Legit Photographer Nightmares

Posted by katie ett on February 13, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under photography

I had a dream the other night night that I was photographing my first real wedding. I was so excited to be the one in charge for the first time and wanted to create the most beautiful, artistic pictures for my friend Samantha (whose maternity photos I really did shoot thanks to my BFF, Tracey, talking me up).

As the wedding started, though, I realized that I wasn’t prepared at all and hadn’t even spoken to the preacher (who was a LADY) about how close I could come to the alter, whether or not I could use flash, etc. I was going to walk up in front of the whole church full of people and ask, but just then, the bride started coming down a side aisle, and I needed to run to the other side of the church to capture her.

She was walking down alone in a short, short white cocktail dress, dancing and doing catwalk poses as she came. She stopped in front of me with one hand behind her head an one hand on her hip, and I snapped away. Just then, her one bridesmaid came down the aisle on the other side of the church, and I only got over to her in time to get just one shot of her as she neared the altar.

There was no groom to be seen, but I snapped a hundred pictures of the bride before realizing that I had been using a crappy point-and-shoot camera the entire time. I ran back to the pew where my gear was sitting and realized that no, it hadn’t even been a crappy point-and-shoot but just an external flash unit, not even attached to a camera.

I ran back to the altar and sat on the floor, determined that if I had missed all of those shots, I was going to get so many shots from an “artistic” angle to make up for them. I started shooting, but 90% of the time I pressed the shutter button, it would make the sound that the kind of doorstop on a spring makes when you pull it back and let it go. That pth-pth-pth-pth-pth sputter sound. I didn’t really care what sound it was making as long as it was getting the shots, but of course when I checked my SD card, there were only seven pictures on it from the entire wedding.

So I guess I feel more legit now that I’m having photography nightmares. That’s something.

Gearing Up for the NYC Fashion Week After Party

Posted by katie ett on February 6, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under par-tay, photography

You may remember the first New York Fashion Week after party and benefit I shot for The Set NYC. Well, I’m shooting the same event for them this Friday and realized I never showed you the photos from the last party of theirs I did back in November. I KNOW.

I love doing these events, because they give me a chance to chance to try out “interesting” editing under the guise of being “fashionable”. Because if this looks good, then so do these:

NYC Fashion Week After Party

NYC Fashion Week After Party

NYC Fashion Week After Party

NYC Fashion Week After Party

And hey, some of my friends even came out that night to “support me”. Meaning “pick up models”:

NYC Fashion Week After Party

The rest of the set, if you’re so inclined, is on my Ettible Photography Facebook Page.

Tonight, We Are Young

Posted by katie ett on January 31, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under all of my friends are prettier than i am, living in new york is neat, par-tay

It was my roommate/landlord/co-worker/friend, Jack’s, birthday on Sunday, so I took it upon myself to throw him a “party” on Friday night. I wanted to reserve a private room somewhere so he could “mingle” and “work the room” and “network” and “invite hot girls in to enjoy his bottle service, ifyouknowwhatImean”, but I couldn’t get the bars in our area to agree to give me one unless I promised to bring a hundred people and buy a buffet for them. So I gave Jack two non-reserved-room options:

1) a divey Irish bar that my friend Jeff said Jack would like, with a pool table and ping-pong and darts and, like, 1.5 stars on Yelp, or

2) a stylish 1920s-style speakeasy with artisan cocktails and small plates that promised to not have a wait to get in despite the super-high rating on Yelp.

Of course he picked the dive. I hemmed and hawed and suggested that maybe we should just go to dinner instead, but he said it was his birthday and going somewhere nice was going to make him feel old. I said, “Do what you want. People have to pretend to like it,” but I really meant, “I know I’m supposedly planning this party for you, but there’s not a chance I’m going to stay for more than a half an hour.”

But it turned out to be this toooootally not-horrible bar that was not tiny and not crowded and not sticky, and people who said they weren’t going to come came, and everyone played games and caught up and ate wings, and no one got celiac disease, which is apparently common among the Irish, along with small penises. I don’t know. Google it.

