Free kisses with every portrait session

First cute dogs, now even cuter babies. What is this blog coming to?

Seriously, have you ever seen such a sweet face? He's so curious, carefully studying the world around him, taking it all in.

Little does he know, the dog is about to swoop in for a kiss:

Babies and dogs. Sheesh!

I'll post more as soon as I can ... They'll be marked private for family and friends, so if you're either, make sure you sign up for Flickr (if you haven't already) and send me a note so I can add you to my contact list.

That is, unless you don't like babies and dogs.

Alert!

Just checking in to make sure you all remember how friggin' cute the dog is.

Published

My photo “Wooden Boats for Sale” was used for an article on buying used boats in Pacific Yachting magazine. Small picture and no credit, but I did get paid a whopping two-figure sum!

My original photograph, taken at Redd's Pond in Marblehead, is here.

Dove's "real women" faked?

If it is true that the photographs for those Dove ads featuring “real women” turned out to be edited and airbrushed, I am going to have to go on an Amazon stampede.

I might even have to sit on someone.

(AdAge explains it so I don't have to and StyleDash has more pictures.)

Edit--April, 2013: Four years later isn't too late to make a correction, is it?

While writing this post on the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign, I found out that the man who said he retouched the photos says his quote was taken out of context. He only did minor edits, such as color correction.

Here's the original AdAge story: Dove's 'Real Beauty' Pics Could Be Big Phonies
And the update, also from AdAge: Dove: 'Real Women' Ads Were not 'Digitally Altered'
Here's the original New Yorker article that sparked the controversy: Pixel Perfect: Pascal Dangin's virtual reality

Me and Aaron, we're tight, too

So, despite my extremely negative attitude and nearly reverse jinxing myself, I did get into the Marblehead Arts Association show.

I would have been happy just to get my photo accepted, by the way. So imagine my surprise when it turned out my little pic won best in show. That's me, to the left, feeling very awkward and embarrassed (but also secretly very pleased with myself). And this is the photograph that won the prize:



In her comments, the judge said incredibly nice things about the photo, including--and I am not making this up--that it was like "a contemporary update of work by the 20th century photographer Aaron Siskind."

Holy Crap.

But just before my ego started to get way overinflated, I had this conversation with a woman who also had a photo in the show.

Mean lady: Oh, you're the person who won best in show.
Me: Yes, and I saw you won an honorable mention--congratulations.
ML: Well, I would say congratulations to you, but I don't agree with the judge's decision.
Me: [awkward silence].

Later she came up to me again.

ML: I probably shouldn't have criticized you like that. But I'm not sorry, because that's how I really feel.

She also told me my print should have been bigger, and that it wasn't a "standard" size, and mentioned that she works part-time at CVS and one of the Boston branches has her photographs on the wall. And that she's been published in JPEG magazine. Only instead of pronouncing it Jay-Peg, she pronounced it Juh'pug. I guess it was obvious I didn't know the word juhpug, so she spelled it for me.

Meanwhile, everyone else was really nice to me, and congratulated me even if secretly they were thinking that they were totally ripped off, too. Which is, after all, the socially acceptable way to criticize people in a situation like that--in your head as opposed to out loud.

A double-reverse jinx? Inconceivable!

Every once and a while I get the whole "You have a blog? That's inconceivable!" thing from someone who's new at work or who didn't happen to know that I have one, since I don't necessarily talk about it a lot.

"What do you write about, what you had for breakfast or something?" one of my new co-workers asked me yesterday. And I said "no" but when I showed it to her, of course, Wednesday's post came up.

That's the post in which I wrote about what I had for lunch.

Anyway, hello to the handful of co-workers who learned about Gienna Writes in the past couple of days if their curiosity happened to get the better of them. And, by the way, I do not think that you know what this word 'inconceivable' means."

On a side note, Karenology TOTALLY called it about the reverse jinx. I have news to report on that front, but I don't want to double-reverse jinx anything ... so I'll wait till I'm absolutely certain before I put it in print.

Sorry if that's vague, but all will be revealed soon.

Maybe.