is however, that while each revision has been an improvement on the last, I have never been completely satisfied with the result. The website never entirely felt like it represented me as an artist and what I am about. About a year ago, I almost ditched my website for something new and I didn't pull the trigger. The nagging feeling, however, remained that Snapshots by Stacy just wasn't quite really me.

I've had a heart to heart and in the spirit of Jasmine Star, I'm about to "Keep It Real". If you're hiring me, then you are hiring Stacy Hanna, the photographer, the artist. The more I thought about this, I realized that I had to step away from "Snapshots by Stacy". I had to be just myself and shoot what I wanted to and the way I wanted to. I heard Zack Arias say this, "You are going to be one of two kinds of photographers...a photographer that is going to strike out on your own or a photographer who is going to follow everyone else.", and it rings true to how I feel.

My intention is for my blog, like this post, to be a more honest insight to who I am as a person and why I think and shoot the way I do. I want my current and future clients to get to know me and what I am about and what they can expect if they choose to hire me and I also want to share what I have learned with an enthusiastic photographic community. You will see more of my art as well as client work and some posts on things that inspire me. It has been a goal of mine for awhile to extend myself like this. I'm excited not simply because this change is new, but because it feels like what I was meant to do from the start.

I thought about what I could do to better myself and my art and stand out from a similar sea of photographers. I want to incorporate what I am learning from shooting landscapes and lighting into more interesting portrait work. I want to start working with local bands and experiment with this new world of video and still fusion. I have a landscape project in mind for next year. Basically I just have this creative urge to mix it up and push myself. I have ideas and I can't sit still. I don't think I should let me website sit still either and rely on the same old branding and same old web designs as everyone else, so that is why I am making a change, to just be me.

I just want to thank those readers of this blog for sticking with me as I've grown. I'm not sure how many of you are out there, but I hope that you enjoy what you see and read and I really want to improve this experience for you. My goal is that as I keep finding myself, the work will change and the site will grow with me and I want you all along for the ride if you're up for it.

I'll be sure to point you in the right direction when the change happens. I'm excited about it and I hope you will be too.

-Stacy

I'm a Nikon Shorty...

This one, my photog friends, goes out to you. We're gonna kick off a slow jam.



This awesomely fun video of course pokes fun at all the loving online "wars" of Canon vs. Nikon and the best part, is the video is created by the amazingly talented photographer, Joey Lawrence or JoeyL. You must check out his site. He is a young photographer that produces amazing commercial and portrait work. His knowledge is far beyond his years and I love to see him bring out some youthful fun with this video. I'm a huge fan already.

Around the Internet

Thanks to my sister sharing this with me today, I watched this amazing video of National Geographic contributing nature photographer, Paul Nicklen photographing Leopard Seals in Antarctica. To see more stills of this event, you will definitely want to visit his website. It is pretty amazing working with nature like this and their behavior. I'm not a nature photographer, but I'm sure my Nature Photographer friends will appreciate this up close look.




Also floating around the web today is something I am really excited about. Drum roll please....FLICKROOM! Anyone out there reading this should know by now that I am a huge flickr fan, but one of the things about using flickr is that the viewing experience, while not bad, leaves a little something to be desired. Now, with Flickroom, an Adobe AIR based application, we can view the flickr world is a gorgeous dark theme instead of the whiteness that is flickr. Honestly, this application looks just like Lightroom, and I love using and looking at my images in Lightroom, so I am really excited to view Flickr using this application. It looks like we will still be able to comment, tag, upload, search photostreams and explore, favorite images, and now even chat with other Flickroom members.

Much of this sounds similar to Photophlow, which I used a lot about a year ago and occasionally now, however, this interface looks much more appealing to me, so I am excited to try it out.