April Giveaway Contest!

It’s giveaway time at Becklo Photo and there are two ways to enter the drawing for a chance to win a mounted 8” x 10” of your very own!

About the photo

This lion is part of the intricate James Scott Fountain on Detroit’s Belle Isle. A black border surrounds what would almost appear to be a black and white photograph if not for the yellow sky of dusk falling behind the fountain. The photograph is a glossy chromogenic print on Fuji paper. It’s mounted on 3/16” black foam board which has a metallic green ribbon threaded through for easy and adjustable hanging. A small hole behind the knot of the ribbon has been carefully carved into the foam board to hang without a ribbon if desired.

This print would sell on Etsy for $30 plus shipping, but the winner of this giveaway will receive it at no cost. I'll even mail it for free! Participating in this contest requires nothing on your part but a couple minutes of your time.

How to enter

What is Etsy? Etsy's website states: "Our mission is to enable people to make a living making things, and to reconnect makers with buyers. Our vision is to build a new economy and present a better choice: Buy, Sell, and Live Handmade." Etsy features many traditional artists who paint, draw and (like myself) photograph, but there are many other things offered. Woodwork, clothing, music, food and more can be found here!

I am a strong supporter of Etsy, a website for people who make things and the people who want to buy those items. I’ve sold a variety of photographs via Etsy and also have a wish list going of things I’d like to buy. I owe a lot to Etsy and would like to give the good people there some exposure.

Step one: Sign in to Etsy or create an account (which is completely free, quick and painless!). The only information you're required to give Etsy is your email address, the user name you choose and the password you decide on.

Step two: Add my Etsy shop at etsy.becklo.com to your favorite stores by clicking on "Add to favorites" near the bottom of the left hand sidebar.

And that’s it! I’ll send you a message through Etsy, called a conversation, to confirm you’ve been entered in the drawing. And if you're interested, you can go for the...

BONUS ENTRY!

Step three: Find an item on Etsy from a shop other than my own that you would consider purchasing. Favorite that item and send me a conversation with the link to it. You will be entered in the contest a second time and I will make a treasury collection of all the items that have been sent to me. This will help other Etsians out by featuring their shops and wares.

A detailed display of how the ribbon is threaded (above)
and what the print looks like from the back (right).

How to win

On Sunday, April 24, I will randomly draw a winner from those who participated. I'll make the announcement here on blog.becklo.com and contact the winner with a conversation on Etsy. Make sure to check Etsy often and/or enable Etsy to notify you via email when you receive a message. If I don't hear from the chosen winner within three days, I'll redraw the names for another winner.

I hope this contest will encourage you to explore Etsy as well as help promote some amazing people selling things they've made by hand. I've encountered inspiring sellers who live in far away time zones and others who live only a few streets from me. Creativity is everywhere you look and I can't wait to see what you find!

4/04 - ETA: This contest is open to all people in all countries. Good luck!

Super old self portraits

When I take pictures, I vastly prefer using natural light to flashes. Natural light meshes better with my style of photography. Which is to say, artificial lighting is stupid and I get impatient with it and it's ugly and I hate it, so there.

Really, I don't know what it is with my inability to conquer flash photography. Impatience has a lot to do with it. I don't want to bother with setting up more equipment than I have to and dragging it around with me wherever I go. I feel more inspired and improvisational when it's just a camera in my hands and I'm free to go do whatever I want or need to do. 

I worked briefly at a Sears Portrait Studio in 2006 and obviously that demanded the use of strobe lights. That's all well and good, but the camera itself was attached to a giant, cumbersome tripod-ish thing on wheels that was six feet tall and had a sliding arm to move up and down to change the height of your view. The camera was not removable. Which begs the question, if you can't hold a camera steady and frame it properly, why are you working in a photo studio? The answer to this question is studios like this will hire anyone off the streets and tell the people after the fact that their primary job is sales. But let's save the horrors of portrait studio work for another post and say I don't like being impeded by extra crap when my only focus is what the camera is focused on.

After high school, I took photography classes at the good old within-walking-distance community college. I had access to the studio and often took advantage of it despite clearly not knowing what the hell I was doing. I came across some negative scans from a self portrait shoot I did about seven years and two cup sizes ago and I still have feelings when I look at them that range from "I had fun when I did that" to "these are so fraking terrible."

