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May 12, 2013 - 1:16 pm

Kelly - Stephanie! I love the tattoo- and in the tattoo photo your hair looks fabulous

San Francisco Part 1: Alcatraz

Thursday, May 9, 2013 Posted in Personal, Travel

I’ve been a tourist in a few American cities, and even lived in one. I’ve been to Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, Oklahoma City (duh), Orlando, New York City (although briefly), Washington DC, and none of them ever quite appealed to me. Chicago seemed like it could be fun, but everything was so spread out, it made going to all the different neighborhoods difficult. Seattle was beautiful, beautiful, but I wasn’t a fan of the people for some reason. The others either weren’t interesting enough, or I outright hated for some reason or another.

San Francisco, however, completely won my heart. I went for a work conference and decided, months ago, to stay a few extra days. My dad was flying to San Fran for a conference just as mine was ending. I used my extra days to do my fair share of touristy things, as well as a lot of lounging about and eating as much as possible.

I’m going to use my next few posts to talk about the different things I loved in San Francisco, and what exactly I loved about the city.

First, the major tourist attraction of San Francisco: Alcatraz!

If you plan on making a trip to The Rock, get your tickets in advance. You can order them from a couple of different websites, but everything I read and everyone I talked to advised getting your tickets well in advance. Apparently, at times, the tickets will sell out weeks ahead of time. After taking the tour, I can see why.

When you take the ferry to the island, you have a beautiful view of the city, the Golden Gate Bridge, and, of course, The Rock. There are also some fun birds that trail along behind the ferry, waiting for people to throw food overboard, I guess.

Alcatraz is also a walking audio tour. They say to set aside two and a half hours to take in the whole island. After being there for an hour and fifteeen minutes, I can see why. After all that time walking around, listening to the audio tour, we weren’t even through the main prison building. My only complaint was that, as it is an audio tour, I felt like I was constantly bumping into people. But once you get the hang of looking to make sure you aren’t going to run into anyone, it’s quite a lot of fun. It’s actually the best audio tour I’ve ever been on. It’s also just an incredibly beautiful island, which sounds weird since it was a prison. But… the gardens, the views. It was all pretty amazing.

It’s also a LOT of walking. Up hill, down hill, all over. Just a lot of hoofin’. There is a little golf cart trolley that takes people to the top of the hill to the main prison, and it seems very handicap accessible, if you’re worried about that.

Anyway… on to the pictures! Which were taken both with my phone and my camera.

Can you spot the Golden Gate in the picture above? That’s the view from the Alcatraz recreation yard…

And this picture is San Francisco as seen from the Island, by the Warden’s Quarters and office.

Next post: City Lights, coffee, and tattoos!

Posted in Personal, Travel

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Pizzaaaaaaahhhhh

Thursday, May 2, 2013 Posted in Food, Vegetarian

My dear boyfriend, the light of my life, my Sun and Stars, lost his taste for trying new food shortly after meeting me. He blames this on my constant need for Chinese, Thai, or Japanese food. Now he blames it on how much I want to eat tacos. I can’t say I find fault in his argument, except that… tacos, and Thai food, and Chinese food, and Japanese food are all freaking delicious!

But, that’s okay. I suppose. We spent a few years eating a lot of pasta, or burgers, or pizza, or wings. Or pancakes. I used to eat a lot of pancakes. As a result, I am now pretty close to sick of all of those foods. Especially pizza. There are only so many ways a vegetarian can eat a pizza, especially one who isn’t particularly fond of tomato sauces. Even if I am mostly sick of pizza, it’s still a comfortable compromise for us. If nothing else, pizza places always have beer. And I still love beer.

One night, in OKC, we were both starving after seeing Dracula at the OKCMOA. Using my phone to find the closest restaurant that was still open turned up one really appealing option that we’d never been too — The Wedge Deep Deuce/Bricktown. I don’t know if it’s how hungry we were, or how tired, but we both kind of lost it over how good the pizza was. We got different toppings on each side, but compromised on a roasted garlic olive oil sauce. I’ve been on a mission to recreate my half of that pizza ever since — roasted garlic olive oil, spinach, crimini mushrooms, and mozzarella cheese.

Alright, I lied. I tried to make it twice. And I haven’t found any worthwhile crimini mushrooms at the local grocery stores, so it isn’t exact, but I think I finally found a good, homemade alternative.

And I pretty much decided that buying pizza is a waste of money. This is so, so cheap to make. The most expensive ingredient is the $10 bottle of olive oil I already had.

And since pizza is always better with beer… And it’s been way, way too hot the last couple of days, I paired it with a really light beer that also happens to be quite tasty.

