Mom, on the Onion

OK. I have a beautiful, amazingly detailed wedding to share. But first, ohhh, boy. My brother brought this to my attention this morning and I am still amazed:



My mother's image, appearing in the hilarious satirical newspaper,
The Onion.

This is a photo I took 5 or 6 years ago. I have a collection of stock images available for license through Getty Images, and this is one of them. So, my mom signed a model release, and The Onion's art director did a search and decided that she represented a good "mom" to illustrate this article, "Mom Just Locked Her Door".

So far, she seems to have a good sense of humor about it... I don't know what her share of the royalties will be yet. The image is photoshopped pretty obviously onto a generic background. But, wow, is this ever one for Symphony's time capsule! If anyone has a print copy, please send it my way.

The best part may be that my friend Allison, who I haven't seen in 10 years or so, said, "I was looking at the Onion today and thought, wow, that looks like Jessamyn is 30 years!".

Emily in the garden, summer 2009

Just a fun shoot with lovely Emily and some teeny tiny produce. We have been finally working in the garden, I can't wait to see what grows this year!

Sandwich, Flowers, Cupcakes

I have so many great shoots to edit and post! But I am swamped with more shooting :) so the longer ones will have to wait a bit.



In the meantime, here's (half of) a delicious sandwich from a while back - I think it's brie, mâche, cornichons and homemade vinaigrette on seeded sourdough baguette. Mmm, making me hungry for another one...

I'm always hungry for cupcakes! I made these super simple butter cupcakes with chocolate buttercream frosting (yes, it was a lot of butter), based on a Sunset magazine recipe, and Devon pronounced them some of the best he's had... shucks!



Finally, some pretty flowers too:

Our Backyard (Peeking Images)

These photos are from a series I've been working on involving peeking the camera through our fences, and little mini landscapes in our backyard:































What do you think?

finally - some garden photos!

Happy Memorial Weekend! I'm shooting a fabulous wedding at a very cool location in Berkeley today, more on that when the photos are ready to share...



In the meantime, I know that everyone is simply dying to ask the question, "Jessamyn, Jessamyn (quite contrary?), how does your garden grow?". I don't have silver bells or cockle shells, but we are now happily eating lots of spinach, radishes, strawberries, and lettuces, and we expect many more great things popping up. From early spring we've also had some beautiful flowers (some of which I planted, many that were here sleeping underground to surprise us!), including lavender, the sweetest-smelling jasmine I've ever had, geraniums, daisies, peonies, little pansies, freesias, and lots more (including a single red tulip that bloomed and was never heard from again).



I've been asked for photos of our gardening endeavors, and I've been taking LOTS of photos. But other things always seem more urgent to share. Here are some haphazard shots to give you a sense of what's blooming:

























Here are our scrawny tomato shoots after the bugs started wiping them out, right after we released some ladybugs to help with those bugs. They (the tomato plants) are much bigger and stronger these days!



Here is a different tomato plant now - growing visibly every day:



Back to the ladybugs:





Little bugs eat leaves and shoots, bigger bugs eat little bugs, kitty eats bigger bugs... everyone enjoys the tasty lettuce! Which is why we had to put bird netting over everything...



Little ladybug highway:



Little lettuces and spinach sprouts after we first planted them:





And now (we are eating them every night!):





There are lots more veggies coming up. The trouble is that I didn't mark things, so some are going to be surprises (exciting!):





Oh, yeah, we have lilies and irises too:



We have a huge bottlebrush tree:





And a lovely pomegranate tree:







And a mystery stone fruit tree (I'm hoping for peach, but I'm betting on apricot):



I love fresh, ripe tomatoes - so maybe I went a little overboard:







And I planted radishes because they're easy to grow, but I'm finding I really love them in a salad or sandwich. We're going to have to replant again already!





Gardenia, dahlia, hibiscus:





Nasturtiums (one of my favorites!):







I'm not really posting these photos in order - they were all taken on different days, so there are lots of different stages of growth:









And a sad apple tree:









Little pomegranate life cycle study (see the decaying one, and the new babies?):



I hate crabgrass:



Now, there was lots done when we moved in, but to give you a sense of how far the garden's come just this spring, here are some photos I shot in February:

Where the veggie beds are now, there used to be horrible, hard-to-remove, dead sod:



The blossoms of the mystery stone fruit tree (which later got this weird curly leaf thing - we'll see what happens!):



I cut the roses WAY back and they are crazy huge now. I'm not that into the roses that came with the house so I may rip them out and replace them with better ones...



The neighbor's palm tree occasionally bestows these huge, prehistoric-seeming fronds on our yard. What I didn't realize is that those suckers are SHARP! They basically have teeth along their stem things. Crazy.





That's a sad note to end on, so I'll post these beautiful flowers, which all came from our garden. I am really loving photographing the growth and blooms coming up, and I have some photos of our first harvest (a radish still life study) to share soon.



Hope everyone is having a wonderful weekend with lots of beauty and tasty veggies!