You can't grow as a photographer, artist or human if you can't look back at what you've done and recognize the good and the bad and how you've changed to become the person you are today. What stands out to me the most with these are the lights were far too hard and I decided it would be a brilliant idea to use as many gels on the lights as possible. So, washed out photographs that are impossible to color correct — my favorite! I've probably thrown these through Photoshop four or five times over the years and can't get them to my liking. But this arduous process continues to teach me what to look out for (if there is a) next time.

All in all, this is a cool shot. Just me and my camera, twirling around to the Dead Milkmen. I bought this dress at a thrift shop for a couple bucks and it was perfect for my intentions: DRESS UP PHOTO PARTY! I like/get annoyed that my right shoulder looks like a bad Photoshop lasso cut. It's not. It's just velvety.

This picture irks me for so many reasons. It's washed out to hell, the colors were so ridiculously mixed that the only way to make it even somewhat viewable was to desaturate it and the lighting is so harsh that a more unflattering photograph of my face you'd be hard pressed to find. And what is that face I'm making? I feel like Migrant Mother and Scarlett O'Hara on crack mixed into one person. The pose is kinda cool though, and the slight motion of my left hand is neat. My hands look far bigger than they actually are, still trying to figure that one out. I'd be a far better guitar player for sure.

Another thing about this photo shoot is I don't think I made any adjustments to the lights during the hour and a half I had the studio. I didn't reposition the angles, didn't move the stands, didn't change the intensity of the lights, nothing. And really, I'm not being that hard on myself. This is one of my first studio experiences so it was really a matter of experimentation. That's how I learn the best. It seems like the set up I had worked better for photographs where I was closer to the camera. Still some weird colorization and my face is still washed out and casting hard shadows, but my skin tone doesn't make me look like Vladimir Lenin's corpse. That's important to me. Oh, and if you don't want to look at pictures of the naked body of a communist leader who died in 1924, I'd advise against clicking that link.

Actually, I think this picture's badass, all things considering.

This Day In History: March 26, 1997

This is not anything I took pictures or video of, but I would be remiss as a Red Wings fan if I did not acknowledge the glorious event that occurred 14 years ago today.

The Brawl In Hockeytown was the result of a heated rivalry between the Detroit Red Wings and Colorado Avalanche coming to a head. The year before, Colorado's Claude Lemieux took a cheap shot at Red Wing Kris Draper that pretty much shattered his face. After a season of this act going unavenged (plus the Avs winning the Stanley Cup in 1996), payback was finally given in this game at Joe Louis Arena in Detroit.

Darren McCarty pummeling Claude Lemieux into the position that would grant him the nickname, "Turtle."

The guy with the A next to the Winged Wheel? That's my man, Brendan Shanahan!

Even the goalies were getting in on the action! Avalanche Patrick Roy got his ass beaten by Red Wing Mike Vernon.

The refs finally stopped Mac from beating up Lemieux when the guy looked half dead. Meanwhile, there goes Shanny on the other side of the picture!

Vladimir Konstantinov doing what he did best: beating the crap out of his opponents! This is how #16 is remembered.

So yeah, just had to indulge myself a little in the glory that is the Detroit Red Wings. Even Wikipedia has a page about this one night: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Wings_%E2%80%93_Avalanche_brawl 

This Day In History: March 25, 2004

Downtown Royal Oak has come a long way in the last seven years. Remember when the corner of Lincoln and Main was Erb Lumber? That was ages ago. That space is now occupied by a bank, but even that wasn't built over night.

Fifth street also saw its share of construction and changes, as evidenced by these bird's eye views through the second floor windows at Barnes & Noble:

The northwest corner still had some finishing touches needed before opening as the current day Noodles and Co.

Meanwhile, the fancy French restaurant, Bastone, was still mostly comprised of plywood at this point.

Regional Dialect Video Meme

I joined Vimeo today! Cat over at Midwest Mayhem made a vlog the other day (right here!) about regional dialects so I decided to follow suit. Here are the words and questions if you're inclined to participate:

Words:

Aunt, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin, Crayon, Toilet, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught

Questions:

What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is the bug that when you touch it, it curls into a ball?
What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you say to address a group of people?
What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
What is the thing you change the TV channel with?

