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I ordered this rasmalai cake from Sweets by Nita for my mom’s birthday. It was one of the prettiest cakes I’ve ever seen, and it tasted just as good as it looks.

When I saw people ordering my friend Tiffany Ballos’ creme brulee cake balls, I just knew I had to get some for myself and do a little photoshoot. THEY TASTE AS GLORIOUS AS THEY LOOK!

Just a glass of milk. Don’t cry, I didn’t spill :)

My sister had an assignment for her school’s baking club, so she chose to bake strawberry cheesecake. She has to submit a photo of her creation for each assignment, and then a winner will be chosen among all the submissions. Now that I’m back home in Houston because of the coronavirus, I figured I would use my skills to give my sister the best picture of cheesecake to submit. The cheesecake definitely tasted as good as it looks ;)

My awesome friend, Sammy, had wanted to build her own gaming PC for a really long time. With the coronavirus forcing college students to finish the semester at home, she now had plenty of time to be able to build a PC. She knows that I’m a computer nerd and have built my own PC before, so she asked me to help her choose parts and build it. Our goal was to keep it a secret and then surprise our robotics friends, many of whom would have loved to also help with this build.

My friend Caleb (a.k.a. Carbo) is a talented musician. He has a SoundCloud with 8 songs uploaded currently. My friend Madi decided to paint artwork for each song onto some CDs, and they simply look amazing. If you look closely, you’ll see that she even went through the pain of putting all the lyrics of each song on the artwork! Caleb asked me to photograph the disks to preserve them and show them to the world with higher quality than a smartphone photo.

My friend Madi (@malosadas) is an extremely talented artist. As a graduation gift for my friend Arjun, Madi painted him a pair of white sneakers. Her detail for the drawings was IMPECCABLE! Arjun is a big fan of Marvel and Dragon Ball Z, so Madi decorated the right shoe with Marvel artwork and the left shoe with Dragon Ball Z artwork. Mother Nature isn’t worthy of gracing the soles of these pieces of art. Arjun asked me to photograph him and his shoes after seeing the picture of my Adidas.

I have a tendency to extract the most value out of my shoes, so I end up using my shoes until they are torn at several seams. I definitely wanted to get new shoes before college, so I chose these Adidas Lite Racer Adapt shoes. You can’t complain with having no laces!

I wanted to get a new mouse with my new laptop for college, so I chose the Logitech MX Master 2S. It’s one of the smoothest mice I’ve used so far.

I needed a new laptop for college, so I chose the HP Spectre x360 15t. It has a great combination of portability and power.

This was the first mouse I bought that cost over $10. I flipped some mouse pads over (oh the irony!) to add a carbon fiber-ish texture to the background. Then, I used a cheap LED light to do some light painting on the mouse. For the red light on the side, I shined the LED light through my dad’s red baseball hat. The exposure took 30 seconds.

This NVIDIA GTX 1080 is the graphics card I use to power my desktop workstation.

I never owned my own graphing calculator before. My high school had plenty for us to use during class, and I could use online graphing calculators when I was at home. However, I needed to get a calculator for the SAT and ACT. I struggled to choose between the fancy TI-Nspire vs the TI-84 model. I chose this TI-84 Plus CE because it had all the features I needed - you’d be surprised by just how much this seemingly old calculator can do. I personally think it’s a lot simpler to use than the TI-Nspire after learning the new menus, and it still has a color screen. It’s also slimmer than the old TI-84 models. Did I mention you could also load Flappy Bird and Pac-Man onto it?

I’ve always wanted to build my own computer, so when I finally got the chance to, I made sure to preserve it’s RGB LED awesomeness with these pictures.

In high school, I was the photographer for the Klein ISD Robotics Team, VorTX 3735. We had a summer meeting one day, but the school wasn’t able to turn on the lights for us, so we had industrial work lights set up to work on the robot. The lighting looked really cool with the robot, so I decided to take some pictures of it. This was our 2016 robot, Sabre, and it got its name because of the steampunk theme of the competition that year.

Back when fidget spinners were cool, I used long exposure photography to capture the motion of my metal fidget spinner.

While shopping for groceries at Trader Joe’s, my sister found an assortment of honey. She loves honey, so of course she bought it. I thought the bottles were quite aesthetically pleasing.

I was bored one day, so I decided to mess around with a flash, some water, and a syringe.

After a Walmart employee broke my favorite watch in 5th grade, I stopped wearing watches for a while. Fast forward to high school, and Black Friday deals at Kohl’s were giving up to 50% off watches. I kind of missed wearing a watch, so I got this Armitron watch. It’s a simple design, but I like the blue and yellow accents.

4th of July was the perfect time for me to practice long exposure techniques with fireworks. By adjusting focus during the exposure, I was able to make the thing orange trails flare out into spheres.