Our friend Nik and I left and slogged through the ice and snow to pick up Kamran at his apartment and then took a cab to a sushi buffet in Koreatown called IchiUmi that’s as big as a football field and always full. On the way, the cab driver–who was Southeast Asian and may hold different ideas about hilarity than we do–told us a long-winded joke about three men who were 86 years old. One of them died, and the other two went to his son’s house after the funeral. “How old was he really?” they asked the son, and he replied, “92.” The two men looked at each other and said, “Should we go home?”

And then the cab driver laaaaaughed and laughed and said, “Do you get it?” And the three of us laaaaaughed and laughed, and Nik said, “Do you stay or do you go, right?” And we all laaaaaughed and laughed.

No idea.

Jack and the others didn’t make it to the sushi buffet before it closed, so we met them at a nearby KyoChon that had pretty walls:


Jack is making an important drunken point


Kamran is moody


The guys really love CVS

It was one of those nights where everything worked out just fine and we felt young and unstoppable in New York City. I didn’t give Jack a hard time for not making it to the sushi place, and I had nothing bad to say about the bar that I expected to hate, and I didn’t get stressed about running around with snow-soaked hair. But then we went home at midnight, because we actually are old.

Happy birthday, Jack!

Boys are Dumb and Have Cooties

Posted by katie ett on January 29, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under stuff i hate

It must mean something that all of the books I love are about little boys, right? I don’t mean that in a molest-y way. But Dandelion Wine, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay?

I read this quote from Something Wicked This Way Comes recently:

First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s not chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.

But you take October now. School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you’ll dump on old man Prickett’s porch, or the hairy-ape costume you’ll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.

But one strange wild dark long year, Halloween came early.

I’ve never read that book, but the moment I saw “a rare month for boys”, it reminded me of The Dangerous Book for Boys, and I immediately went to download them both from my local library’s website. It used to confuse me so much to love these boy-based books and to have unlimited tolerance for male-centric movies and video games when my male counterparts are usually unwilling to even consider anything “girly”, and if they eventually are coerced into watching a girly movie or reading a girly book, it’s nonstop complaining and mocking. I don’t see a whole lot of difference between a football game and an episode of “Real Housewives”, but while I’ll tolerate the game, there’d be a riot if I tried to make my male friends watch the women.

But I watched something recently–I unfortunately have no idea what–where a woman talked about how women don’t just tolerate male-centric entertainment but actually embrace it because we’re interested in what the dudes in charge are watching. Isn’t that gross? I’m suddenly so annoyed now by all the hours I’ve spent watching my roommate play Halo, all the episodes of “Venture Bros.” and “American Dad” I’ve watched with Kamran, and all of the male-charactered books I’ve read. It’s all “The Bachelor” and Mrs. Dalloway for me from now on.

Pathetic on Pinterest

Posted by katie ett on January 25, 2013 – 12:00 pm
Filed under everyone's married but katie, good times at everyone else's expense, my uber-confrontational personality, why i'm better than everyone else

Can we agree that anyone who has a “wedding ideas” board on Pinterest and isn’t engaged is a desperate psychopath who should never be proposed to?

If you have a “someday wedding” board but had the good sense to make it private, I’ll grant you some leeway.

And actually, I’ll grant you all of the leeway if you pin stuff like this:

My BFF, Tracey, says that women have to hoard these ideas now because we’ll otherwise have forgetten the things we’ve liked about other people’s weddings by the time we actually get married. So I’m convinced that every wedding from now on is going to include the things that were popular when Pinterest began: mustaches-on-a-stick, everything chevron, and ombre cakes.

The best part is that I randomly chose those pins, and then discovered that these are the boards they’re from:

• My .:*eclectic bohemian inspired free-spirited color-filled fun-loving flower child*:. dream wedding board

• FINALLY- Wedding november 16, 2013

• Ideas I wish I’d had for my wedding

THAT’S RIGHT. The last person is already married and still has a wedding board. For her second wedding, I assume.