The Awesome Book Of Love

[Trine Gritz]

FelixBarjou is a French photographer that grew up in the world of advertising with graphic designers for parents. He started his photography career in 2008 with simple portraits, and immediately discovered his style and process. Felix is passionate about light, which presents itself in his portraits that contain stylized illumination and a touch of humor. After receiving his Rosco Photo Lighting Gel Kit, Felix posted his thoughts on how to use it on his blog, which was originally posted in French. He graciously translated the post into English for us to share here on Rosco Spectrum.

Since I had a very small room to work in, I stuck to a simple portrait using 3 light sources, one reflector and two gels: one blue and one magenta. The blue filter was aimed directly at a white wall to project the light in a very diffused way all over the room. The magenta was taped onto a reflector dish with a grid, just behind the model for a slight touch of color on the background. The 3rd source had a square 70cm softbox without any gels, and a reflector just under to soften the shadows.

The second test with Morgane helped me understand color correction better using the CTO and CTB gels. The CTB filter was placed on a reflector dish with a grid for a very focused light. The CTO was oriented towards a white reflector for a soft and diffused light, so the skin could have an orange under tone. And finally the purple was placed in a 135x30 Phottix Stripbox for a touch of color and a cold mood.

For this image I ventured outside the studio and used the CTO to recreate a sunset. Since there was no sun that day, I figured I could create a nice sunset with a flash and a reflector dish. I placed my flash outside and another to my right so it could bounce on the wall. The CTO can reproduce the temperature of a sunset really well and allows for a lot of possibilities.

Let's move to my favorite gel, the Cyan! I really love this color, it gives a dark and cold mood that is really nice. The mix with the CTO is perfect to me. For this image I installed a Stripbox at 45 with the cyan, and a square softbox with a 1/2 CTO filter.

Here is my final technique with the filters - the long exposure! In this shot, the cyan was used on a continuous light, while the other two were used in a classic way. The technique is to shoot at a low speed to have this movement effect and allow the other flashes to freeze the motion (first or second curtain). I used a speed of 1/2s and an aperture of F/11 with a camera movement during the exposure time.

Always check with your host about their house rules and customs. Are they a shoe-less household? Are they strict with how they sort their trash? Do they prefer toilet lids down or up? Just be mindful!

If you have them, share them. It seems like everyone is on some sort of diet or has some sort of food allergy. Guests should make it known in advance what their eating restrictions and food allergies are. In general, I do find that the stricter the diet, the more food you should bring with you so as to not burden your host.

When you leave, ask if the host would like you to strip the bed and deliver dirty towels to the laundry room. I love when guests do this, but I also know hosts who prefer you leave everything in your room. Never hurts to ask!

Fantastic tips! When staying with friends or family, I travel with a thank you card and a small box of chocolates from my local chocolatier. I leave both on the dresser as I leave the guest room I have been using. (I know I personally am terrible about mailing these once I get home, so this removes the possible faux pas of a late thank you.

For visiting guests (whether they are staying with me or not), I often give them a selection of local postcards and also include colorful postage stamps sufficient to send the cards back to their home country. This not only promotes the lost art of postcard sending but also gives them something to do during their downtime.

I just came across this post at Uproxx, where someone transcribed my words to baby Violet earlier this year. It makes me so happy that it exists in this form that I copied it to have on my blog forever.

And listen: This is really important. I want you to be honest, honorable, kind. I want you to work hard. Because everything worth doing is hard. And I want you to be awesome, and I will do my very best to leave you a planet that you can still live on.

America has not been attacked like this since 9/11. Six unelected people forcing their christian nationalist agenda on a population of three hundred and forty million is not a Democracy. It is tyranny.

A good friend at work suggested we look into Catholic Youth Summer Camp (CYSC). Her brother has been a councilor there in the past and is just crazy about it! We had never thought about camp or anything like that before but after hearing how excited they were, we looked into it. It only took 3 seconds on the website to fall in love.

We had three main goals for Marlee when signing her up for this camp. Growing her faith and relationship with Jesus, gain courage to step out over her fears, and to meet new people and make friends. To say she accomplished all three is an understatement!

