Back to the portrait series! This one is of yours truely. As of November 1st, 07 I've had (or at least been diagnosed with) diabetes for seven years. My emotional connection to the disease has definetly been bittersweet. I think that as an adolescent I loved the attention it brought but I always resented actually having to deal with it. Now, I'm more or less simply living with the disease - or at least trying to accept it as a more natural aspect of my life. In any case it is, and probably always will be, a struggle.

The technological advances in diabetes care are always incredible and somewhat mind-blowing. Shortly after I was diagnosed, I began wearing an insulin pump which essentially holds a vial of insulin in it which is connected to my body through a tube. The insertion site for this piece is on your left here (the right side of my body). On the other end is a beeper-sized computer through which I can program the amounts of insulin I need. Pretty slick. But I still needed to prick my finger and check my blood sugar before every meal. That was until this past summer. In August 07, my two younger brothers and I (yep, they came down with the sickness too) began using the Continuous Blood-Glucose Monitoring system (that's it on my left side). It basically does what it implies: a sensor sits in the fat and takes a blood sugar reading every five minutes! Incredible, really. It has its hiccups, but the fact that this is possible still amazes me.

As for the shot, this was my first attempt at using a studio and lighting in the photo studio here at school. Knowing absolutely nothing about lighting this was kind of a shot in the dark; I basically set up a light on either side of me and played around with their intensities. It was a long, exhausting day and this was probably the only good shot to come out of it, but I like it a lot. I used Mark Fleming's Cross Processing technique for processing. There were some other tweaks as well, but most of the credit goes to that technique.

I've been all about the wide cropping lately. I'm sure there will be more piece that pop up on the site with a similar composition. I just think that when you take a plain background and stick a figure or part of a figure in the middle, then eliminate the top and bottom, it makes the shot incredibly appealing. What do you think? Oh, and feel free to blast my lighting setup; like I said before, lighting is entirely foreign to me. But I want to learn, so take a shot!