i went on a little bit of a shopping spree today. i didn’t mean to, but there was something that i was interested in getting so i went around hunting for just the right thing.

primarily, i was looking to find some cheap gels for my flashes, but that led to also trying to find backgrounds for portrait photography. man, what an undertaking!

my first stop was aaron brothers. they were absolutely, completely without a doubt unhelpful. nothing. they didn’t have anything i wanted. my next stop was TAP plastics. it was the first time that i set foot in that store and i felt like a little kid walking into a toy store for the first time.

it’s not that there’s really anything particularly exciting about plastic, really…but there was something about the fact that pretty much everything in that store was made out of plastic that really piqued my curiosity. i went from aisle to aisle looking at all things plastic. i was tempted to grab a whole bunch of stuff but then i started to ask myself questions like:

“why do i need a 4 foot, 1/4″ neon orange dowel made out of plastic?”

“why do i need a plastic cube?”

“why do i need sheets of plastic?”

but it’s still fun to take a look at all of the things that they have. so that’s what i did, i looked.

finally, i got what i went there for: sheets of acetate paper. i wanted to see if i could make my own colored gels for my flashes and it all began at TAP plastics. they had 4 colors: red, green, blue, and yellow. i got a foot of each of them. it’s too bad that the sheets are about 4 feet wide because i only used about 20 square inches for the gels. what am i going to do with the rest of them?

after the gel purchase, i started to think about getting a backdrop for portrait photography. so i went to the local fabric store and looked around. while i was shopping there, one of the customers came up to me and asked me if i worked there. i told her that i didn’t and she apologized explaining that i looked so at home at the store that she mistook me for an employee.

i sort of stood there dumbfounded. this was the first time i had ever set foot in a fabric store so her comment was a little disconcerting. but i picked up two cords of cloth and had 4 yards cut out of each, so hopefully they’ll work out ok.

after that i headed out to borders at oakridge to check out the new store. while there, i was reading up on portrait photography. there’s one book that i really want to buy, it has a lot of good advice, however the store copy was very worn, so i didn’t want to buy it there. i’ll probably check out another borders and see if they have a copy of it.

as i was leaving borders, i saw that the da vinci code was on sale and since i had heard so many good things about it, i decided to pick up a copy. i hope it’s worth it!

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