How every single Becky on this blog feels about politics

When it comes to politics, I proudly consider myself an independent. I have my own views that admittedly lean often to the left, but they are my own. No one tells me what to think. I make my own informed decisions. I’ve never voted straight ticket at elections and I’ve voted for (and occasionally elected) Libertarians, independents and Green Party members.

With that said, it rubbed me the wrong way when Rachel Maddow repeatedly spoke on her show about what “the Republicans in Michigan” are doing to destroy the state. Not all Republicans are out to tax the elderly and low income citizens, nor are they looking to cut education budgets and control cities in desperate financial straits. Hell, half my family leans to the right. My grandfather owned a business for many years. It drives me nuts, but I don’t call him out on watching Fox News when I’m at his apartment. I get it. But I’m also pretty sure that he didn’t instigate all the stuff Rick Snyder is trying to push through, either.

The generalization bothers me to no end. Just as it grates on me to hear about the “liberal agenda,” I can’t stand listening to anyone spout off about a large demographic as if every single person included feels the same way about each and ever single issue brought to the table. No, I don’t agree with a lot of what’s happening in Michigan right now. But when fingers are being pointed, it’s often with such generalization that the accusers may as well be blindfolded. To group so many people together like that inevitably drags unwilling participants into the argument. I would much prefer being called out by some fanatical pundit on national television specifically, like: “Becky Locke wants prayer out of YOUR public schools! She wants you to work side by side with GAY PEOPLE! She thinks recycling is a GOOD IDEA!” At least I’d be able to shrug and say, “Yeah, and?” Everyone would know that it’s the truth because I, speaking for myself, would not dispute the allegations and then no one would have anything to fight about. Oh wait.

All that aside, this clip from Rachel Maddow’s show is an interesting insight into what’s going on right now in Michigan. As she points out, it would be one thing if these tax increases on old folks and poor folks were helping the budget, but in fact it’s only paying off the tax cuts Snyder is giving businesses in the state. Figure that one out.

Moo + Etsy = new business cards for Becklo!

As a seller on Etsy, I keep my eyes open for special deals. Moo.com does a great job of making exclusive offers on business cards and I pounced on their latest special: 50 business cards for just shipping costs ($5.50). It took a couple days longer to receive in the mail than I anticipated but it was well worth the wait!

The packaging is a lot of fun. I opened the box with careful deliberation so I can save the Yay! sticker – I think I’m going to put it on the steering wheel in my car.

And even the inside of the packaging features some great advertising. These are clever people over at Moo.

Cards can have as many different designs per order as desired, even if you want to use a new design for each one. I chose nine different images for this order and the back of each card has my name, email address, URL and a banner logo.

The one caveat to this deal is a small banner across the front of each card that advertises both Moo and Etsy. I actually designed the cards specifically to be able to crop the banner off without losing any details from my own contact information. But the nice thing about the banner is each one has a unique code for 10% off Moo orders for first time customers. Since I imagine that could benefit some recipients of my cards, I think I’ll leave the banners on after all.

Getting over a cold...

Learning to exist in society and still be batshit crazy

To say I grew up socially inept would be like saying, “Electricity makes stuff do things.” It’s true, but just the tip of the iceberg.

I don’t know how much a part my parents’ divorce played, but jogging my memory back to when I was seven, I find it to be the general time when I began to withdraw from regular social activity at school. I believe it also stemmed from mental illness that was long overdue in being diagnosed. (You mean, not everyone is sad all the time? And who knew ADHD could mean more than just rambunctious boys jumping on desks? I had a hard time paying attention in school but I thought I was just bored and lazy.) Regardless, it meant I spoke to people my age less and less, and this made for very long days at school.

The only thing that made me more adorable
in second grade was being on a Polaroid.

By sixth grade, I spent every day at lunch by myself. Walking around the playground, waiting for recess to end so I could go back inside. I didn’t do anything particularly productive during this time, unless you count teaching myself how to burp on command – a skill that really charms the guys today but only served to further ostracize myself at the time. It was boring and miserable and the only thing I hated more than being so bored and miserable was the majority of the people I was stuck with at school.

I think it was in fifth grade that I befriended a girl in my classroom and we hung out every day at recess for a time. It could have been a couple weeks or a couple months, I really don’t remember. But I do vividly remember her turning to me one day and asking why I was “always following” her. Mortified, I walked away and returned to my solitary lunch periods, walking laps around the playground and avoiding eye contact.

