| just
your average creepy girl |
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My default bit of wit when faced with
having to slap together a bio is this:
I'm a card-carrying, certified geek, a bibliophile, antisocial and
quiet. I take photographs, usually black and white and almost never
people. I'm pierced and tattooed but can pass for the girl next door
when I try really hard. As a result, I'm just freaky enough to disturb
normal people but just normal enough to disturb freaks. I like this.
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While it does sum me up nicely, I'll try
to be a little more informative than that.
I'm probably older than you think I am but younger than I often feel.
I'm an honors-degreed chemist who has worked in academic research, electronics,
pharmaceuticals and forensics. I'm a lab rat who has worked middle-management
and is determined to never be a desk-jockey again. Ever.
If I could, I'd be an
eternal student. Instead, I read. A lot. No, really. A LOT. (Well, okay,
and I am pursuing a Masters but that's beside the point.)
I grew up in central Florida. Spending my formative years in a football-obsessed
college town in a tourist state, I developed a healthy distaste for
home games and black socks with sandals but I'm still enamored with
the ocean. Any ocean. It doesn't matter.
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Self-portrait
- Monterey, CA - November 2004 |
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I've lived all over, both coasts and places
in between, and now have finally settled in the San Francisco Bay area.
I'm home now.
One would think that a pale-skinned, gothy girl wouldn't be quite so
attached to salt water. I will, however, remind you that it doesn't
dry up when the sun goes down.
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love
letters to moments
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January 2006, in a paper-letter to a friend who is also a photobug, I
wrote something approximating the words on the index page. It seemed an
apt way to describe it. It feels right. Typically, when I'm out with my
camera, it's to write those love letters, to capture a moment, just as
I see it and be able to let someone else look at that moment through my
eyes. I scribble notes too. Sometimes I do both. Sometimes I come back
empty-handed. |
My boots - South San
Francisco, CA - January 2006 |
I "started" taking pictures when
I was a kid. I used Mom & Dad's Polaroid, my first cheap 110-box camera,
the next cheap 35mm box-camera and countless disposable cameras. The pictures
were of camp and field trips and the duck pond behind our apartment. Some
of them, looking back, weren't half bad. The majority of them are about
what you'd expect from a grammar-school kid with a point-and-shoot.
I was fascinated by a tiny camera my father had that I was convinced was
a "spy camera." To this day, I still think about it, wonder
if I could find film for it and speculate on what it might produce. |
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I didn't, however, really develop a passion for it until right after
I graduated from high school when I took a community education course
in black and white photography, developing and printing. I never put
together the darkroom I so fiercely desired then (though, I still think
about it) but I did get my first real camera and come away from it looking
at the world with a new set of eyes.
Due to a number of factors, that passion--or rather the ability to follow
it--fell by the wayside for a number of years. Shortly after receiving
my Bachelors Degree, I found myself unable to find a job in my field
in the area where I lived and went to work at a photomat. Originally,
I applied to work black and white processing and printing as that's
what I had experience with but got placed in the digital department.
Working there, I became familiar with the capabilities of digital cameras.
I saw the prints that came off the little memory cards for the ~3megapixel
cameras and was actually kind of impressed. When I shot, I still used
my old 35mm cameras.
In 2002, after chasing the tail of my first "real" job to
the mid-Atlantic, I got my first digital camera, a little, 3.2 megapixel,
almost fully-automatic beastie. I took the self-portrait, above and
right, with it. The image here is cropped down quite a bit and extremely
low resolution but I've printed from the full-sized files and have been
reasonably pleased with the results.
In 2005, I picked up my first (probably not my last) dSLR and I'm very
firmly in love with it. It has all the things I loved about shooting
with my old, clunky, chunk o' metal 35mm and remedies some of the things
that made using it sometimes frustrating.
I do still use film but I'm not a film snob. I like the feel of the
clunky, chunk o' metal. As much as I'm attached to my dSLR for the immediate
feedback, I kind of like the anticipation of waiting for prints and
the pleasant surprise of finding absolute gems in the sets. Especially
when I wasn't expecting them.
In addition, for my birthday last year, I got a lomo supersampler. I'm
kind of hit and miss with it but I don't expect much else from what's
basically a toy camera with no view-finder. The good shots are really
good--good enough to justify only getting two or three of them for each
roll of twenty-four. The bad ones may find their ways into a collage
some day.
I do have most of my digital images--including the ones on flickr--in
large, printable resolutions. Negatives are a little harder to sift
through as I haven't managed to organize them to my satisfaction yet.
If you're interested in any of them drop me an email and we'll see if
we can work something out. I can be reached at merrymairi@yahoo.com.
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| credits
and sightings |
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- The cover of Paul
G. Tremblay's short story collection, Compositions for the Young and
Old. (hardcover,
trade
paperback)
- The bio-image on SethLindberg.com.
- A non-fiction article
entitled "Four Days in Salem" accompanied by four pictures
was published on the old Gothic.net, September 2004.
- A book review in Morbid
Curiosity Magazine #10.
And, yes, for simplicity's sake, when
it comes to professional credits I do use the part of my name that doesn't
require complex hand gestures and a pronunciation guide.
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