dear purolator

You are silly.

I woke up this morning to a couple packages being delivered to me. One was my new external harddrive, which I'm super excited about, and the other was a mysterious large box marked as a gift.

So there are the two boxes. The left one is my harddrive, which was packed nicely with enough room for the product and some paper padding. Overall, not a bad use of space:

So after opening that package, I couldn't really figure out what the mysterious large box could have in it. I didn't order anything else, but it said it was addressed to and sold to me by the same place that I purchased the harddrive from. So I open it up:

Lots of paper it seems. I wonder what could be in there...

Really, Purolator? Really. Did you run out of boxes or something? It's not even fragile! It's a carrying case for the external harddrive.

Hilarious packaging aside, I still didn't know why this was shipped to me. I thought maybe it was just some gift with purchase thing since I bought a featured item. Then I remarked at the fact that they got me one in red, which is always a great choice, so then I figured it had to have been someone I know who sent it.

As it turns out, my boyfriend is all thoughtful and awesome and got me this to go with my harddrive! It arrived a little sooner than he thought, since it was supposed to wait until my birthday, but I guess they just shipped them all at the same time for convenience. Or it was a coincidence. Who knows! Either way, awesome monday morning. =D

Maybe now Photoshop will stop yelling at me about my disc space.

abby and the old barley mill

So I just realized I never actually uploaded the rest of the photos from this shoot to this blog. They've been on Flickr for a while, so if you follow that you may have already seen them. They're also now on my Facebook Page!

time, originally uploaded by avalilly.

lean, originally uploaded by avalilly.

weightless, originally uploaded by avalilly.

glow, originally uploaded by avalilly.

The levitation image (weightless) is probably my favourite photo to date involving Photoshop to achieve the desired image. It features two different photos to make up Abby's body, one for the gallery space, and two more to create the left, foremost pillar. I'll have to do a full before and after with the in between steps to fully explain it, but I'm happy with the results, so I hope it looks good!

You'll be seeing more of this lady in the future as she's hired me for her business portraits and aerial straps photos (which I shot last night with my new red backdrop!). I'll post more about those in future.

I may upload more photos to this post in the future. There's still a couple images that I want to work on from this shoot, so whenever they get done I'll just add them to the end of this post. :)

george brown and p.l.a.r.

So last Thursday I went in for my portfolio assessment at George Brown. Now, this is a continuing education certificate that I'm going for, so one doesn't actually have to apply to take any of the courses. I just felt that the first couple courses would mostly be a waste of money for myself as I already know a good portion of what is covered in them. Because there are mandatory courses in order to achieve the certificate at the end, I had to be officially exempt from them, thus needing a portfolio assessment.

Anywho, I was given the final exam for that course at the interview and overall received an A for my assessment. I was granted exemption from the first course, so I'm super happy about that.

I took a digital photography course when I was at York University. It wasn't the most technically inclined course, but it assumed that you had a fair bit of knowledge to begin with, so I imagine that's why there weren't full on studio lectures explaining what curves and histograms are, etc. I figured that because I have my honours degree in Visual Arts, and that I had taken this course, that I'd be able to use it to exempt me from George Brown's second mandatory course in the certificate.

Apparently this was not the case. The director emailed me the course outline saying that they have a much more in depth study of Photoshop and that my 4 hours / 12 week course at York does not compare to their 3 hours / 7 week course. This is probably a fair assumption in the grand scheme of how much technical information is exchanged, however it's still all stuff that I already know.

So now I'm faced with the decision of: do I apply for another Prior Learning Assessment and Recognition (PLAR) appointment to fast track me to the next level, or do I just take the course and see if I actually do learn something?

I'm sure that I would learn some stuff. There seems to be a fair bit of study on colour management for predictable print results, which I could maybe brush up on... but is it worth the $375 price tag when I could just pay $100 for the PLAR and move on up to the next level where I know I'll be learning new things?

Ofcourse, there is the consideration that they use Mac computers in their labs and classrooms, so perhaps it wouldn't be a bad idea to just take it to get better aquainted with the operating system, so I'm not as slow at things once I get to the higher levels.

Oh, decisions.