My 3GS is two years old; I have loved that phone long and hard but it was showing its age. The vibration was louder than the ringtone, it was slow and glitchy, and the very day my 4S came in the mail was the first day my 3GS told me it didn’t have enough room to update the apps that needed updating. So, so long old friend, and hello new friend who has a way way better camera.

As an avid Instagrammer and general iPhonetographer I am so excited to upgrade the only camera I always have with me. The picture above is the first one I took with the 4S and put on Instagram; it’s of this tree across the street from our new house that is part of a pair of trees that are as red as autumn gets, and I love them. It’s been a great fall so far, but now that it’s officially November I think I’m bracing myself for the inevitable loss of fall and the gain of the typically nasty midwestern winter.

From June 4th to June 6th we hiked (backpacked) down to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and back out again. Here is a set of photos from our cameras during the trip — I still need to do a picture swap with the other hiker for his images, so this set will grow to include more in-canyon shots soon hopefully.

The trip was superlative in many ways. Very beautiful, very painful, very unique, very challenging. I am *still* healing from the hike in some of my joints and muscles. I wasn’t prepared for how intense it would be for me, but I learned a lot and I’m ultimately glad I did it. Plus the surreal beauty of this place is incredible and worth quite a bit of effort to get to experience it.

Big news might just be upcoming in the next couple of weeks — we’ve put in our application for renting out an amazing house on the other side of town. It has so many things we currently lack that I keep thinking there must be some kind of a catch. The landlord is great, the location is great… keeping fingers crossed.

I’ve been an Instagram user for a few months now. I love the creative, social, daily-life sharing aspects of it. It makes everyday photography accessible and minimizes some of the intimidating aspects of it by giving everyone the same platform/technology, packaged with a way to share their images easily with whoever would like to watch. Some of my favorite bloggers have been joining up in the last few weeks as well, and it’s been fun to watch it spread and to get glimpses into the lives of artists and writers I admire.

Even if I’m not posting here I’m usually broadcasting daily moments through photographs. Follow me in the Instagram app under the username “carissapod”, or follow me on the web here.

My birthday was April 7th. 27 years old, oh dear. Is that ‘late twenties’? I think it probably is.
One of the amazing gifts my family got for me was this large, unusual ammonite fossil. I’m not an expert, but in my many years of ammonite collecting and perusing I’ve never seen one quite like it.

I took these shots of it today with my iPhone and processed some of them (the first and third above) with a new photography app called Camera+. I love it — lots of photo taking and postprocessing options.

Lots of things going on at work, but I’m still trying to make the time to take pictures often, even if it’s just via Instagram.

I have big news about a new addition to the mid century collection — post about it soon!

After initial doubts, I have really fallen for Instagram. The interface is perfect, the filters are nice, and it fits right in to and definitely enhances my existing iPhone-everyday-photos habit.

In the meantime, have a look at this amazing photographer and illustrator I just discovered today from Portugal, Joana Rosa Bragança.

Our house is also sort of an ongoing expression of joint functional creative design too, as much as we can given limited space and budget anyway. I’m planning to do another set of photographs of the current state of our place, as any new (or vintage in some cases) things have found their way in here somehow and it’s looking pretty different than the last house tour I shot. So, look for that once I get my camera back!

Some rain, then record-setting heat. Yesterday we had a fruitful trip to Ikea and dinner at P.F. Chang’s. I am loving my new camera.
I badly want to travel and expand my experiences. We both want to move to a larger city, maybe/hopefully/eventually near the ocean…