I would include a recipe, but all you do is throw some stuff on top of a crust and then put it in the oven. This is very much not vegan, but could easily be made so. I’m just partial to spinach, mushrooms, and mozzarella cheese. The only special thing I did is sauté some minced garlic in 3 tbsp of olive oil and then spread it, as evenly as possible, on the pizza crust before the toppings. It’s my alternative to tomato sauce because… Ew.

Oh, for your reference, I used the Pillsbury thin pizza crust and just followed the package instructions.

Posted in Food, Vegetarian

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The Lesson of the $9 Studio (Don’t Be A Lazy Photographer… Well, Not Too Lazy, Anyway)

Friday, April 19, 2013 Posted in Drinks

I’ve had this post in my queue for awhile now. I’ve been thinking and thinking and thinking about what to even make this entry about. Even now, I’m sitting here, eating pineapple sorbet, wondering how to proceed.

Usually that means I leave it alone so long that I have no choice but to delete the entry and forget I even took the photos.

However, I feel like there’s a lesson I learned that I don’t want to keep all to myself. As I am self-taught, I’m constantly learning from other photographers, from blogs, from trial and error… And I want to share my blunders.

It will seem so silly to most of you, but we’ll call it….

The Lesson of the $9 Studio:

Don’t Be A Lazy Photographer… Well, Not Too Lazy, Anyway

Awhile ago, I asked my friends on Facebook to name some of their favorite drinks. I had fun shooting the Gin Rickey’s last year, so I wanted to give drink shots another chance.

Since it’s not my livelihood, I can be a really lazy photographer. I’m even worse when I’m photographing food… Usually by the time I get around to setting up my tripod, moving the coffee table over by the window, plating whatever it is I’ve made, etc, I’m hungry. I should probably start snacking while I’m cooking, but I got out of that habit awhile ago and I’d like to keep it that way.

Since I can be Lazy, with that capital L there, I’m often disappointed with the end result. There is no better proof than when I attempted to photograph my favorite, albeit simple, rum drinks. For a frame of reference, I took 24 photos. I will show you three.

First up: The photos I hated.

Ugh. What the hell was I thinking? I didn’t even attempt to disguise my apartment complex. I tried multiple angles, but these were the two best photos with the least amount of glare. These, friends, are terrible photos.

I only liked one. One. photo from the entire thing. And you can’t even tell what I was going for…

what was I trying to show you? It looks like I’m showcasing that pastry that, by the way, I didn’t make. That’s not what I wanted, even though it looks appetizing enough. I went out of my way to provide extra props for this photo set up. I wanted something to accompany the drinks. I mean, it was a tasty pastry, with raisins and caramel and all kinds of goodness, but… C’mon, Steph. You can’t use that. It doesn’t serve a purpose.

So what did I do?

After a few days of feeling disheartened, I went on a mission to take some better photos.

Since this particular set up didn’t require any cooking, even if my recipes are beyond simple, it could be easily redone. And I didn’t lose any money on this. You can bet your hat I drank those drinks, and Dillon helped eat the pastry. Besides, even if I was just able to get one new photo that showcased the drink, then I would have succeeded.

And then… BLAM!

Now, obviously, there are problems with this photo as well. First, the Kraken bottle needs to be moved, or the glass needs to be moved, my backdrop isn’t flush with the table, etc. But… I did what I set out to do. I got a photo, a decent one, of the drink I wanted to show case (it’s Kraken and Ginger Ale, in case you aren’t paying attention, dummy.)

So, how did I accomplish this? Did I paint my wall yellow? Did I buy a table?

None of the above!

Here’s a more paired down photo to explore.

That yellow background? It’s a poster from the Dollar Tree, where some things are even less than a dollar… in this case, $0.60 a piece for poster sheets. I bought three (yellow, black, and red).
The poster board is taped to a piece of white foam board ($1.00 a piece). I bought 4.
The table is another piece of foam board with wood printed vinyl shelf liner ($1.00 a piece). I bought two rolls of the shelf liner, one light, one dark.
The red fabric is a folded up place mat ($1.00).
There’s also a poster board to the side set up as a reflector.
Are you keeping track? I spent $8.80, pretax.
I used the rest of the $20 I had set aside for this task to buy a few other items for future shoots — a plate, a bowl, a few more place mats and napkins.

It looks like this when you’re done setting up:

If you’re limited on space, don’t worry. So am I. I used the top of my dog’s kennel to set all this up. And to store it? It’s all in the closet, neatly packed away for next time.

If you’re interested in getting amping up the food photography on your blog, I strongly recommend you spend this money up front. If you’re interested in getting more advanced than that, I’d like to point you over to Vanessa‘s recent blog posts about the creative and technical aspects of what she does. You should pop over there anyway. It’s an amazing blog with some really inspirational photos.

Posted in Drinks

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