Trip “Home” In Photos Day 1

Have you ever had Freeze Dried Ice Cream Sandwiches? You should, they are amazing, and don’t melt! We took them on our picnic in 100 degree weather.

Then of course we had to go see my favorite thing in the world, COWS! I love them, and could drive around forever looking at them, I have so many pictures of cows, it’s unreal, and some probably think I need an intervention…

Then it was off to the “lake”, I’m not sure why they call it a lake it’s more a reservoir, but it was beautiful that day!

Upper Left: Where my parents now live - NOWHERE, and it is grand!
Upper Right: The wonderful bugs they have the privilege to live with.

Then it was time for the ritual summer evening fire pit sitting, marshmallow roasting, family chatting, police scanner listening,
wonderful summer evening.

No Excuses

I’m not a fan of when people say, “It’s been far to long since I’ve updated.” or “Where has the time gone since my last post?” I guess since I started with that that’s kinda what I’m doing. I won’t make promises for weekly updates and I shouldn’t even say monthly! Mr. B has been gone since May and that’s caused for nothing interesting to go on… one of my goals is to be more active, find things to do, be outgoing and just enjoy life instead of just being bored and lonely most of the time… For about a year I have had a fantastic group of friends around me who lift me up, support me, and are just friends. It’s weird you turn (almost) 30 (minus 3) and you expect to not have these type of friends, well maybe I’m the only one - but I am so thankful for them! Back in September (wow that just seems like yesterday!) a group was going down to Disney and another new friend of mine and myself decided to ride down on our own together just for the weekend as we had work and couldn’t go with everyone else. It was such a needed weekend! We laughed the entire way down just enjoyed ourselves! Once we got to where we were staying we jumped in and started helping for a birthday party with a Mario theme, it was fun and of course I took some pictures, it was quite the cute party complete with a question brick piñata, question brick sacks to put their prizes in, Coin boxes full of coins, star power suckers, an AWESOME Mario cake, a Mario hat for the birthday boy, and even mini - one up - growth mushroom cupcakes! It was a fun experience to be part of! Thanks!

 

There were fun times in the pool!

 

And did I mention the amazing cake?

The weekend was perfect! After all the kiddos left we sat in the hot tub listening to good music then played a new favorite game, A Ticket To Ride - if you haven’t played this with your family it’s a MUST for all! It’s great because even kids 7 and up can play and it’s a riot even for adults! Had a fantastic dinner of a great salad and then us girls (Me, Mickey D, and Ishmabishi) just laughed all night long, it was unstoppable! I’m the youngest of the group and I felt like one of the parents were going to come knock on our door and tell us to keep it down - but they didn’t, and eventually we fell asleep and made the drive back the next day.

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I also went out to visit Mr. B in New Orleans where has has been living for the past little while, I didn’t really take many pictures but I will be sure to the next time I go out to visit. We stayed at the Hilton Bourbon Street one night, let’s just say that was an experience - the hotel was nice and it was a good time but it was very interesting.

 

Here is the only picture I took on Bourbon Street… and will probably be the only one ever as I have no interest of going back to that part of the city…. ever.

I’m not sure if you can see it - but in the picture on the right above there are two people in the street they were playing instruments and it was amazingly awesome - that’s pretty much the only reason I pulled out my camera was to record them, I have a video but I’m not sure if you can hear it well, but I’ll put it up anyway…

 

 

Okay so maybe I took one more…. not very good quality but this fellow was quite interesting…. and there were horse mounted cops all over and the horses were beautiful! It’s still amazing to me the stuff that can go one with the police right there, but I suppose it’s all about picking your battles, right?

Lake Pontchartrain is beautiful, and larger than I ever thought it could possibly be! These are a couple I snapped while driving down the highway.

About the only other thing I did this month was have our regular weekly dinners (I love the 50mm 1.2 lens, it’s amazing)! The Bear enjoyed her corn - the adults played games, this time we played Puerto Rico which is awesome.

 

And I suppose the final thing was a family session, which I learned a lot from - a lot, but got some really cute images!

 

That was my September - somewhat busy, but good! A lot of lessons learned in different things. But mostly this month I learned that I’m so thankful for the Lord and especially knowing that He really does care about me, and I’ve recently felt that we are where we are supposed to be right now - and that things fell into place to put us here so we could find the friends that we have, they are amazing and I really do consider myself lucky, I suppose I feel more blessed than lucky.

Kentucky, Part Deux

Probably one of the best places of the trip was the Louisville Slugger Factory & Museum, it was very cool. We weren’t allowed to take pictures of the actual factory as it is proprietary equipment, nonetheless it was very neat. They have bat samples from all the big league players that purchase from them, did you know that the average pro ball player buys 120 bats a year?! That’s A LOT OF BATS, and the cost of a pro bat can range from $64 - $96. Mr. B purchased him a pro bat with his name engraved along with the Cubs logo, yes my husband is a Cubs fan, that’s okay, at least the Braves are represented in the family somewhere :).

