Make a flash reflector!

When you’re taking pictures indoors, ever want to get nice even lighting from your DSLR but can’t afford to buy a decent external flash, or don’t want to carry around an extra bag full of accessories when you go out?

Usually you can’t get enough lighting from indoor shots; built-in flashes are more for filling in shadows from bright sunlight, not illuminating indoor areas.

But with this home-made flash bounce, you’ll get much better results without spending much money on things like this or this. (I haven’t tried either of those; it’s more of an illustration)

All you have to do is download and print out the Shipwrecked with You flash bounce here or by clicking the image below!

Click through to see what a huge difference it’ll make in your photographs.

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DIY: Restuff An Old Papasan Cushion

papasan cushion restuff - before and after

When Joey and I first moved in together, we didn’t have much money to spend on furniture.  So instead of buying a couch for our living room, we bought a double papasan chair from Pier 1.  It started out great, and we felt so smart for all the money we saved, but over the years it’s been slowly falling apart.  We’ve already had to reinforce the frame once, and lately the cushion just gave up. We should probably just buy a new couch, but Joey graduates in just a few months, after which we plan to move to Oregon.  And I hate the idea of dragging a new couch across the country.  I thought about either buying or making a new cushion from scratch, but this weekend I decided to try opening it up and adding some new stuffing.  It worked beautifully and only took about half an hour from start to finish.  If you’re also suffering from a papasan cushion failure, here’s how I did it.

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Real Food: Hippie Pizza

At the beginning of the year, Joey and I stopped eating processed foods.  We were overweight and unhealthy, and we knew we had to do something about it. When we first started our “diet”, we didn’t really know what we were doing.  We knew we wanted to eat lots of whole grains, fruits, and veggies as well as cut down on our sugar, fat, and meat intake.  It was a lot of work to get started, but so far we’ve done really well.  We make almost all our food at home from scratch, and we’ve lost around 50 pounds between us.  We still miss our old unhealthy favorites though, so we’ve been trying to recreate them on our own and make them healthier along the way.  One of our favorites is homemade pizza, which we lovingly call hippie pizza.  Hippie pizza is made from 100% whole ingredients, and in my opinion, 100% more delicious than any pizza I have had delivered to my home in a cardboard box.  It also takes less time from start to finish than the average pizza delivery in rural Mississippi.

Here’s how you can make it at home:

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VS. Brewerey

The very last package design we made for print production was for some beer packaging.

We had to make up the beer company and create an actual physical package, which we then photographed. Enjoy!

The idea I had was of a company based on historic rivalries. Each six pack of beer would contain two kinds of beer selected to mirror each side of the rivalry for three of each kind.

 

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Website downtime

School has covered me up completely but yesterday was my last day, excepting finals, of which I only have two. Expect posts of some of my favorite projects, and a quick catchup with the daily chalkboard calendar.

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