These are awesome. I will be checking out your flicker sometime, you’ve got a great eye.
I don’t think I knew how many times a day I check tumblr until opening my phone and remembering not to open it today. And I’m afraid what it will look like tomorrow.
They look so cool! I was just thinking today (after the 9th advert came on full of shiny tall women with swoopy hair and fluttery dresses and megawatt smiles and perfect skin and giraffe necks being all aspirational about perfume or makeup or diamonds how FUCKING SICK I AM of media being exclusively full of women who look nothing like the women I see in real life. Real live women are MUCH more interesting and aspirational than that. It makes me angry that we're supposed to aspire to be something *less* than what we are.
yes, this is super important. i do miss roller derby in part for that. and i wish it had caught on even more than it has, because it was such a great sport in terms of body types-- unlike, say, marathon-running, there are advantages and disadvantages to being tall or short or thin or heavyset or anything. we had a team of 15, with 5 women under 5'3", and 5 women over 200 lbs, and so on. it was really interesting.
Wow! I admire your ability to get good action shots like these! I don't have that skill.
I am totally in favor of support/acceptance/appreciation of diverse body types. A good friend of mine is a long-time size acceptance activist, so I was exposed to the idea sometime in my twenties, I think. (Teens would've been better timing for me, but I'm glad I got it as early as I did. I have always been built with a seriously rounded belly, no matter what my age or weight. As a teen, that was hard. I'm still somewhat self-conscious about it, but finding out how variable human beauty standards are/have been was definitely helpful. I eventually took up belly dancing, and have performed as a belly dancer, though not commercially, big surgical abdominal scar and all! :)
Are you familiar with a coffee-table photo book called Women El Large: Images of Fat Nudes? (Apologies if I've asked you that before. If not, here's a NSFW link to some photos from the book: [link]. My friend Debbie is in several of the photos at that link, and she co-authored the book with the photographer. They blog about photography and body issues at Body Impolitic. Both also have individual dreamwidth accounts.)
I'm curious about what else you liked about doing roller derby, if you feel like saying. Please feel free to point me to one or more links, if you've written about it elsewhere!
Ha, my ability to get action shots comes down to by the time of that album, about four years of serious practice and $2k of equipment investment. I think I shot that bout on a Nikon D7100 and a Nikkor 85mm f/1.8 lens. Some of the bouts I shot, I also used remote strobes, which are not only $$$$ but also hard to master, but I was able to borrow the remote triggers from work at least.
I loved a lot of things about derby, and hated a lot of things about derby, and it's not that I don't want to sum it up, so much as that I don't really know how. I wrote about it on here from 2007 thru 2013 or so, but nowhere concisely. It eats your life, is the thing, it's 20 hours a week of commitment, and it's got all kinds of shit that goes along with it. But I had a good time and got great reflexes, so.
It was part of my body-acceptance journey, too, though I'd started that with various online movements already-- most of which were via websites now-defunct. (i did join Tumblr to participate in the Fatshion February thing that fatshionista on Livejournal had been hosting but had given up.) That's also a long story, and an old one, but in short-- solidarity!
These are fantastic! Sports photography can be tricky, and I'm with everyone else in feeling that it's doubly great and refreshing to see such good shots of female athletes. I especially love the framing in the top and bottom photos, and in the black&white shot of the jersey grab.
(I've also been meaning to comment on your Istanbul photos over on Pillowfort. At any rate: I totally concur with paean, you have a great eye.)
Thanks! Sports photography is quite challenging but like, during the time I was trying to master it, consumer digital SLRs had a huge breakthrough in sensor capability, and so after I had gone and bought all these specialty lenses, the next gen of camera that came out was capable of vastly superior low-light performance which meant I could use faster shutter speeds and didn't need these huge wide-aperture lenses I'd sunk thousands into, so. I mean, I still have them, so I use them, but it's like. I used to work my goddamn ass off to get one usable (and by that I mean, in focus and recognizable as subject matter) shot in twenty, and now suddenly I have the luxury of wading through 20 in-focus shots and picking just the one I like best, rather than The Only One That's Remotely Close To Focused.
Which means now so can everyone else, but, whatever, it took the pressure off me.
Oh man I need to get the rest of those travel photos up. I'm procrastinating because I need to go through the cellphone pictures I took there too, because various bits of the trip I only really captured on my phone.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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I don’t think I knew how many times a day I check tumblr until opening my phone and remembering not to open it today. And I’m afraid what it will look like tomorrow.
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I am totally in favor of support/acceptance/appreciation of diverse body types. A good friend of mine is a long-time size acceptance activist, so I was exposed to the idea sometime in my twenties, I think. (Teens would've been better timing for me, but I'm glad I got it as early as I did. I have always been built with a seriously rounded belly, no matter what my age or weight. As a teen, that was hard. I'm still somewhat self-conscious about it, but finding out how variable human beauty standards are/have been was definitely helpful. I eventually took up belly dancing, and have performed as a belly dancer, though not commercially, big surgical abdominal scar and all! :)
Are you familiar with a coffee-table photo book called Women El Large: Images of Fat Nudes? (Apologies if I've asked you that before. If not, here's a NSFW link to some photos from the book: [link]. My friend Debbie is in several of the photos at that link, and she co-authored the book with the photographer. They blog about photography and body issues at Body Impolitic. Both also have individual dreamwidth accounts.)
I'm curious about what else you liked about doing roller derby, if you feel like saying. Please feel free to point me to one or more links, if you've written about it elsewhere!
no subject
I loved a lot of things about derby, and hated a lot of things about derby, and it's not that I don't want to sum it up, so much as that I don't really know how. I wrote about it on here from 2007 thru 2013 or so, but nowhere concisely. It eats your life, is the thing, it's 20 hours a week of commitment, and it's got all kinds of shit that goes along with it. But I had a good time and got great reflexes, so.
It was part of my body-acceptance journey, too, though I'd started that with various online movements already-- most of which were via websites now-defunct. (i did join Tumblr to participate in the Fatshion February thing that fatshionista on Livejournal had been hosting but had given up.) That's also a long story, and an old one, but in short-- solidarity!
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(I've also been meaning to comment on your Istanbul photos over on Pillowfort. At any rate: I totally concur with
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I mean, I still have them, so I use them, but it's like. I used to work my goddamn ass off to get one usable (and by that I mean, in focus and recognizable as subject matter) shot in twenty, and now suddenly I have the luxury of wading through 20 in-focus shots and picking just the one I like best, rather than The Only One That's Remotely Close To Focused.
Which means now so can everyone else, but, whatever, it took the pressure off me.
Oh man I need to get the rest of those travel photos up. I'm procrastinating because I need to go through the cellphone pictures I took there too, because various bits of the trip I only really captured on my phone.