Susan Solo – Photographer | Traveler | Adventurer

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  • Charlie

    Charlie

    Last week I had quite the scare with my little guy, Charlie. All of a sudden on the day we had a big snowstorm, he seemed to be sleeping more often and breathing a little heavier than usual. He was still eating well though, and didn’t otherwise look ill, so I kept monitoring him for the next day. His behavior didn’t improve, so I made an appointment with the avian vet. She did an exam and determined that he had fluid build-up in his abdomen which was creating pressure on his lungs and making it harder for him to breathe, so she did a belly tap (abdominocentesis) to remove the fluids. The visit was frightening for both of us! We are lucky to have a wonderful vet though – she was great with Charlie. I’m waiting to hear back on some lab results, but in the meantime I’ve been giving him medication and supplements daily (which he hates), and he seems to be improving a little. Today he’s even singing, and that’s a great sign. He’s getting up there in years, but I’m going to do anything I can to keep him healthy and happy.

    I know it might sound weird to some people that I’m so attached to a bird, but I am! I think most people understand the connection with a cat or a dog, but a bird?! Yep! They have quite the personalities, they’re fairly easy to care for, and I love the little bit of background noise when he’s singing and chatting.

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    Charlie shows up on my Instagram feed fairly often. He’s quite photogenic and seems to love having his picture taken! So here are a few of my favorite Charlie snaps. Side note: I know it’s not safe to give birds salty foods and he’s shown in a photo below with a pile of sunflower seeds. He usually picks one up, works on it for a while to crack it open, and then moves on to the next one. He’ll open about two or three and then move on to doing something else. He never actually eats the seed (weird!), and I don’t think he gets that much salt from one or two shells.

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    Update 4/2: I am so sad to say that Charlie is no longer with us. He passed away quietly at the vet’s office last week while waiting for a follow-up exam. We miss him dearly and the house is just a little too quiet, but I’m comforted in knowing that he is no longer suffering. Rest peacefully, sweet Charlie!

  • Ready, set…bake!

    Last weekend I photographed a really fun and special session for a friend – she and her husband just remodeled their kitchen and it made the most beautiful background for some photos of the girls baking together! They were preparing for a fancy tea party/birthday party the following day, so we baked chocolate chip cookies and decorated cupcakes for the occasion. These are some of my favorite photos from the day!

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  • Photographing Sunsets and Flowers

    I’m often asked how I learned about photography or for advice on how to go about learning. I’m mostly a self-taught photographer – I learned from reading books and practicing on a 35mm film camera (before digital cameras were around), and I’ve probably learned the most just by practice, practice, practice. Seriously, if you want to learn, go out and shoot as much as possible. Take your camera with you everywhere. Examine your resulting images and the settings you used. Identify what you like about the photos and what you don’t. Figure out why an image worked or why it didn’t. If you’re having trouble and wondering why a certain image turned out blurry or underexposed or uninteresting, show it to another photographer to get feedback. Feel free to even send it my way! I certainly don’t know everything there is to know, but I can help you try to figure it out and point you towards some resources for learning the basics.

    In addition to self-teaching through books and practice, I did eventually take formal courses to round out my photography knowledge and skills. Wanting to soak up as much knowledge and experience as possible, I signed up for a couple of workshops and eventually for a certification program. I especially loved the studio and darkroom classes – two facets of photography that I might not have otherwise had the opportunity to study. Depending on the specialty in which you’re interested, formal schooling and/or certification may or may not be necessary for a job or career in photography, but it certainly can’t hurt. (If anything, business classes are probably most valuable for running a photography business, but that’s a different story.)

    One of the most helpful lessons came from a favorite instructor who challenged us at the beginning of the program NOT to photograph sunsets or flowers. Ever. His reason being that sunsets and flowers are two of the most over-photographed subjects, and unless we could figure out a way to photograph them in a completely new and exciting way, don’t photograph them. I remember being sort of bummed and embarrassed that I had brought in an image of some daisies for our homework assignment that day! But now looking back, I can totally appreciate the request. By forcing us to continually explore new subjects, we grew as photographers. So if you’re new to photography and you’re wanting to improve, look through your images and see if you tend to stick to the same subjects. Are most of your photos sunsets and flowers (or your pet/spouse/lunch/etc.)? Are your images usually taken within a one-mile radius of your home? If yes, try to “ban” yourself from photographing that subject or location for a while. Stretch yourself outside of your photography comfort zone and see what happens!

