Diffusion filter

I’ve been watching lots of YouTube videos on fashion photography and portrait photography. Lindsay Adler has been particularly generous with her YouTube videos. I like the idea of doing weird and different, like adding the Omni Filter system or funky filters or gel lighting. One of filters is this star filter. One of the filters is a diffusion filter. Both of these shots are with one. Samuel photobombed me so I decided to shoot him and that is in the extra. My last dog refused to be photographed so this is nice.

I went to Union Station in DC today and explored what is there now. All the restaurants I remember are gone. There are huge areas of empty store space - and this is/was prime real estate. On the top floor is a store of African jewelry and clothes. The oddest thing - I walked in and immediately wanted to shoot one of the coats. I wanted a model and lights and I wanted to take dramatic photographs of that coat. 

Maybe I can manage to interview one of my new subjects tomorrow but if I don’t then I realized it would be a great day to print out information about the photo shoot and go visit businesses and ask them for money. Uh, yippee.

I like these first two paragraphs from a Forbes article, esp as it gets harder to find non-defeatist news:
“While many pundits and politicians in the West declare the war in Ukraine a “stalemate” and demand the Ukrainians negotiate with the same Russians who have abducted Ukrainian children, bombarded Ukrainian cities and murdered Ukrainian civilians, the Ukrainian marine corps has gone on the attack.
Three weeks ago, the marines crossed the wide Dnipro River in southern Ukraine’s Kherson Oblast and secured a bridgehead in the settlement of Krynky on the Russian-dominated left bank.”
The rest of the article explains all the work the Ukrainians put into preparing so they could take this area across the river. It was lengthy, it was well-planned, and it treated their soldiers like their lives mattered. 
To reduce dissent in the larger and wealthier cities Russia has disproportionately “recruited” minorities from rural areas. The Siberian Battalion is a newly formed unit of the Ukrainian armed forces that consists mainly of members of Russia’s ethnic minorities far from Moscow. The men were helped to get to Ukraine by the Civil Council, a Russian dissident group that wants to cleanse the guilt of one of the cities where Russian soldiers slaughtered civilians. The men travelled by circuitous routes because it is complicated to get out of Russia to other European countries. “The problem isn’t that there aren’t Russians willing to join us. The problem is that Ukraine can’t process the large number of applications it is receiving,” he said. “We have to carry out lots of checks to ensure that the battalion isn’t infiltrated by Russian agents. We also need to make sure they meet the requirements of the Ukrainian armed forces, of course.”
Spouses and relatives of Russian soldiers serving in Ukraine held a protest on Tuesday in Moscow. It lasted for five minutes before police came. Dozens participated. What is amazing is that it happened at all.