The real Beth. And spiders.

Well, I'm not sure if anyone really reads this. Maybe my mom and a couple of friends? haha 

I've been thinking about how well my blog and website really fit me. I want people to come to me for photography because they like me and not just because they need some photos. Because let's face it, I still don't have a ton of photos in my website portfolio of people.

I know that if I were searching for a photographer and I came across a website like mine, I would want to see more. -I'm working on it!-  What I mean by that is, there would have to be a reason other than seeing their photos that I would choose them and trust them with my money to take photos of me. I would have to like them.

Personally, I think I'm pretty likeable. ;)  But how would you, you reading this, ever know that?  This is what I've been thinking about.

That's part of the reason I've been posting more often again.

I would like to keep this blog and my website a little more separate. I want my personality to be present in both places, but I think this daily sort of diary thing is fun.

I have started adding some text to my pages over at my website. I tried very hard, while writing it, to stop editing it and just be me. I could have written, "I've been into photography since I was a kid" and it would be true, but nobody cares. hahaha  But I think that saying I have "irrational zombie fear" (also true) is kind of useful information (hey, it could be...) and it's silly, which is all me.

I'm making a concerted effort to post more here. I know that as a photographer I'm supposed to have a blog where I blog about photography. And I still will. But I'm going to do more of this random posting about my day or whatever I feel like talking about.


And now for something completely different...

We have a pretty big garden this year. We have had a maybe 15x7 ft space for a garden since we bought our house, but this year we built two raised beds and we expanded the garden spot past our fence out into the side of our front yard. Then we dug up a stump that was keeping us from expanding the garden spot in the other direction and moved the garden over so that we could fit some composters. We bought two of those composters that rotate on a stand at Costco. They work pretty fast and we don't have a stinky pile of rotting stuff sitting in our side yard anymore, which is nice. The pile method wasn't working for us.

-A side story about the compost pile we used to have - We had this sort of modular compost pile retaining wall container, with a removable top. I guess it was vaguely house-shaped, but it had a big pile of stinky dirt in it, so...For some reason, the FedEx guy never wanted to leave packages by our door, so he would always go around to the side of the house and put them in the "dog house". Yeah. Gross.

Anyway, so now we have this great setup and we  have had the best garden year so far. Sugar pie pumpkins, sunflower seeds, tomatoes, kale, lettuce, basil, corn, beets, yellow squash and zucchini, and tomatillos. The tomatillos are like weeds now. We planted one or two like 3 years ago and now we pull all but one plant every year. They take over everything. We're about to have a huge load of tomatillos. I guess I'll be making some salsa verde.

Albuquerque is home to a lot of creepy crawly things. I like some of them. I like finding a praying mantis in the yard or on the house. We have bunches of those here. But I'm not a fan of the huge roaches or the black widows. There are so many of them. I kill most of the black widows in the yard because we have 3 dogs and a 2 year old. Sometimes I miss one, and it gets big.

Last night, we found a big messy web strung between the composters and in the middle of it was a medium-sized black widow. We might not have seen her because it was dark, but she was moving around and there was something larger than her in her web. I got a headlamp and went out to look. She caught a praying mantis. Then I ran to get the camera.

Sorry if spiders freak you out. I'm not a huge fan of them either, but this is pretty cool.