Middle school was an improvement and high school even better because the pool of people with whom I could associate grew larger. I slowly felt more in my element because everyone else was awkward too. But not to be outdone, I developed my own little techniques for retaining a degree of social strangeness. My struggle with depression was constant and gradually increasing. I was never goth but my morbidity knew no bounds. I kept a binder filled with poems and short stories where unexpected deaths were very much expected. I even brought Harold and Maude into school to show people during lunch breaks in our English teacher’s classroom over the course of a week. (It’s a lovely movie that I still show to people now, but for completely different reasons than when I was 15.)

I still stayed relatively quiet, but when I had something to say, it was generally fucking weird. The best way I can find to justify it was that it was my way of reminding others that they didn’t like me and I didn’t like them, but I was still there and they’d have to deal with my existence the way I had to put up with theirs. It sounds angsty and rebellious as any teenager, but it was my peers I was giving the middle finger to, not my teachers or parents or any kind of authority figure. In some circumstances, I went out of my way to piss people off because they’d may as well have an actual reason to treat me like I was inferior. It didn’t go down well when I told girls in middle school that the Beatles were way better than Ricky Martin and I know I irritated the crap out of people by writing the box score of each Red Wings game on the whiteboard of every class I had. I started bringing my guitar to school and sang nonsense songs about Jesus or The Doctor, a song I wrote about Jack Kevorkian and his career in assisted suicide.

My junior year of high school, I discovered photography and it not only became a creative outlet that continues to this very day but a way for me to get in someone’s face without them being able to do much about it. I was the photo editor of my senior yearbook and even now, I wish I had abused that position with horrible pictures of horrible people. (Bitter? I barely know her!) But it was enough that I could take pictures whenever I wanted to and no one could say shit. I’ve been compared to Mark from RENT, always following people with my camera and living life through a lens. But you know what? I don’t have AIDS.

Obviously, a lot of this is still with me, or I wouldn’t be writing about it. It’s been eight years since I left high school and they’ve absolutely been better than the eight years prior. Some of that is just the process of growing older and maturing, I’m sure. Some of it is because I’m in more control over my mental illness with therapy and medication. A lot of it is I no longer have to see the same assholes day in, day out.

A girl who bullied me relentlessly in elementary and middle school lived in a house a couple blocks away from me. She moved away and some years afterward, the house she lived in burned down. No one was hurt but I once lamented to my mom that I wish this girl was still living there and that she had been in the house when it caught on fire. I sincerely, unapologetically meant it when I said it. I don’t feel that way anymore and it’s not because I’ve had a change of heart or we made up. I’ve just finally been able to let go. This girl doesn’t even live in the state anymore. She added me on Facebook and I only accepted her request because I thought it was so she could apologize to me. Yeah, no. I doubt she even remembers or realizes how she treated me. And instead of getting angry about that epiphany, it gave me a release. Here is someone who genuinely doesn’t give me a second thought. And not out of malice, just… she has no reason to think about me. Now I can do the same for her.

I’ll have the occasional pity party if I’ve had a particularly bad day, but I don’t feel sorry for myself the way I once did. When I realized there was a difference between feeling down and out and bringing people down with me, a new world opened up to me. Because people get tired of feeling sorry for you pretty effing fast. Legitimate reasons are a death in the family or suffering an injury. Someone saying mean things to you 15 years ago doesn’t hold much water. Learning to differentiate between truly sucky stuff and, what is affectionately called on Twitter, “first world problems,” has helped me come a long way in maintaining healthier social relationships.

Haters gonna hate. 

I’m still goofy as hell, though.

Live blogging at McDonald's

Often, I have a hell of a time updating blogs (or anything related to being online) because I don't have the internet at home. I can sometimes get an unsecured wifi signal but even that isn't very reliable and I often have to reconnect within minutes - usually when I'm about to do something important, like web banking or confirming something to be submitted.

So now I am sitting at McDonald's with Sara while she studies. Food and coffee (I don't even drink coffee, I'm a tea girl, but I'll take what I can get!). We're sitting next to a gaggle of old southern men who are rambling to one another about the gov'ment, semiautomatic weaponry and frequent mentions of Texas and Alabama  ("I want a translater," Sara just muttered under her breath). In fact, one man just asked another one to repeat himself with a loud "HUH?"though that could be either from not comprehending him or just not being able to hear because he's old. One of them just said, "I tell you what," just like Hank Hill would. This is a mesmerizing thing of beauty. Sara and I keep snickering in unison... these are the experiences I love to share with others.

