Black & White Photos

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times… there’s something so classic and beautiful about a black and white photo. I recently watched The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Spoiler (but it’s an old movie so…)… at the end of the movie he photographs his brother’s wedding. All the photos they show were in black and white. I’ve always wanted to photograph a black and white wedding. Now, would I only want black and white wedding photos, probably not… BUT!!!!

October 10th, I got to photograph my husband’s friend since junior high’s wedding. It was pretty exciting. And while I edited all photos in color… I turned them all black and white too.

Oh… and if you notice below I have 3 cameras… I’m NOT a professional videographer, but I got to play and make them a video too. It was a lot of fun!

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What Camera Lens Should I Use?

Once upon a time back in September 2009, I bought my first dSLR. I didn’t have a friggin clue what a dSLR was. A couple of friends of mine and I decided we were going to take a photography class at a local technical school. Honestly, I hate to say it, but it was a pretty worthless class. The teacher threw a lot of information at us in a very short amount of time. And instead of encouraging us to learn to take better photos, we just took random photos and moved on with life. The only thing I learned from the class was there was something called a dSLR. Said dSLR was different than a point and shoot camera. Bam, now you learned what I learned and it was a lot cheaper.

That first class I came home and had to do some research on what a dSLR camera even was. Now, here we are a little over 10 years later and I’ve owned a Canon Rebel XS, (2) Nikon D5000, a Nikon D90, a Nikon D7100, a Nikon D610, and recently upgraded to a Nikon D850. To say I like Nikon cameras might be obvious. However I keep up-to-date on Canon’s as well so if someone is looking for suggestions on what to buy, I know both models. I’m not so good at Olympus or Sony although I did own a semi dSLR Olympus for underwater photography. I didn’t own it long enough to do anything with it though.

A Kit lens vs body alone

There is a lot of controversies when buying a new camera. Do you buy just the body and then buy a lens or do you buy a kit lens with the body? There are a few things to consider before you totally make up your mind. First, if you look at the lens itself, it has a lot of information that looks like jumbled letters and numbers. What do they all mean? (more…)

Guided 365 – January 2019

I decided to tackle the Guided 365 project that Digital Photography for Mom’s does. This is a paid class. It was a lesson that we received every day (about 5 am). There were times I got behind. It just happened, but as long as I caught up, did it really matter? 

We submitted our photos through Instagram. Now… my biggest complaint was I didn’t feel like I got as much feedback as I would have liked. Maybe that’s a good sign. My photos were just so outstanding that… or maybe I was just behind. Who knows why.

The first month she spent teaching people how to shoot in manual mode. That’s awesome, but I’ve been shooting in Manual since 2011. I was a little bored and contemplating why I did this class, but I stuck through it and I’m glad I did. Now, people can start and stop and restart if they want. You paid monthly. No, I’m not getting anything for talking about this, I just wanted somewhere else for these photos to live. I’m going to break it up into 12 posts, otherwise, there would be 400+ photos on this blog post alone. I’ll break them down by month.

Note, I got started late. I’ll tack on the last 3 photos that were done in January 2020 onto that last post so there will be a few more days there.

January 2019

Day 1 objective: Connect to what you want to photograph.

It has one of my kids and cake… I love photographing both! P.S. Happy Birthday Tbug.

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It’s Wedding Season

I don’t know if you know it or not, but summer has officially sprung! Here in the midwest we went from Winter to Summer. Spring, what’s that? I’m pretty sure last fall we didn’t know what Fall was. We just fell from Summer into Winter. Crazy Midwest weather.

But, that being said, It’s coming on big time wedding season. They say that people in the olden days got married in June because they took their yearly shower in June so they’d smell good. But for good measure they carried a bouquet of flowers to hid that musty smell. haha. I sure hope that was a joke! In this instance, I just hope I’m gullible because if that’s true, pew.

Last weekend, I went to a wedding. Yup, that’s where I was headed with all of that. The weather was gorgeous! We drove out to Big Hill Lake near Cherryvale, Kansas. I have a bunch of friends that live in that area. I was apparently only 3 miles from one of them. I’m not sure about the other… but on one of their farm websites they mention Big Hill Lake in their description on where they’re located.

When I got there, wedding preparations were already underway. As you can see, I got in on some good pictures of them making lemonade. We also had taste testers in this endeavor. It was fun. (more…)

Easter 2018 (Better Late Than Never)

Easter 2018

Yey! Easter has come (and gone!). This year we made a trip to my aunt and uncles in southern Oklahoma for Easter. It is a 5 1/2 hour trip down, so we left Friday, celebrated Easter (with dinner) on Saturday and drove home on Sunday. Luckily this was our year to have Tbug with us too! Woot woot!

We weren’t able to get Tbug until something like 1:30 on Friday and my dad wasn’t able to get off work until closer to 3ish so by the time we got out of there, it was closer to 4 or 5. I can’t quite remember but does it really matter?

