Latest flickr inspiration...

1. El hombre quien le encantan los platanos (y ama su chica tambien), 2. Untitled, 3. Fill These Spaces Up With Days, 4. Kiss, 5. down on the farm, 6. tarmonbarry 01 042, 7. Forest fairy, 8. 8O, 9. I look good in Love. ;), 10. all she wanted was the shoes..., 11. akBD, 12. Late HBW, 13. my fancy new postcard..., 14. L.O.V.e, 15. Moan-et, 16. Untitled, 17. Autumn Ride, 18. Find Of The Day, 19. Stone man on old chair outside my house, 20. The Haunted Pumpkin Patch, 21. Japanese Maple, 22. blast, 23. Untitled, 24. gone with the wind, 25. Happy Easter........, 26. almost dry & ready to fly......., 27. Blue Butterfly on Yellow Flowers, 28. to the light, 29. old time photo, 30. I'm Thiiiiis big, 31. Star Trails Revisted B&W, 32. Adios, Dallas, 33. freedom, 34. Carry my heart across the sea, 35. First newborn shoot!, 36. First newborn shoot!

*blink*

ARGH....
My photo editing program (paint shop pro - the main one I use) crashed on me while I was working on the website. Decided to take a little mental break from it and post.

No new pictures to post (well, anything of interest anyway) so dug up a couple I didn't show the other day.

{Photographer Gear}

Nothing terribly exciting. A chair and a cheap tripod I've had since high school. Apparently it's a good tripod (that and I hardly used it for years).

I toted this out to the yard the other day to do my pumpkin head shot and then got distracted by dew and macros. Then noticed that it was kinda pretty looking so I snapped a pic.

{Generating it's own light}

Love how this little fluff is catching so much light it almost seems to be it's own light source. Please note the bokeh (blurry bits) in the background. Prettttty.

I'm so very happy.

I have the main splash page of the new site DONE. It's full of awesomeness. I'm trying to get a template for the inside pages done, then I have to edit photos for slide shows - just to make sure they all look good, then I can go live. I really want to have it done by the end of the week, because I'm sick of talking about it.

I've joined in to the "Week in the life" project that Ali Edwards is "teaching" this week on her blog. This blog tends to satisfy some scrapbooking urges, but I really should be doing something a little more permanent. So yesterday, I took pics of doing laundry and dishes. Excitement all about.

Dishes are done today, still gotta vacuum because I skipped that yesterday (cuz there was a tablesaw in my living room). Gotta go to the bank (they frown if you don't make house payments, they smile when you make them early). Can't forget to take tanner's papers to town for him, or I'll be making two trips to town.

That's it.

I'll share the site when it's done

Livin' the good life.

We got a lot accomplished yesterday.

Pool got stored away - only one minor disagreement on the storage method. I won.

Went to st. Joe, found an even better priced back door. We'll get that this week, and install it next weekend. *that will be fun* {sarcasm}

Went to Panda Express {one of my favs}. Gene's always so sweet, he orders stuff that's not his favorite, so he can have leftovers for my lunch the next day.

He has an annoyed look because I asked if I could take his pic, and with the new lense, I had to back up quite a bit so he was embarassed. heh.

Got home and we installed the last door. It was a pain in the rear!! No really. the top of the door was wider than the bottom by *a lot* so we had to do a lot of shim work. The trim will be left up to me, which I'm really not all that excited about, but it's now my specialty :p I also have to stain and install the doorknobs on the last 2 doors.

After we got done with the doors, and all the little chores to get done, we dragged out the new lounge chairs and gene barbequed steaks (big shocker) and I read my CK mag. crappy pic of me, but it's ok. Looks like a bad ad for CK magazine. LOL.

Then I got out my camera for a project I'm going to share with you next month. And while setting up the shot, these guys flew over.

Still not sure why they were flying north.

This butterfly ticked me off. He'd been hanging in the tree for like an HOUR so when I finally broke down and went to get my camera, he decided to get up and fly around. grr. It was a cool shot too.

Today...

Working on laundry as we speak. Every weekend dish is washed, seriously it looked like we had a party here we had so many dishes. I'm going to finish cleaning the bathroom - it's sooooo much cleaner now. I decided to get serious and super scrub the shower (because I didn't do much but try to knock the dirt off because we're planning on ripping it out) but since it'll be a bit before we replace the shower, I decided that I should super scrub it. All that's left is the toilet, which just needs a wipe down cuz I swish the inside every day (easy to keep clean if you do it that way).

Gotta vacuum, and I'm going to put the table down smaller to make room in the dining room. It's going to just have to be a "staging area" for a while until we get our garage sale out of the way.

Happy Monday!

Happy Sunday

Tested out my new lens on my only willing subject. LOL.

The image on the left is the lens at f 1.8, and the right is f 8. The wider (smaller #) aperture, the narrower the depth of field, which gives you that pretty blurry background/foreground. Ppl pay lots of money for blurry bits. Neither photo is tack sharp to be honest, I need to play with it a while til I get the hang of it.