We picked up her on Friday and her heart was on fire for Jesus! She had Prayer Lab each day where they taught her the best ways to pray and she even said for the first time ever, she felt God answering her! (Chills!) She went to adoration for the first time and was prayed over and prayed for her new friends. She also learned some fun, new prayers. It was beautiful!

After her week at camp, Marlee has plans to go every year all the way through high school. Her heart is so on fire and I know she is going to bring along new people each year. If you have similar desires for your children as we do ours (and I think most do!) then we STRONGLY suggest sending your kids to CYSC!

COPYRIGHT 2016-2021, Kristy Fiely. Happy to have you link to my blog but please use a direct link to my site/post when using my photos. It is NOT permissible to copy anything else on my site without prior written consent. For my full disclosure agreement, click here.

Nine years ago, I was sitting in my college dorm room, thinking of a guy I liked and feeling what I guess some might call "smitten" or "enamored." But those words didn't do it justice. I was on the brink of dizzying, warm, smack-you-in-the-face love.

It's a stage of a relationship we don't have accurate language for, because it's often brief. You're hovering on the edge, trying to pin down how you really feel and guessing what might happen. It's too soon for those three small words and yet, if things stay as smoothly as they are, you feel you're headed for that much-heralded relationship benchmark.

In fact, being in pre-love works its magic on us at a physiological level. As Valerie Frankel wrote on Oprah, the feeling of being about to fall in love is marked by a curious set of symptoms including "involuntary preoccupation, mood swings, emotional sensitivity [and] enhanced sensual awareness."

What makes your brain go funny on pre-love? "During this stage, what I call infatuation, you experience increases of norepinephrine and dopamine levels in the brain and of testosterone too, since lust is involved," Helen Fisher, author of Anatomy of Love, told Oprah. But it doesn't last too long: "When you move into the attachment stage, where you see an increase of vasopressin and oxytocin, the other hormones return to normal."

It's all about the (lack of) language: There aren't standardized phrases for the various feelings around love, and what we do have is imprecise: There's a crush, there's the vague stage of "liking" and then there's the limiting "love."

In fact, English only has one word for the term "love," compared to other languages, like Sanskrit, which has 96 words to cover the complex emotion, as relationship expert Margaret Paul pointed out in the Huffington Post.

The passion before commitment: Some might be hesitant to surrender to that "pre-love" stage because the stage after it can require more decision-making. "Sometimes it's the nicest part of a relationship: It's all promise," Lisa, 26, told Mic.*

Indeed, pre-love is essentially step one of more serious aspects to a loving relationship. In 1997, psychologist Robert Sternberg put forth the idea that love is composed of three parts: intimacy, passion and commitment. The closest to the pre-love stage is that of infatuation, which is marked by feelings, "high in passion but low in commitment and intimacy, which will come later," Whitbourne told Mic.

"It feels giddy," Kelsey, 26, said of being in pre-love. "Like the top of a rollercoaster, and therefore also terrifying, because love means the probability of getting my feelings hurt, exposing myself emotionally, and it also means commitment."

Finding yourself in states of pre-love again and again, if anything, is a reflection on how we date today, with so many partners and constant change. If, on average, we're not fully committing to someone for the long haul until our late 20s, we may find ourselves in the pre-love stage more often than in love itself. That's not a bad thing; in fact, as Kelsey and Lisa point out, it can be a great joy.

I'm excited to announce that Ramen Chemistry is going to Tokyo next month for a ramen and culture tour. Among other things, I will experience wonderful food, strange and magical toilets, and, best of all, a week-long holiday from having to understand literally anything that is spoken in my general vicinity. The blogging opportunity inherent in such a trip should be self-evident. To get ready, Ramen Chemistry will warm up with a few posts about things Japanese. Starting now with "love hotels."

We found a place--Hotel 555--and pulled into an underground parking garage. There, we found a succession of parking stalls, a special one dedicated to each room in the hotel. Lots of the stalls were full when we arrived. But get this--covering the license plate of every parked car was a portable screen. And we paid for the room not by going to a check-in counter, but by inserting cash into a payment machine in our garage stall. The machine gave us access to the room; we never even got a key. This was new. This would be educational.

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