Some news? And the zoo.

I'm about 27 weeks pregnant. What's that, like around 6 months?  I'm getting pretty close to the third trimester. We're excited :) So that's pretty great.

The not so great news...Friday I got laid off from my day job. They said it had nothing to do with performance and it was because they just don't have anything for me to do. Anyway...not here to talk about the why and how of being let go or to bad-mouth them, because that's not my style... But, being 6 months pregnant doesn't really give me an advantage at interviews for new employment, you know?

So it's time to spin it into something good. It's not really how I wanted it to happen, but I guess now is as good a time as any to jump full time into photography. Don't get me wrong, I'm going to continue to search for jobs as well. But I'm going to use my new time for some good things.

I have been wanting to work more on my abandoned southwest photo series. I can't spend too much on gas now, but I'll be doing some of this in the next two weeks while my son is still full-time at daycare. So that's cool. I am excited to have a little bit of alone time and run around with my camera.

I will be making another post here about another series I'm going to start working on pretty soon that is just a personal project. I will have to make a couple of things for it and get 4 models for the first shoot (representing a family, but I don't want a real family for the shoot - I'll explain later). I'll be putting myself out there a little on this one, I guess. But it's about time. You have to show your wounds to get to the good stuff, right?

And I have two more ideas that I'm mulling over. One is in the prop-making stage, as I'm making a headpiece for the shoot. And the other is going to require several shoots and I'm thinking about details because I'm going to need two models for most of them.

Since I'm now at the no money input stage, I'll have to get models that are willing to trade. Or I can try to do a kickstarter for all of this? Might work...

So, I'll have more details about that stuff soon. And I'm going to be posting more of my previous work on here and/or Facebook. Not just photography, but other fine art I've done in the past...starting with a post tonight or tomorrow. I have to scan some things first, so we'll see how long that takes.

Anyway, look for that stuff...

Yesterday, Ailin and I went to the zoo with his little friend again. We had a great time. We took the train from the zoo to the aquarium and back, which was really fun. I spent most of my time trying to keep up with Ailin, which is getting more difficult because I swallowed a beach ball...but I did get a few photos of him. Here's my favorite one. He always has this look in his eye. He's a little mischievous imp.

As promised, more maternity shoot pics!

At the beginning of the month, I had a maternity shoot in the Bosque with some fun people. It was awesome. I love these! I posted one photo from the shoot right away. I'll post a couple more here, but there are even more of them on my website. http://elizabethwaldronyuhas.4ormat.com/maternity-and-babies

Maternity shoot today!

I know I just posted, but this one requires its own space. I had a fun maternity shoot in the Bosque today. I was worried because a couple of hours before the shoot the KOB news app popped up a story about a fire in the Bosque on my phone. Forest fire isn't really the look I was planning on for the shoot, but also, the Bosque is one of my favorite places in this town, so I really don't like when there are fires there.

The fire appears to have been contained now, so all is well. And the shoot went on as planned, which is great because I had a good time out there and got a lot of good stuff. They were so great! I'm planning on posting more about them and more of their photos, but I had to post one, because, wow...

This.
She's beautiful.
I will definitely post more of these later.

The ABQ Biopark Zoo

I went to the zoo a couple of weeks ago with my family and Ailin's friend and his family. It was a good time. The zoo is super awesome from a 2-year-old's point of view. We had fun running from one exhibit to the next. We saw the whole zoo in a couple of hours. Warp speed zoo-ing.

I took a bajillion photos of the peacocks. They were especially cooperative that day, so that's good, but mostly I wanted some reference photos for a painting I'm working on. I also took a bunch of photos of Ailin and his friend, but I'll spare you. haha

The ABQ Biopark Zoo is a cute little zoo. We actually have quite a good zoo for such a smallish city. I adore the Biopark. Not just the zoo, but the Botanical Gardens (my favorite) and also the aquarium. We have a newish baby rhino at the zoo, and he/she is extremely cute.

The obligatory photo of a peacock. There are a million of them at the park, but they're always gorgeous. I think you're required to take a peacock photo...

 Baby. Rhino. Cute!

No idea what they were looking at but it cracked me up that they were doing it in unison. 

 I'm pretty sure this guy threw poop at the crowd not too long before we were standing there. Also, he was in a mood and throwing lots of stuff. He chucked a heavy block of salt or something right after I took this. Grumpy Gorilla.

These guys are just silly looking. 

Saturday morning fun!

My husband started a new business recently doing GIS work. He's part of a larger consortium with a bunch of our geogeek friends and they have a poster going out in a few days. They needed his logo on there. Except he didn't have one.

I'm not a graphic designer, but I did take some design in art school and I love Illustrator. So I made one for him this morning. I still see some imperfections in it, so I'm going to have to get in there and clean a couple of lines up, but I did a pretty good job. I made my own logo a while ago, which has gone through a few versions, but I'm happy with it now. Don't know that it says "I'm a photographer" but since that's not all I do...

Anyway...the logo I made for him... :)

What to do, what to do...

So far, the biggest problem with my new-found freedom is deciding what to do with my time. For the last couple of weeks I have taken a well-deserved and guilt-free break. I've been editing some photos I owe someone, but other than that, I've had some nights of TV watching and some nights of pregnant-lady-falls-asleep-on-the-couch-at-9.

