Behind the Scenes: Tie-dye photo shoot at Mount Charleston (part two)

A necessary evil of running any sort of online business (like, say, our Etsy shop full of tie-dye) is that eventually, you're going to need to provide photographic evidence of the items you are trying to sell. Not only do these photos need to clearly showcase the item itself in a clear and well-lit manner for people to judge the merit of this thing you're trying to sell them, but the photograph needs to be interesting enough to distinguish them from all the rest out there. There's no shortage of places to shop online, after all, and we're definitely not the first or last duo to ever make a tie-dye t-shirt. The trick is to find what sets us and our creations apart, and to try to capture some of that in the photographs. I don't know if we really accomplish that, at least as well as I really aim to, and I'm certainly not at the point where I would hang up my hat and consider myself a smashing success, but it's all part of the process. With each new photoshoot, and every photograph I go through and edit, refine, and polish I'm learning. If we can have some fun along the way, I think we're on the right path. 

Part of what makes us who we are, in my estimation of such, is our love of travel. I can not long live without some form of travel, lest I become bogged down with pervasive cabin fever and start to go a little nutty. Getting outdoors and into nature is absolutely necessary for our well-being, along with being a known boon to human health. Given as much, we try to get as many of our shoots done outdoors among nature now as we possibly can. More often than not, this gives us an excuse to go camping, though for this shoot we ended up making it a single day excursion rather than staying overnight. This was more a practicality, as camping locations at Charleston are mainly pay-to-play, and we're trying to be judicious in our spending as we prepare to take off for a new location. That's right, kids, this summer might be our very last in Las Vegas for awhile, because we're sick and freaking tired of all these motherf**king snakes on our motherf**king train! Haha, I kid... more so we're just sick and tired of the heat out here, of it, of how it saps the life from our pets, our plants, and us, not to mention all the additional vehicular stresses it adds. I've been driving the same car since college, and I've had to replace the radiator more than three times in the last decade. That seems....excessive...to say the least. My previous car suffered from a water-pump malfunction that left me overheated and stranded on the side of the road on my way to work (at the mall) on Black Friday, of all days. Suffice to say, it's hot, and I'm tired of being hot the majority of the time. Mount Charleston, while a nice respite from the heat of the city, is still not far enough away to break the umbilical. We must go further! And we will. Soon. 

But for now, enjoy these photos of the lovely Mount Charleston, a short drive from the Vegas valley. 

Korea: Supermoon 2016

During my time living in South Korea, there was an especially spectacular supermoon - or maybe it was just the stunning view my little room in Hwajeong offered me at the time... whatever the case, I was glad to have been able to capture some measure of it for posterity. I tried using my phone and my digital camera, which is coming up on a few years old now so it's rapidly becoming something of a fossil by technological standards but I wasn't entirely disappointed with the results.  There are certainly professional astrophotographers out there with the equipment intended for truly capturing the beauty and magnificence of our friendly little satellite who captured exponentially better photos, but for a point-and-shoot it's not bad, and none of them would have captured my specific viewpoint at that particular time in history. I wanted to be able to share this moment with the people I care about back home, and record it for my own memory in a tangible way. The science of human memory, and the terrifying fallibility of it as time goes on and our biological machinery grows weary shows how fragile our recollections can be, so having external reservoirs for memories seems like a pragmatic way to try to preserve the passing moments in a lifetime. Maybe I'm just sentimental in this way... I've always had an affinity for words and was a voracious reader growing up, so the idea that our thoughts can be captured by words like an insect in amber has always appealed to me. Why not include photography in this mix? With the ever-expanding technological prowess available to the modern consumer, we have an endlessly growing selection and price point to make these things happen. That's more or less the premise behind this blog, as I try to preserve memories of my travels in a way that is authentic and externally based. It takes time and effort, but so do most worthwhile things in life. We've all got our magnum opus...and who knows, maybe after writing hundreds of blog posts and typing out dictionaries worth of words, an actual book of some sort might come into being. You never know if you don't try, and to do anything well takes practice, after all. But I digress, I'm veering away from the point of this post... the moon! Photos of the moon! There are more of those to be found here, never fear.