As you may have noticed, I haven't posted much lately. Well I've been working on something pretty cool and I'd hopefully like to be able to show it off soon, but it's still not quite done yet. In the mean time, I wrote this story a couple days ago and I thought I'd share it. It's not quite photography related, but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. I've been calling it a short story, but I suppose it's more flash fiction since it's only 400 some odd words. I also did a dramatic reading of the story in a video at the end of this post if you'd rather hear my sultry (ha) voice read it aloud...

   I was in desperate need for a replacement battery, as the battery for my MacBook Pro was over 5 years old. Not only was it really old and couldn't hold a charge for longer than 5 seconds (seriously), it was exploding out of the bottom of my mac. So while my mac slid around on my desk on a slight angle everytime I touched it, I decided to buy a new battery. I ended up going with the Anker as it was the only one I saw that was brushed aluminum like the (discontinued) factory mac battery. Not only that, but it got amazing reviews on Amazon by people praising it despite the $70 price tag. Upon opening the package once delivered, I immediately noticed the nice packaging it came in. There were two thick styrofoam pieces to cushion it and the whole thing came in a "frustration free" style cardboard box. Inside was an instruction manual which recommended, like most batteries, to drain the battery and then fully charge it...

   I’ve been unable to get anything more than 3-4 consistent hours of sleep a day for the past month now. Which in and of itself isn’t that bad so it’s not necessarily insomnia that’s the problem. I’ve gotten around that much sleep many a times in the past and I was fine. The problem is that I’m only fine for the first half of the day after I wake up, but I inevitably end up taking a thirty minute to hour long nap during the day. Again, that’s not that big of a deal, but after waking up from that short nap I feel way worse than I ever felt when I just force myself to stay awake or get a much fuller sleep. My body revolts and won’t let me sleep any longer and I’m forced “awake” with this heavy feeling of tiredness. My body is in a state of painful fatigue where I can’t focus on anything or do anything remotely productive, yet my body won’t let me fall asleep ‘cause it’s “too tired” to sleep. Along with that, my entire body aches as it’s screaming at me to just lay down and go to bed. I usually give in and lay down, but like I said I just can’t get back to sleep. So I end up just laying there for most of the rest of the day barely being able to accomplish much at all if it wasn’t already done in the first half of the day before the nap...

   There's a story behind this shot that I thought I'd share you guys. I originally came up with the idea while I was thinking about the direction I wanted to take the letter F in my Emotional Alphabet series. I wanted to do something with fear and I started to get inspiration from some horror movies with serial killer stalker type people. As I looked at the thoughts I had written down, I noticed that it all sounded a bit clichéd really and I'm not one to settle on any specific idea. So I started branching out to other things. I got to thinking about a game called Persona where the users hold a gun to their heads to activate a demon inside of them (fun game) and led me to thinking about the limited life we live (which is a prevalent theme in my work). I started thinking about the concept of a forced suicide, wherein a person is held against their will to off themselves...

   Usually fridays I put up a weekly challenge where I have a concept like, for example, last week's white on white challenge, but today I wanted to mention something interesting that my friend had showed me a couple of days ago. He showed me a trick where you can light a candle immediately after you blow it out using it's smoke. For some reason I had never heard of this before and it was the highlight of my week (sad life right?). What you do to get this to work is by blowing out a candle and within the next couple of seconds you have a limited window where you can hold a flame to the smoke and the flame travels down the smoke almost like lightning and reignites the wick. This works due the nature of the candle. When you light a candle, the wax from the candle evaporates into the air and mixed into that smoke when you blow it out is a small amount of wax vapor. This was the perfect opportunity to try out some slow motion recording of the wick being reignited. Maybe this video will peak your interest and you'll try it for yourself. It's definitely cool to see the flame travel down the smoke. Also, apologies for the vertical video in advance...