Oh, yeah...did I mention that before? Yep, pregnant lady = me. Our second boy is due at the end of August. (Man, never a better occasion for a smiley and I can't find one? I thought there used to be a tool up there for that? hmmm...maybe not)

Anyway, so now I have a million ideas running through my head at once. I have several paintings in various stages of incompleteness that I could finish. I could start a totally new painting. I bought most of the makings of a ball jointed doll a while ago, because I have some sculpture ideas I want to try that require me going through the process of making a normal one first...so I know what I'm doing a little before I change it and make it all freaky. So, yeah, freaky doll sculptures are probably on the horizon...And I have a bajillion photo ideas. For one, I'm ready to get out there and start my tour of abandoned NM towns for a series of photos. And I would like to get a model or two and do a couple of shoots. Also, I have a backlog of photos I need to edit and get up on this blog. Some of them are from second shooting weddings months ago. I also really want to start work on some boudoir photos, so I need a model for that too.

As you can see, I have quite a parade of ideas through my head these days. Pretty soon, I'm going to have to stop the ride so I can get off with one and see what I can do with it. Right now I'm sort of cataloging them all and writing ideas down. It's a good place to be.

Can't remember if I put this here before or not, but since I need to put a photo up and I was just talking about running around NM towns with my camera...I took this one either Vaughn or Encino a few months ago. I absolutely love both of those places. I want to go back again and spend more time walking around. I put this one up on Etsy as well.

I'm back y'all, with a long story that ends with an exciting announcement!

You may have noticed that I've been gone. I haven't posted in a long time. Want to know why? Well, I'll tell you. Be warned...this could get long.

What I haven't really advertized about myself on here is that for a long time I've been trying to do too many things. I have recently lightened my load.

When I was a kid, you were pretty much guaranteed to find me with some kind of art going on. I know a lot of people say that kind of thing..."I've been taking photos since I was one month old"...yeah, right. In my case, my first camera showed up around 2nd or 3rd grade. I did take loads of photos as a kid, but the arty part didn't show up until later. But...drawing and painting, that's really what I spent most of my time doing. The point isn't that it was great art...it was kid art. I'm sure my mom thought it was awesome. The point is that it's all I did (and reading...loads of that too). My mom likes to tell a funny story:

She came into my room and discovered that I had drawn this really nice picture and hung it on the wall myself. A couple years later when we moved, she found that what I had actually done was draw a pretty picture on the wall...and then hide it by hanging another pretty picture over it.

I took art as an elective in middle school and all four years of high school. My senior year, there were only 2 kids in Art 4, me and one of my friends, so they stuck us in the corner during a different class - Art 1 for seniors - and we pretty much did our own thing. I was a TA for my art teacher in my free period during my senior year. I spent that extra hour...doing more art. A couple of friends and I were asked to paint murals in the creative writing class room at our high school. Maybe they're still there, I don't know. I have photos of me next to drawings and paintings on the wall in high school art shows.

I was accepted to the fine arts program at Virginia Commonwealth University and went right after high school. I did mostly safe work, and never really put the stuff that scares me into it. I picked sculpture as my focus and got to do a lot of really cool things, the wood shop stuff, welding, etc. And then...I'm not really sure what happened, except that I just wasn't ready.

So then I left school and went off to figure out what to do with myself. I moved somewhere to follow a boy, which ended badly, of course. I sort of drifted around for a while, working at coffee shops and grocery stores. Then I went to visit Montana, where my parents had moved. I ended up staying and doing some soul searching (read: I stayed with my parents for a year and tried to figure out what to do with myself). I ended up going back to school at the University of Montana.

It had never occurred to me that I could be a scientist, but when I took the geology lab and it was so fun, I chose geology as a major. I kept getting good grades and surprising myself by being sort of good at it. And so I think that's how I ended up here. A life experiment, maybe? -Hey...I'm sort of good at this, how far can I go?- I got two bachelor's degrees. One in Geology and one in Spanish (that's a different story - another fun side trip). Then I moved to Albuquerque and kept surprising myself by passing comps in the Master's program and then getting Master's degree. -Hey...I'm a scientist now. Cool- Here's where it starts to get real. At this point, I'm forced to examine what I'm doing, because now people make a choice to get a job or continue school for a PhD. At my core, I'm an "eh, what the hell, let's do it!" sort of person. My mother calls me "fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants-girl". So my choice to go for a PhD was another -Can I do it?- and I kept surprising myself when I passed my PhD comps. Whoa. This shit just got real. -Is this really what I want?-What am I doing?-Why have I taken this so far?-

You know who should get a PhD? The person who stays awake at night thinking about how to make their experiment work, or a way around a problem. The person who lives and breathes what they do and wants to do that forever. It's hard work and you shouldn't be doing it if you aren't totally into it.

Throughout my undergrad and my master's, I had art as an outlet because I took electives or workshops and I had friends that also did artistic things. We would get together regularly to for art nights. But when they moved away I didn't do it so much and then I had to try and focus on the PhD program.

Well, it turns out...I have ideas that keep me awake at night. I spent hours and days and months and years of my PhD program thinking of something else. Painting and photography. At this point, however, I didn't have real time for it. I had a kid, got a job, was in a PhD program. A few years ago, I opened my photography and art business, but sadly, I have never really had the time for it to go anywhere.

Back to today...(this is where I went, by the way) A few months ago, I switched projects/advisors at school, partly because at the rate it was going, I'd be in school for another 5 years and partly because I wondered if my lack of interest in it was just project related. It isn't. I didn't really swoon over the project I decided to replace it with either. I just couldn't make myself look at it. After all, when you spend all of your "free" time pining for something else, you don't focus very well on the task at hand.

So, I quit my PhD. To focus on art. I am over the moon about it. So far, I have no idea what's going to happen. I do still have a 40 hour job and I need to keep it (as you can imagine, years of school = mountain of school loans). But all of the other time that I spent wishing and hoping, instead of doing is now free to...do. Guilt free. Yay, me!!

Now that this story/announcement is out of the way...

This is my art studio (excuse the crappy cell photo) and I intend to use it!!