For the record, Gene does not smoke.... STILL. He's just enjoying a VSOP in celebration of finishing the plumbing! I mean *everything*, clear down to insulating everything. That was like 5 weekends and a lot of back pain for him.

ATM, breakfast is cooking. I found a recipe that sounded good, broccoli/mushroom quiche so we're having that for breakfast. I actually got up way early to make it.

I got Tanner's door hung yesterday. Man, that one was sooo hard. It's not perfect (the trim in one corner looks like swiss cheese where I had to screw it down), but it's in, and it works, that's what matters most. I have to get some trim and I'll be able to finish it tomorrow.

Went to garage sales yesterday. Hit one that was reallllly good. Gene got 2 sets of lead crystal tumblers. He likes to have a drink out of them, makes him feel hoity toity. LOL. I got 2 architectural pieces to hang in Tanner's bathroom. And we got 2 lawn/lounge chairs. I'd been wanting one, and we got them looking near new for CHEAP. We decided that we're going to bbq steak, bake potatoes and lounge outside for supper.

Yesterday we went to the Hangar to see Eagle Eye in the dinner theatre. I thought it was pretty good. I love action thrillers. Gene thought it was too long... which is silly as it was less than 2 hours. I agree that it was kinda hokey at the end.

We're going to St. Joe today, to pay for our new back door and to pick up knobs. Have committed ourselves to getting the pool packaged up (that's not fun) and getting the AC out of the bedroom. We've talked about putting on the guest room door. I'd rather get all the other stuff out of the way first.

Oh, and a shout out to Paul Newman who died yesterday of cancer. Butch Cassidy and Cool Hand Luke is gone. Just seems strange when one of the great "old" actors passes on.

OK, I'll stop with the bug photos..... after these.

It's monarch migration time. You can stand outside and just watch them flutter over the flowers on the other acre. So pretty.

But they are touchy, so it's hard to get a good shot!

Coming in for a landing, out of focus, but I still like it.

Oh Hai!

My favorite. Just as I snapped he/she flew up to the camera. LOL. *whatcha doin? whats this? wanna take my picture? kthanksbye*

bzz.

Went out to test the new lense, and got distracted by butterflies and bees instead.

Dandelion seeds

Seems my dandelion seeds pic is doing pretty well over on flicker. Click through.

Ohh.. and I got my new lens today - 50mm/1.8 *so happy* I haven't even had time to open it yet.

Happy Fall Ya'll

Well it's official.
It's fall (well, as of about 5 days ago).

So I went to Walmart to pick up some stuff, and on a whim picked up a pumkin. Thinking .78/lb isn't bad, probably going to be about $1.50-$2.00.

Does this look like a $5.00 pumkin?

No, not to me either. I about crapped. That would be .75-1.00 at the regular pumpking place. Don't tell gene, he'll crap too. LOL.

Photo - Self portrait with a texture on top, desaturated me, left the pumpkin bright.

Love this photo. Love love.
Linen texture on top.

I filled a bowl on our coffee table with apples that came from Aunt Norma's tree. They smell really yummy, it's almost potpourri. I found some WW recipes for apple crisp, so I'll probably make a bit before they all go bad.

The corn is almost ready. I saw a combine drive by yesterday. I wanted to shake my fist at him.

We have one poor tree that just never looks like much of anything. It loses it's leaves early and they're not even a pretty color, but I loved this leaf this morning, with a tiny spider web on it.

Lots to get done today. I'm trying to get into a Bridal fair next month and I realized last night I have A LOT of stuff to do before then. I have to assemble several albums, pull photos, make sure they are edited. I have to scan some old pics from film, get those edited and printed.

OK, gotta move, killed a lot of time on pics this morning!!

Dude. That was close.

Woke up this morning to do the pumpkin pic, got up early actually, and went to the little "field" on the second acre to get my morning "this is awesome light" pic.

That's when I discovered that the dew was out, and the light was beautiful and there were so many things to take pictures of. I ended up taking over 80 pictures in about 1/2 hour of tons of cool macros.

One tiny drop hanging off an old spider web.

The stems on a dandelion.

All pics are much more impressive if you click on the photo to see the full view.

I have a stalker....

named winnie-the-pooh.

See??!
I have evidence.

Irrefutable proof that a BEAR was trying to peep in my front door this morning. Stuck his nose on my door so long that it ran down the door.

Disgusting.

I can't decide if I should call the game warden, or the higher-ups at Disney.

*yawn*

Nothing majorly exciting to report other than I made it to bed at a reasonable time finally and got up at a reasonable time too.

Gene went to KU yesterday, and they gave him no new news on his breakouts other than "hopefully it will leach out" and "learn to live with it or get a new job".

Errands to run today like mailing the last of my fliers, catching up on some emails, setting up a time for a shoot or 2, go to walmart to get Gene's prescriptions/food/catfood.

I'd work on the door, but I'm at a stopping point until someone helps cut the door down, it's not a one person job. It will probably way until Saturday - before Gene fixes the one leaky pipe we have.

No pictures.
Nothing.

Sorry for the boring post. Felt obligated. :p

That's hot. No. Really.

