Good Morning!

I picked out and finished my self portrait from vacation! I've been staring at it for way too long, so I'm a little tired of it, but still pretty happy with the shot and editing. Hope ya like!

I'm feeling a little rough this morning, probably because I've been going full speed all week, so I am actually writing this from my bed. So in reality, my self portrait of this morning kinda looks like this:

I think I'm going to spend the morning relaxing and staying in bed. Of course I need music for that, so I'm going to share a dear playlist of mine that I use for when I want to do absolutely nothing, which everyone needs to partake in daily. I'm apparently too tech challenged to embed it on my blog, but here is my playlist, hope it helps you relax to:

http://grooveshark.com/playlist/For+Laying+In+Bed/75906891

 So I just got back from an amazing week in a Tennessee cabin for a family reunion. No cell reception, no internet, and unfortunately, not the best coffee. But it was lovely, with tons of family and porches to rock and gossip on. Plus my cabin had a porch swing. Who doesn't love a porch swing? All this solitude and nature inspired me to take my camera out and get creative. I had two main ideas for self portraits, and here are some of the out-takes from one of them. Wednesday my best friend in the whole wide world came up, who happens to be a photographer. She's moving to New York in just a little over a month, and she's going to be famous in fashion photography. For real. Anyways, she was awesome enough to take the photos since I would be wet and cold the whole time. Here she is!

Here is me seriously reconsidering the whole submerging my butt in freezing cold water thing.

Yeah, it was really cold.

Holler back?

Here was one of my top 5, but didn't make the cut.

Me and some of the family had dinner on Watauga Lake. This was our view on the porch. Totally going camping there. Oh hey, and my grandpa helped build it!

This is my grandmother's humming bird feeder. The last day we were visiting she put 2 quarts out in a 24 hour period. These guys are nuts, but so beautiful.

Annnd here are a few randoms because I'm tired and don't really feel like writing much.

I also came across either a really big fox or a coyote on one of my morning trail walks, but we ended up scaring the crap out of each other so I couldn't get a good look, or a nice picture :\ Perhaps next year. I'm very sad I'm not drinking hot tea on a mountain porch right now, or catching up with great family I never see, but I have the pleasure of being surrounded by two dogs I missed very much. If only I could take them back there with me. 

Not sure when I'll be done editing one of the portraits, but when it happens I'll  put it up!

My weekend through other people's iPhone photos because I'm lame and don't have one.

I had an awesome weekend. Because I spent it with my two best friends. Doing nothing. Except drinking wine, watching movies, laying around, and eating yummy things like macaroons and black bean veggie burgers with teeny tiny potatoes. Oh, and I bought a really pretty new dress, which is clearly displayed in the picture of me pushing my lack of boobs together with a duckface. Classy, I know.

All About Pups.

This is a completely random post, but while looking through my Lightroom catalog today I noticed that I have a massive amount of dog pictures. Why? Because I LOVE dogs. I see four  pups on a regular basis, and with a camera by my side I can't resist capturing the cuteness. Can you? Anyways, here's a crap ton of photos of puppies I'm WAY too obsessed with:

Here are a few of my own pup that passed away in May at 17 years old. I just came across these as I was writing this, so I have to share them! Here she is about 5 or 6 years ago:

And here she is last year, cuddled up in my bed. Such a sweet girl, I miss her like crazy.

A few randoms.

     I just finished nannying and have parked myself on the outside of Summit Coffee's front door, which is absolutely lovely, because if you haven't been to Davidson, NC, it's an adorable town with lots of friendly people that keep main street busy and cute. Just watching the people here make me feel productive. 

    This week has been a rather chill one. Not too much happened, even on the weekend, except for laundry and cleaning, oh yeah, and a went to a biker bar. No, really. My mom found an abandoned birds nest in her fern which hangs by our front door. The reason the bird abandoned it was basically because every time we opened the door it would have a panic attack and either fly out immediately or try to attack us. While it's a little depressing, I don't blame her, and now there is this sweet nest for me to take photos of. I'd like to use it in a photo shoot if possible, I'm not sure how though. To be honest I'd like to set it on fire. While possibly holding it in my hands. No, really. Well, since I'm not positive I can do that without also needing skin grafts post-shoot, I figured I might as well document how pretty it is. 

     Ever since I went to Asheville I have wanted to continue my little portrait assignment, and try my best to do them at f /1.8. I haven't been very motivated since being back, but here is one of my awesome padre. Happy belated Father's Day padre!! He had to lean down for a good face shot due to me being so short...which may already be a clear sign that I will always have issues photographing tall people. I'll keep posting more too, I took one today of dear Gus Gus that is pretty freaking adorable.

     I still fully intend to pursue a self portrait project, it's just going to be slow without being able to afford good lighting right now. BUT, here is the one I will consider the beginning portrait. Yes, it's kind of plain, but the reason I chose to do this one was to do a recreation of the first self portrait I ever took of myself once acquiring photographic knowledge. I did it with an old film camera when I was 16 years old, and was one of the first photos I took in school that I was truly proud of. Of course, now it bothers me. It's out of focus, backwards, the highlights are blown out and you can see the Kodak print leaking in from the backside... not sure how I managed to pull off those last two mistakes but whatever. I now have a new and improved photo with my great great (great?) grandfather's portrait, which I think is very picture worthy, despite that fact that it creeps my friends out to the point that they refuse to sleep in the guest room. More updates soon!!

Back to My Mountain Home

    Friday was a day off for me, so I decided to take advantage of that and visit a place that I've been missing for quite some time: Asheville, NC. My previous home for 3 years, and a place I will always want to return to. I went up early friday so I could grab a bagel with a couple of lovely people and then headed to see my brother and his fiance, and my 2 favorite nephews, one of which is fairly new to the family. Below is sweet Dodger at only 6 months and below him is my Fela boy who thinks 5:30 am is a perfectly reasonable time to wake me up for cuddles. But look at those faces! How can you say no??

      One of my priorities of the weekend was assisting Jenn with wedding stuff, which was exciting since I'm the maid of honor and hardly ever get to see them or directly help out. Jenn is very crafty, and she had the cool idea to spray paint mason jars for vases to make simple centerpieces for the reception tables. While it didn't go perfectly according to plan, we got out some paintbrushes and fixed some rough edges, and in the end they looked pretty awesome! We painted some on the inside and some on the outside, but I love the striped ones. While I'm artsy, I do not consider myself crafty by any means, so I was quite proud about helping with these.

      And in case you haven't heard, Asheville is full of beautiful people. It's the kind of city where a dread head in a shirt made of rags can exchange smiles with a man in a business suit on a street corner, instead of ignoring each other like many other places. Because of this I decided to take my camera everywhere I went, and take pictures of every person I caught up with or a stranger I loved the minute I saw them. My favorites were an artist from Thailand, a mime, a coffee vendor from Davidson who makes awesome drinks, and a hotdog vendor, who I sadly did not get a picture of. Here are a select few, I put some on facebook as well. I took a ton downtown while catching up with my friend Simkus, who was up for having his picture taken with some of them, and since they crack me up, they are totally worth including.

My purdy friends

Simkus!

Vinnie!

Jordan and Jenn!! @The Southern

      The morning I had to leave I realized I didn't get to see everyone on my list of people sadly, but I bought these baller notecards. So while i sipped on coffee, I wrote a couple of them happy thoughts and dropped them in mailboxes. How cool are these? Who doesn't love bacon?

     I'm so sad to have left, but I'm going to try to make more of an effort to go back up whenever possible. Asheville is da best.