Karen Shinkins: A Loss For Words

Over the past few days I have tried very hard to sit down and blog, but honestly, I couldn’t think of anything that has been interesting enough to write about. The past week has been pretty much standard and uneventful.

I spent my weekend working, which was fine, except for the fact that I had a hangover on Saturday due to the consumption of waaaay too much wine on Friday night. As a result I was unable to eat a lot that day cos of my messed up stomach, my head was pounding and while I was at work, the hot flushes had me constantly running to the bathroom just so I could put my face against the lovely cold porcelain sink in an effort to reduce the sweating and bring my body tempeture down. But I throw my hands up in the air on that one; it was totally self inflicted, so no one to blame but myself.

Sunday morning my good friend Tracy and I hit Piedmont Park in downtown Atlanta, to take some photos. Both of us are taking a photography class at the moment, which I am loooving and for our assignment this week, we had to work on our panning. Which is basically capturing and freezing the image of someone in motion. So we were on the prowl for cyclists, roller bladders and runners, basically anyone moving at a pace considerably faster than a walk. It felt a little paparazzi’ish at the start. The two of us camped out in one particular spot, scanning the area intently for some motion. Once we spotted our target we sat and sat, watching them closely, camera set and focused waiting for them to pass the spot we had earlier eye-balled as the best place to capture the shot. It was all very tense. We actually managed to scare the crap out of a couple of our subjects. You could see they were totally in the zone of their activity, when two girls, came out of what seemed like nowhere, with some big ass lenses pointed in their faces and set off a sequence of rapid fire click, click, click, click, click, click’s. The element of surprise had some of them giving us a very intense “death stare” and you could tell they wanted nothing more than to kick our asses, and had they not been at the mercy of their heart-rate monitors or stop watches, they would have had no problem interrupting their workout to do so. Others where surprised for a second but them appeared to be flattered that we found them interesting enough to photograph and just flashed us their best smile.

Today, I took my kitty-cat, Fintan, to the vet. He has had some big behavioral changes lately, which I initially put down to the fact that it’s hotter than hell itself here in Atlanta at the moment, but something kept telling me it was more. So just to put my mind at rest, I made the call and took him to the vet. Well, turns out that little Fintan was sick. He had a stomach infection. Poor little fella. But we got him some excellent drugs and he’s been sleeping it off most of the day and should be right as rain in just a few days.

And that’s pretty much it. No major drama’s that need reporting. Just a simple, uneventful week.

This is an example of "panning". The cyclist is in focus and the background is blurred, showing he is actually in motion.