    Of course, if you’re on an island vacation (say, Tortola) and there’s a stunning sunset happening as you enjoy a cocktail from your rental villa balcony, please feel free to photograph away guilt-free.

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  • Deep Thoughts on Snowboarding vs. Skiing

    Hope everyone is still staying all warm and cozy through this long winter! Chris and I just returned from a quick trip to Seven Springs in Pennsylvania where we broke in our new skis and enjoyed playing on the snow. We decided to go during the week rather than on a weekend so that we could practice skiing with fewer people on the trails. Hardly anyone was at the resort, and we really did have the place pretty much to ourselves so we felt like that was a good call! The drive up was so beautiful, and the mountain was also really lovely. We stayed at a cute condo with ski-in/ski-out access, and were able to get in lots of practice.

    So now that I’ve skied a few times after spending the last two seasons learning how to snowboard, I think I can say with confidence that skiing is much (much much) easier to learn. I have fallen maybe 4-5 times total so far while learning on skis, whereas with snowboarding I fell at least 4-5 times per run in the learning stages. Ow. And that’s not counting falling when getting off the lift, which was at least half of the time. Oh, the bruises and aches I collected while learning! It took me at least five separate trips to various resorts to get the hang of snowboarding (meaning, linking smooth turns all the way down without falling), but with skiing I was able to successfully make it down the green runs on my first try. I’m not really counting the first time I ever skied when I was sixteen, although I was able to ski down the greens back then, too.

    I’ve read that snowboarding is harder to learn but easy to master, and that skiing is easy to learn but hard to master. I wouldn’t say I mastered snowboarding, but I did become proficient enough and I can agree with that statement – skiing is waaay easier to learn. But I can see how it’s going to take some more time to improve my skiing techniques, and I imagine the patience comes into play during the intermediate level. So if you’re new to snow sports and trying to decide what to try, maybe that will help. If you enjoy a challenge and have the patience to stick with it, try snowboarding! If you’d rather have an easier time with just getting down the mountain on your first day, maybe skiing is a good option. Or you can always choose to try both so you’ll know for sure which one you like better. I’m planning to put more time into skiing next season to work on technique.

    Here are just a couple of photos from Seven Springs. I meant to take more, but the one thing that is harder on skis is taking photos! It’s hard to hold both poles and a camera. 🙂

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  • Tourist at Home: National Geographic Museum

    Tourist at Home: National Geographic Museum

    Yesterday Chris and I had planned to go snowboarding, but the forecast looked a little too cold for me so we visited the National Geographic Museum in D.C. instead. For some reason, we had never been, which is crazy considering we both love National Geographic. We attended the Women of Vision and A New Age of Exploration exhibits.

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    Both of the exhibits were wonderful. I love that quote above, by the way. I could have said the exact same words because it’s exactly how I feel. And I actually thought seeing the exhibits would make me bitterly jealous – I assumed being a Nat Geo photographer would be my dream job. But seeing some of the harrowing images and reading the accompanying stories made me wonder if I don’t quite have the stuffing to photograph some of the assignments. I can’t even think about some of the photos without tearing up – horrible situations in the world I wasn’t even aware of, and photos that will stay with me forever because they made such a lasting impression. Even the photos I’d love to take of beautiful wildlife, for example – I’m not sure I could hang out in a jungle for hours or days waiting for the perfect shot, all the while potentially being threatened by various parasites, blood-thirsty mosquitoes, animal attacks, native attacks, the elements, and so on. I have an enormous amount of respect for the photographers who complete these assignments in hazardous and/or heart-wrenching situations. I’d love to be a travel photographer, but a National Geographic photographer is an entirely different job.

    Now, if for some reason I get a call from the publication wanting me to join them on a trek to Antarctica to photograph emperor penguins, I’m so there. That’s definitely a dream of mine, despite the risks of hypothermia, frostbite, blizzards, falling into a crevasse in the ice, or accidentally drifting away on a chunk of sea ice (apparently this happens). Photographing penguins in their natural habitat is at the very top of my must-do list, and I’m absolutely planning to do it someday! And yes, this is coming from the girl who didn’t want to snowboard because it was too cold, hence the reason we ended up in a toasty warm museum, but I’m stubbornly determined to go see those penguins.