What's Inside My Head? (Now Featuring Martha Stewart)

Is the Holiday Whirlwind finished with us yet?


As things settled down to normal I found myself re-Photoshopping the San Fernando photo for prints, which are selling nicely right now thanks to a very special lady.
We secured next year's Christmas Cards at a great price, which is cool because the prints I add cost a bit more than WalMart charges for a 4x6".

I'm also putting my portfolio back together, filling the holes from sales and gifts over the last 8 months plus adding the new stuff. This requires packaging and framing supplies which were bought in bulk today so I'll be ready at all times.

Sunday night was the first real chance I had to play around with my most-needed Christmas present. It's a Westcott 32" Shoot-Through Umbrella, and I really like both the construction and results.
You have all seen photographers with umbrellas. The short version is that it turns a small light source such as a flash into a bigger and more-even light source, which can change everything about the quality of light on your subject.

That's my excuse for enjoying the construction of the following shots of a little stuffed toy and an empty Jagermeister bottle I picked up in a bar parking lot.
Did the first on Sunday night but woke up Monday with more ideas.
They might be useful for my band's web presence or not.
We'll see.





Continuing with the skull theme, I have been a longtime follower of Skull-A-Day where a guy showed the photo of each different piece of skull art he produced every single day over 1 year, in an amazing number of media.
I came in somewhere in the middle and enjoyed the hell out of it, but now that the project is over the site is more about his fan's "art" and the inevitable book deal bloggers get when they're clever and good.

There are some downloadable stencils at Skull-A-Day so on Monday night I cut myself a pair with an ExActo knife and tried them out on some old and scratched-up black background material.
The original sized result is on the left, my 65% version on the right, and it's stencil is angled up the middle featuring flat white Krylon over-spray.

This photo is all about photographic mistakes--we all make them, but do we find and fix them before it's too late?
It's a nice reflection of my new umbrella, which kinda ruins what I was going for.

**********Important Edit**********
Firstly, the correct answer to this post's title of "What's Inside My Head?" is:

A skull


Secondly, in a remarkable synchronicity of internet magic and luck, I present this screenshot of one of the above photos lurking inconspicuously in the corner of a webpage at the aforementioned Skull-A-Day website in fairly close proximity to Martha Stewart herself:

The Skull guy was on her show and it looks like they were making potato-skull ink stamps together.
Awesome.

As far as me and Martha hooking-up, it was due to her post moving far enough down his page so that it was next to the Blogger gadget that's in his Skull-A-Day code011010 plucking images from Flickr with the proper tag.
Short Version: A lucky catch on my part.

I knew my pic would show up on the site eventually due to the tag--I just got lucky to have stumbled upon it during the handful of hours when it was near Martha so I could document the special occasion.