Erin

Yesterday, I got to do a photo shoot with Erin and it was definitely an adventure! We did some intense photos and some more whimsical ones. I love how a lot of these turned out! The lighting was perfect, despite it raining for about ten minutes. 

This next picture just shows how great the lighting was! It isn't edited at all.

I had this idea of a modern day greek goddess. I don't really know anything about greek mythology so we did some whimsical shots. I love this first one, also unedited. 

And then... I started editing again.

We also took a few head shots. I love the last one of Erin smiling, it's very her! 

Jasmine in the Mountains

Jasmine has been helping me get back into taking pictures - asking why I stopped and nudging me to get back into it. She asked for me to take photos of her and I had an idea...so we went up to our photo spot. It's a special spot and I haven't taken pictures of anybody else there! This time, I got to pick out Jasmine's clothes which was very exciting. It helped with the inspiration process. I'm amazed at how the photos turned out. The colors are spectacular! The photos that I'm posting that are in color have hardly been edited. My editing process probably took a total of 30 minutes. I'm sure I'll go back through the photos and find more that I want to edit. For now, here is what I have.

 These are the photos in color that I like in color so far.  I still can't believe how great they turned out :)

I love this very last photo of Jasmine. It captures her so well - so smiley! That's how the photo came straight out of the camera!

Next up...Naomi in body paint. You all should be excited for it. She just has to get back from Florida so I can photograph her!

Do it to it

I always have to edit pictures over the course of multiple days. I tend to miss things in the excitement of the first edit and my mood affects the photos drastically. So now I've gone through this set of photos twice and edited some of the photos twice. I found some hidden gems too playing with features I hadn't noticed before in Lightroom. The landscape photos are taken by me whereas the photos of me  - WHAT? a photographer modeling? preposterous! - were taken by my wonderful boyfriend, Mark Beaty.

 

This last one I cropped to this. I think it's pretty magical. Yeah, I used the word magical. Basically I love this picture :)

If you can't tell, the photos of me are heavily edited. That's because it was really freakin dark out! Mark turned the ISO up to 3200 towards the end determined to get a good shot. I think he succeeded. I missed editing. Goodness gracious. I miss taking pictures, too! I know I ought to do it more but I get so caught up in living and seeing the way I see. What I mean by that is that it is difficult to transfer what you see onto a sensor or film or whatever medium you use. The colors aren't right, the contrast is all wrong, and it's impossible to get people to focus on what you see... But sometimes you can get it right and that's amazing. I miss that feeling and I'm going to go after it. I plan on doing a photo shoot with Jasmine soon featuring her super awesome tattoo. Hopefully that will get me in the groove again and I'll start pestering all my friends to model for me :)

It feels good to take pictures simply because I want to.

Indiana 2012

I am currently in Indiana! I am with Mark, Vally, D-Ross, and Mark's dad, Mike. It's been a whole lot of fun so far.

To get here, we drove through the night last Friday and arrived early Saturday morning. We went grocery shopping early on so that nobody got crazy hungry...none of us are a pretty sight when we're hungry. Mark, Mike, and Dross went and got the boats and we found out the speed boat was broken! That left us with the jet ski, the pontoon boat, and a sailboat. I don't remember a lot of Saturday because I was so tired. It seemed like I slept in the car the whole time, but I was really half asleep because of the bumps...having to pee...mostly having to pee. It seemed like I was the only one who asked to pee the whole trip! Oh wait, I was.

Anyways, I'll just mention some memorable moments since the days all blur together here. I've been on the jet ski a bunch. I rode with Vally once and that was pretty wild! We hit a wave and I did a backflip off the back of the jet ski. I didn't really feel like moving a whole lot after that haha. I got a lot of water in my ear and was afraid I ruptured my eardrum again. Mark told me to hop on one foot and turn my head to one side to get water out - which I tried - and it worked! Yay!

We have gone sailing a lot! Mark, Vally, and I all went sailing to Olin which is attached to Oliver Lake. That was such an adventure! It was really hard to manoeuvre because the wind kept changing directions and we had to come about a lot...which was really hard with the 3 of us in a tiny sunfish! We actually hit  some land started swaying all over the place; it was wild. When we finally got to Olin, we swam. Trying to leave was difficult because we either couldn't get enough wind or we were going to hit shore, we came about a lot there as well. We ended up "turtling" because...I don't know why. We weren't really moving. I remember sitting and then suddenly we were sideways! It was super fun. When we finally made it back to Oliver Lake, the main lake by the cottage, Vally and I hung onto the sailboat while Mark sailed. Half of the time I hung onto Vally because there wasn't a lot of areas to hang onto the boat. We ultimately made it back to the cottage and it was an adventure!

Today we went to look for animals in some of the shallower waters. We found this really awesome turtle that seemed to really like our boat! I think I got about 100 pictures of the turtle. He really liked the worms that we fed him. I even got to feed him a work :)

The story with the speedboat. We took it to Ernie because it was making a scary screaming noise. The very same day, the speedboat was fixed! It was amaaaaazing! So got to go tubing. But to improvise in the meantime we tried waterskiing using the jet ski to pull people. We were going to go tubing with the jet ski but have only used the speedboat. That's all we've needed!

I  went tubing today and that was pretty wild! A few days ago Mark told me if I wanted to die, I should make a certain hand signal and say "chaka-bradah." I was feeling kind of wild, and cold, while were tubing so I made the signal! The thing about chakabradah is...the tube flew like ten feet forward and a couple feet in the air! It was so crazy. Dross and I bumped heads haha. It was chilly today and I didn't want the wind on my wet skin anymore so I leaped out of the tube to hang on in the back. Dross liked that idea, too. It's just so much warmer to stay in the water! So we flipped the tube over to hang onto the handles while the speedboat towed us.

I feel like I've written so much and I don't really feel like checking what I read. So there! Those are some things that stand out to me right nowwwww. Maybe I'll have a Part 2 for you guys with more stuff. It's been a fun trip so far but it is supposed to start being cold out. Dangut! Hopefully it won't be too bad. Now for some pictures!

I saved some of the artsy stuff for last.