This bat is 120’ tall and 9’ wide around the bottom, you can fit 36,000 gallons of lemonade in it, well I suppose it could be any liquid of your preference but who doesn’t like lemonade?

 

The M1 Carbine stock and the billy club were manufactured by the Louisville Slugger plant during WWII for the US, isn’t that cool?! Well, I thought it was.

Yes this is Babe Ruth, and yes, this is Babe Ruths bat :)

Visit To The Bluegrass State, Part I

What’s blogging again? I believe I may have forgotten! Project 365? Not going to get caught up, I’ll just start from now. Thursday Thoughts? Well, we’ll just have to see. In the past month I’ve visited Mr. B in Kentucky, which was wonderful, beware, this post will be photo OVERLOAD. And currently, I have a horrible Respiratory tract infection that won’t leave, although this last round of drugs from the good ol’ doc seem to be working much better. However, it would be nice to breathe…. but onto pictures and stories from the trip at the beginning of July to go see my husband (I can’t believe it’s been 2 weeks since I was there!) Let me just start by saying the city of Louisville is a great city, and how wonderful it would be to be a photographer there, SO MANY great scenes I had soooo many ideas going through my head, it was just so beautiful!

 

This is the Pomegranate Limo - The owner of the 21c Museum Hotel in Louisville loves Pomegranates, so much in fact that he had his Limo covered in little red glass beads to look like Pomegranate seeds. There is this fellow who was polishing the car by hand jewel by jewel to make it shine, when we walked by. Is this not one of the craziest things you’ve ever seen?

 

 

Now if someone could please explain these contraptions to me I would greatly appreciate it! They were down below the street level and they look like the middle one empty and then every few seconds it would make a funny loud metal clanging sound and a puff of steam would come out in this perfect circle, then it would dissipate like the top one shows. It was steam and well, none of us had ever seen anything like it before, ever. So please share your ideas if you know what this was, because I would sure like to know, it can’t be a heater as it was over 90 degrees that day…

 

 

All over the city were these bases/bats as well as horses from the Gallopalooza were all over and they were very interesting to look at, different artists create them and then they are auctioned off, I’m not sure where the money goes that they raise for them but they were really cool to see.

 

They also have the prettiest architecture, that’s another reason I love the south, growing up in GA I was obsessed with the beautiful homes from the 1800’s, there's just something beautiful about the hand craftsmanship.

 

But they also have beautiful newer buildings as well, I can’t get over how much of a great town it is!

 

And this I thought was pretty, Love the new all glass sided building with the reflection of the old, probably one of my favorite pictures now.

They have the best artwork/statues around town, I could’ve walked around this little town, FOREVER! isn’t that bike rack totally awesome!?

 

 

I really did enjoy this town, we went to the Louisville Slugger museum, took cute, cute pictures of our friends little boy, and just all around had a fantastic time!

Water or Snow

I have a full time life, and I love it. I wouldn’t change it for anything. This weekend is about spending time with my family and doing some of my homework for the class I’m taking this month so here is today’s 365 and I will update the other 4 days when I get an opportunity to do so, as long as I’m taking a photo a day - that’s all that matters right?
I love this picture, while it was taken during a 60 degree day, it still could be taken here in NV in 20 degree snowy weather.

Homework, time! We had a lot of homework this week, and I’m getting started on it slowly a little at a time. This is hard for me because all of this week is just straight shutter/f-stop math to configure the right exposure, and I’m not allowed to post-process, it just kills me. But it is what will make me a better photographer, so that’s what I will do. Our assignments for this week are:
The Shoe Project - 10 Different People/Shoes in 10 Different Places.
  
This is the first image(s) in this series of ten photos.

Texture, Texture, Texture
For this next assignment we have to take 10 photos of textures while configuring our exposure and shot all before activating the shutter. This is hard as well because I like to shoot and adjust. But I’m pretending I have film in my camera, thinking about things before the shot and just going for it, so here is the first photo in another series of ten images.
 
These were our croutons at lunch today, they were delish! I had to use 400ISO instead of the base 100 as there was hardly any light in the restaurant.

The next assignment is a depth of field assignment, I found the shallow depth of field assignment pretty easy but the deep took me awhile as I wanted everything to be perfectly in focus, after 45m I finally gave up just set my camera on the proper exposure settings and just did my best.
  
I’m still proud of myself that I am able to do this without any ‘post additions’!

The last and final assignment is 3 different type of panning, I’m hoping on working on those tomorrow. So until then goodnight and good day!