Drinking more coffee - Sara says she's bringing me over to the dark side - it's actually really calming to be sitting here and finding ways to be productive. I intended to do some German work by copying a book I checked out of the library but for whatever reason, it's gone AWOL. I like it because it goes in depth with each section of grammar. I am not always the type to need someone to hold my hand when I'm learning something new, but another language is the type of thing I want to master as well as I can. A constant warning when learning a foreign language is to not associate said language with what its English equivalent should be, and I do get that. A simple example is in German one would say, "Ich gehe ins Bett." Literally translated to English, it's "I go in bed." But native English speakers know it's "I go to bed." I can accept the idea that languages have these types of differences with no problem, but I still like to know what the differences are because it helps me to understand why things work differently. Prepositions are weird. Gender and case are weird. German is weird. But I love it.

The old men are now joined by a flock of old women. They are apparently regulars; they all know each other by name. One woman is chiding a guy about how he hasn't lost any weight and his doctor will yell at him for it at his next appointment. (Why are you at McDonald's...?) 

Another old lady just said this verbatim: "I had never heard of the Tea Party until just recently. The last time I heard of the Tea Party was the Boston Tea Party. Some little girl had tea party dollies or something like that." The old man she was talking to walked by Sara and me earlier and gave us each a slip of paper.

I haven't done "a Google search" on this. I'll give you the pleasure of doing so and letting me know how child brides, Islamic law, women abuse and September 11 relate to each other. Let me know what you find out.

These old people next to us are now talking about different locations to go for dialysis like they're discussing their favorite restaurants. I am a little depressed by it. But it makes for good blog fodder. They've moved on to bladder infections and colonoscopies. This is what I have to look forward to in my old age!

Ugh, Hotel California is on the Muzak. I hate the fucking Eagles.

Tea Party lady is talking about her Social Security checks. The other ladies are talking about a guy on oxygen whose daughter is coming up from Tennessee to get him and take him away. Now someone else is going to rehab. Physical rehab? Drug rehab? Maybe both.

All I know is that it's hard to get anything accomplished right now because I'm enjoying live blogging old people at McDonald's too much.

An adorable couple. PLZ TO MOAR COFFEE.

The old ladies are beginning to dissipate. It's getting late and their children are coming to pick them up and bring them home. There's a creepy trucker-like guy they know who I think wants to sit down next to me. I am against this idea but I've done well enough to ignore them so far.

All I know is I got free dinner at McDonald's and I am jittery off of black coffee. The rule in my family is, "You aren't old enough to drink coffee unless you can drink it black." I am not one to stray from such golden rules.

Edit 8:14pm - The guy who gave us aforementioned paper slips came over as he was leaving and asked us how the wifi signal was. He told us he's a professor at Macomb and that he found out about all of this through a student who someone tried to recruit to their church to teach him how to use guns and kill police officers. He was wearing a veteran's trucker hat that had a patch tacked to it that read, "Remember 9-11!" Tea Party lady interrupted him mid-sentence and asked if he was coming or not, then told him she was going to wait in the car. I should expect nothing less from an establishment across the street from the Hazel Park Racetrack.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar

I was debating making this an Etsy listing because I wasn't sure how well it would go over.

"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." - Sigmund Freud
http://www.etsy.com/listing/68297734/freud-cigar-mounted-photograph

I decided to go ahead and list it today because if nothing else, it makes me laugh. Freud could point out what he thought was psychologically wrong in anyone, but he saw himself to be normal. I'm inclined to believe that obsessing over other people's obsessions makes a different case. But who am I to say? I take pictures of action figures and tampons!

Stupid furniture

Two posts in one day? Why not? I'm excited because I've spent the weekend hanging out with Sara and Kyle, helping them move. And not that they lived far from me to begin with, but now they live only a few streets over and it's easier to simply walk to their new house than drive.

Last night we had a wonderful time transporting a couch... I was behind the camera for the whole time, so I probably had the best time of all.

Even Dan thought it was hilarious, sore hands and all. It's further evidence of how much I love my friends.