On the drive down I listened to the book, The Time of My Life by Patrick Swayze and his wife Lisa Niemi. I can’t read in a car. I get car sick just sitting in one if I’m in the back seat, so reading is totally out of the question. But Audible to the rescue! It wasn’t a total loss, yey! I’ll have to do a “book report” on that in the coming days. So totally worth reading (or in my case, listening to).

We stopped in Oklahoma City for dinner. Technically Norman at a restaurant called Salt Grass. So totally YUM! Oh and don’t worry, I sent my friend Camille a picture of the water tower. I didn’t forget her on my way through… although I never got a response. In the words of Stephanie Tanner, How Rude! haha.

We got into AC & UB’s close to 11 pm. Abug told UB she was going to get up the next morning at 7 am and do chores with him. (more…)

Ads and the Weekend

Hello Monday! I’m sitting here, listening to my baby girl talk about packing up to go to the “hotel” for the 15th million time (no joke). She’s obsessed with hotels and staying at hotels and packing for hotels. I think she’s stayed at a hotel maybe 2 handfuls of times since she’s been alive. I’m not talking days, but different trips. But she’s totally OBSESSED with hotels.

Every time we pass a hotel she comments on the hotel. There’s one about 15 miles from here that every time we pass it she comments she wants to stay there. Every time. I’m not kidding. This is NOT an exaggeration. And we pass this hotel about once a week if not more.

In other news, I got sidetracked this morning looking at more recipes that I’m going to save but will probably never make. I want to write a cookbook so bad but I keep questioning it… whose to say that I would sell any. With the millions of cookbooks on the market, what makes a person actually think, I’ll buy this cookbook over that one. I mean have you been to a bookstore lately and seen the amounts of cookbooks on the shelf? Maybe not… cookbooks are becoming a thing of the past these days. It’s really sad.

But I bring all of this up because… I ran across a recipe this morning for Hot Chocolate Dip. As I scrolled through it looking at the ingredients and the words of the blogger, I got tickled by the ad that was in the middle of the page.

Do you see the irony there? It’s a recipe full of sugar with an ad in the middle for the 3Step Sugar Detox. I couldn’t help but laugh about that… seriously. Anyway… moving on…. (more…)

Round and Round We Go

Last week was the Lamar Fair. I pretty much grew up there during high school and college. In fact, from the time I was 15, I think I only missed 1 until I was too old to show there. That’s not to bad I don’t think. And I have lots of good memories from there… like the time that I got into a water fight. I’ll have you know I didn’t start it.

Okay, so the water fights at the Lamar fair… At the end of every livestock portion of the fair, there was typically a water fight. The officials tried to stop it, but it never happened, so then they banned it from being under the tents (yup we were under tents at the time, now they’re under a pavilion). So as long as the water fight stayed outside the tents, it was fair game. 2 friends and I had left to go get lunch. When we got back, Chelsea and I made a deal that if one of us got wet, the other would join in on the fight.

I took off running like mad because we both had kids hot on our tail, I dove into someone’s sheep pens head first while she got soaked. So I walked out the front of the tent and said hit me, which caused me to get hit with 4 different buckets of water from all directions. But then, the hunt was on. What do I mean? Oh Chelsea and I were out to get all our fellow sheep participants involved in the water fight. By the end of the water fight, I’m pretty sure that most all sheep participants we showed with were soaked, including our official leader. He was a parent, but we didn’t take mercy.

Those are the kind of stories I want my kids to have. Fun ones. Even though it sucked being soaked in jeans and boots, it was a lot of fun and something I wouldn’t trade. Luckily for me, I brought dry clothes to go home in. Poor Lexie, a fellow competitor we got soaked, she did not, so she had to ride home pants less or so her mom told us.

Abug is too little to show yet, but when I heard the Lamar Fair was going on, I asked the hubs if we could go up one night. The one thing about the Lamar fair is that they have rides as well as the animal portion of the fair. We always start out in the livestock barns because, well, that’s where I grew up. It’s always funny to me to see the kids who were her age when I was showing, now being at that showing age. It’s CRAZY!

Case in point… This kid right here was like 2-4 years old the last year I could show. Now he’s 17 year’s old I think someone told me earlier this summer.

After yacking with my friend Casey and his dad Randy for a while down in the sheep barns, and Casey and hubby ganging up on me more than once (by the way, I have multiple stories on Casey… we’ve been friends way to long), we decided to head up to the carnival portion of the fair.

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20 Photography Blog Post Ideas

1. A day in the life post – These are always fun because it allows people to get a feel for your day.

2. What’s in your Camera Bag – Sometimes this is helpful for other people. It allows them to get ideas for their own bag, especially if they are newer to photography.

3. What camera you use – I always love these. It allows me to see what other people use and I’m nosey like that. I devour camera reviews.

4. Speaking of Camera bag – What camera bag do you have and what features do you like?

5. Start a 365 project – It is time consuming but oh so worth it. I’m about to wrap up my second year of doing this. Yup, 2 years now. I think I’m going for a 3rd, but changing it up a bit. Either focusing solely on photos from my dSLR or maybe Black and White Photos. I haven’t decided yet.

6. Show some behind the scenes in setting up a picture – Not everyone knows what goes on behind the scenes of a photoshoot.

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