Self portrait
{reflection in the front door of my house}

{enhanced in photoshop, looks way better now - less reflect-y}

Had another night of not sleeping well. Must be a phase. I didn't get to sleep until late. Did not help a big storm blew through - zapped my modem too!! They were good and out to fix it ASAP.

In the meantime, I decided that I needed to give myself a shot at lightning photography. I've never been lucky enough to catch it before. IT'S HARD! I had a tripod set up in my sink and got these first 2 shots. (about 1-2 min exposures.

I then moved to the living room where there was more activity and got a HUGE one, but it was so big, that it overexposed the image. I enhanced it to the point you can tell that it's not DAYLIGHT...{third image}

{ok, so I played with the color a bit. The green is real, the purple/blue is "artistic license"}

{This color is real}

Not bad for a first shot. Not great, but not bad.

My camera gets hot pixels during long exposures (dots that show up on the image) so I won't be able to do any star trails unless I try film, which I'm totally game for.

Mom came down - she needed new glasses and needed someone to help her pick. She's getting some really awesome red ones with sparklies. I need glasses but haven't worn glasses/contacts since 2001.

We swung by Orschelns, which was a huge score. We only made it right inside the door where they were selling 20x clothes - western wear - good old comfy/quality t-shirts, jeans, etc for .75 to $2.50 *each*. Much over 90% off. We did well, I bought christmas for about 6 people for less than $22.00 (more than one thing per person!!)

Got some samples of pics in from some photo suppliers and they are pretty good. Not all that excited about metallic, but I suspect people will love it

Rest of the day did not get accomplished all the brochures that needed to get printed and mailed, so I guess that will happen tomorrow!

I'm semi-still not famous!

Got some business cards done. I originally did something COMPLETELY different, and while plopping in pics, I realized how much I really liked the full card image thing. The old card is not a complete loss, I'll use it instead as a marketing/rep card and it will include a sampling of images.

I do something a little different to get full color business cards.

I make my business card, and them put in in a 4x6 image and have them printed off at a bulk discount place, get them home and cut them apart. I get a large variety of options, without a huge investment.

I wanted a variety of cards, as I could not pick just one image so I picked 9. LOL. (3 were fluff cards I just wanted to see how they'd look). I'm working on my branding and I know where I'm going with it, it'll just take me a few days to get the website done!

Got my external hard drive today, paid some bills, mailed some fliers, finished my cards, did dishes. I still feel like I didn't accomplish enough.

Oh, and I suddenly saw an influx of hits from wordsplosion and realized that the pic I submitted must have been put up on the site "It's Anarchy, Stupid" made the cut. Heh. It's a new site, that makes fun of grammar, punctuation and spelling. I've heard it described as "LOLcats for smart people".

And now that I'm making fun, I made sure to do a spellcheck. hah.

Did you know that cathartic's first definition is "stimulates evacuation of the bowels".... yeah that's how I felt.

Yesterday, I could not sleep.

In my up time, I created this:

Which is another amber/cole pic, with some really cool texture over top.

The main reason I could not sleep was because minutes before going to bed, I finally figured out what I wanted to do for my website. I had been hellbent on doing black, but it just wasn't working in my head.

I saw this awesome business card online, and it sparked a whole host of ideas. yeah, right before bedtime. *huge mistake* So I followed the 1/2 hour rule. If I don't fall alsleep in 1/2 hour, get up. I don't like laying there until 4 a.m. staring into the darkness when at least I could be doing something that's making me tired and I'll fall asleep at 1 a.m. instead. In actuality, it was around 2 a.m. Totally not what I had planned.

But...

I have a good ground now for what I'm going to do with the website.

In the process of looking for the textures I knew I had on my computer, I was in my old files for when I was designing paper. I did not realize several things:
a.) how huge the files were taking up space on my harddrive
b.) how much it was dragging down the computer
c.) how much easier it would have been back then if I'd only added some $35.00 RAM
d.) how cathartic it would feel getting rid of all of it. (well, most of it).

That relationship did not end on the best of terms. Well, for me anyway. I guess I was sold one thing, and got another. There was sleeping on the couch while I uploaded files to the server (which weren't good enough for them even then). There was the president/ceo that was narrow minded about the market to the point I couldn't put witch hats on halloween paper so I wouldn't offend customers. That should have been my first clue. Did I mention she offered me a job? Sorry, that wasn't in the cards - glad I didn't move there for that. -- whole bunch clipped because that's not the point of this post--

Anyway, I deleted it.

I quadrupled the available space on my hard drive. That felt good. I can fill it with pictures. (that and I'm going to buy an external harddrive today which will give me double my harddrive space just for pics. ahhh.. )

Got a lot accomplished yesterday, but the list was long (it was monday), so trying to get that all finished up today.

Amber and Cole's Fall shoot

Cole, Amber and Copper came down Saturday evening to do some fall type pics. The pumpkin place we planned on going to didn't have pumpkins (yet?) this year. So disappointed, but we took pics in several other places.

Here are some of my favs of the shoot.



Working with a dog is like working with a toddler, only not as smart.