What are the odds?

I have a friend and neighbor, Lori Hall Steele who is a fantastic journalist with over 3,000 articles to her credit. Eleven months ago she contracted what has now been diagnosed as Lou Gehrig’s disease (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, ALS). A mutual friend had seen her in a wheelchair and asked me about it.
She is in Michigan and I am now in Los Angeles. So I e-mailed Lori right away asking what was going on. We had these terrific long e-mail-a-thons back and forth where she was energetically proactive in finding out what was wrong, why she had lost the feeling in her feet. That was last October.

Then the emails got shorter
Then they stopped altogether

We went to Michigan for the summer and saw our dear friend, by this time a quadriplegic. She sat in our yard, still upright in her chair and sipped a beer through a straw waiting for her lungs to re-inflate to contribute to the conversation in small, quiet bits.

By summer's end she was confined to a hospital bed in her dining room, on a breathing machine.

This is my friend. A 44 year old divorced mom of a 7 year old boy. This could be any one of us.

Now because she can no longer write / work and her insurance carrier dropped her, ya know, because she actually needed their services, she is losing the house she has lived in for many many years.

Lori wrote this 2 page essay 3 years ago, when she was in perfect health. It was published in The Washington Post this past April, while the steady and rapid decline in her condition continued. It's chilling to read it now. Now that she is in Hospice care. Coincidence or did her son somehow know there was something brewing.

Please visit Lori's Blog and website which were set up to offer information about her plight and save her house from foreclosure. Donate if you can. If not, that's ok too. Just send her healing thoughts and help spread the word about her situation.

Hug your kids.
Call your parents to tell them that you love them.

Creative Photography - Add Impact to Your Subject

I love to take pictures. I have always shot my own models and assembled all my ads. When digital cameras came out... well suffice it to say I had to get an arsenal of storage to hold all my pics. I have taken well over 15,000 since the digital camera age was born about 8 years ago. Makes scrap booking a bit of a task. Good thing I don't do it. Ha! Then I recently bought a Nikon D40. Love love LOVE that camera! I was having a terrible time with my old digi camera because it took so much time to focus etc. that by the time the camera got done farting around, the baby model I was shooting had moved on and I would miss the shot.

Well, no more. The Nikon is such a fantastic camera. The D-40 in particular. Well, this isn't a camera ad, I just thought I'd let you know there is a great one out there and the price is coming down!


If you love photographing people, flowers, or wildlife, you never have to look too far for a subject. The true challenge is to create an image with real impact.

How do you make your subject really stand out in a photograph? As a beginner, it is tempting to blame the camera when you don't quite get the results you want. I have news for you - buying a more expensive camera will not necessarily solve the problem. In truth, the techniques in below will work for almost any camera. All you need are manual aperture and shutter speed settings, and a decent zoom lens.

Here are a few simple tips for adding impact to your subject.

Tip #1. Highlight A Brightly Lit Subject Against A Dark Background. If you photograph a flower is in the sun, but the background is in the shade, the attention of the photo will naturally fall on the flower. This is a simple principle to understand, but it is a little easier said than done.


When your photograph has two very different levels of light, the lightmeter in your camera can be confused. It may expose for the dark background, causing your subject to be overexposed. The trick is to expose for the subject.

You can't do this on automatic. What you need to do is switch your camera to manual, and adjust the aperture and/or shutter speed settings until the photo is underexposed by one or two stops (according to the lightmeter). When you get the balance right, you should have a dark background and a perfectly exposed subject.


Tip #2. Use A Small Depth Of Field To Blur The Background. You have seen plenty of photos where the subject is sharp and clear, but the rest of the picture completely out of focus. This is an excellent way of creating a three-dimensional effect and adding real impact to the subject.


To achieve this, you use a combination of a large lens and a wide aperture. First, zoom in on the subject with your largest magnfication. This will naturally reduce the depth of field. Then adjust the aperture to its widest setting. A wide aperture will reduce the depth of field even further.

The closer you are to the subject the more pronounced the effect becomes.


Tip #3. Use A Wide Angle Lens To Exaggerate Perspective. This technique is almost the opposite of Tip #2. A wide angle lens makes everything in your photo appear much smaller, so objects in the distance seem much further away than they really are. Meanwhile, you can stand very close to a subject in the foreground (a person, animal etc) and still fit it in the frame.

As a result, your close-up subject will appear to tower over a background in which everything else seems very small and distant. Although the surroundings will be mostly in focus (the wide angle lens has a much larger depth of field), they will seem relatively small and insignificant, making your subject seem larger and more dominant by comparison.

So there you have three fairly simple ways to add impact to the subject in your photos.

The great thing is, you don't need a professional camera to try these ideas out. As I said earlier, if you have a zoom lens, and manual control of your aperture and shutter speed, you can add impact to your photos with just a little practice.

Even better, in the age of digital photography, practice costs nothing...so get out there and start snapping!

All photos are ©2008 Jennifer Hughes -

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If you found these tips helpful, check out Andrew Goodall. He released two top-selling ebooks that have already helped thousands of new photographers learn the art and skills of nature photography. See Andrew's images and ebooks at http://www.naturesimage.com.au

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How Far do You Take the Lie?

Ok, it's not a lie per-say... Or it's a lie as much as Santa and the Easter Bunny are a lie...

My youngest lost a tooth and the usual tooth fairy monetary reward discussion came up. Oh yes, put it under your pillow and the tooth fairy will bring you money...

No trouble there.

But she decided to write the tooth fairy a note asking "where do you keep the teeth and are you tiny or big, like me?"

So I answered the note on the back using a mechanical pencil to make a very fine line, wrote in a tiny back-hand script so the kids wouldn't recognize my writing... I had, incidentally, done this for our older daughter too, when she lost a tooth in Indonesia. She left the fairy a note saying that she already had tooth fairy money in US funds so to use local currency was fine. Precocious little fart.
Well, I copied some Indonesian language off the wall in the bathroom at the hotel, to respond to her note. I imagine I instructed her to leave her towels on the floor if she wanted the maid to change them, or to save water, hang the towels up if she wished to use them another day... I really have no idea. But I wrote it in my best cursive.

It was a HUGE hit. That made the tooth fairy real!

So in this latest tooth/note episode, the answered note, again, had amazing impact. So much so that they woke me up to see the note, and my oldest, convinced that tooth fairies are very real, related a story of how kids at school made fun of her for still believing in the tooth fairy. They told her it's just her parents pretending.

She told me this looking for a reaction. To which I shook my head and shrugged as if to say, "Wasn't me."

She then said, "No! I know they're real. I don't care what they say. People believe what they want to believe."

Man! Pretty insightful for a 9 year old.

But I digress.

I'm not sure how to find a graceful way out of this perpetual series of "lies" we tell our kids. Santa is real because there are big ash boot prints on the hearth and cookie crumbs and carrot bits left on the plate! (Yes, the carrots are for the reindeer). We go pretty far to suspend belief.

I don't remember being heartbroken when I found out none of that was real. I don't even remember finding out at all, but alas I am aware they live in the hearts and heads of children,

and the delusional.

My dad wasn't allowed to believe in those things because, reportedly, his mother didn't want to deal with the disappointment that would come when he found out the inevitable.

Shame on that thinking. The joy these little tooth fairy note instances bring are precious.

So that settles it. I'll keep up the lie for as long as I can get away with it.