SmamPhoto

With the return of the nice weather, my photography has come back as well!  After 3 days of sun, I finally felt like getting out and about and picking the camera back up.  My first stop, of course, had to be the Magical Forest.  However, lots and lots of mud may have made it a little less magical than usual….

After the trip to the forest, I took the next day to go see my Mom for her 50th birthday!  Construction in the nearby neighborhood has driven deer onto our street, and yesterday evening we caught some in our front yard.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!!!!!

This past week I finally got motivated to paint again.  So after prying open some linseed oil, paint thinner, and some (somewhat crusty) oil paint tubes, I’m back in the game.  Here is my progress thus far….it is a very (very) long way from becoming the final product.  It helps so much that Becca is letting me invade her studio space, and working on projects as well.  It’s like being back in school again!

This is London.

She came into my life on Friday, March 13th.  She has been with me through a lot in the past 9 months and I can’t imagine coming home and not having her here.  She has a personality unlike any other and trying to capture her moods has been my latest project.

I consider the above picture her seldom seen “Ewok” face.

Above is her “I may swat at you” face.

Thank you London for all the love, and I’m sorry I had to put you on a kitty diet.

So the fall has ended, along with my favorite time of the year.  Winter has officially begun, and I sit here writing this with 2 inches of snow falling outside my nice warm living room.  I have been terribly neglecting my blog with all the holiday craziness, starting a new job and having the flu for what seems like 6 weeks now.  However with the new job also came the new laptop I bought as a treat to myself!  It is amazing and I can actually create posts on here again without my computer catching on fire…hooray!  To get back into the swing of things I thought I would share some pictures from my Thanksgiving trip to my parents house.  It was a short, but amazing trip and I wish that I could go more often.

These are all little stolen moments with members of my family.  The light turned out very yellow, orange and red in these photos.  They almost seem too warm, but the light in these rooms, as well as the warm feeling they give, was exactly how it was in the moments they were taken.  The below photo is one of my favorites because it is of one of those looks that my parents give each other that makes me smile.

Thanksgiving ended quickly and Christmas snuck up on me as well.  Thanks to my family I got to go home for this holiday, when I didn’t think I would be able to.  I was too ill to even pick up my camera, but I hope they all know that if I could have documented every second of my trip I would have.  So I hope that everyone has as good a holiday season as I had a Christmas!

Thanks Jeanna, John and Gunnar for letting me share the day with you take your family portraits.

For the past couple of weeks I have taken hundreds of photographs of the many things going on in my life.  Below are all pictures from our hike at Oak Openings during peak last week.  Fall is my favorite season and no photograph can ever do it justice.

More pictures to come this week from the reception and as much Fall as I can possibly capture.

One of my younger sisters just became a freshman at Kent State University this fall.  I recently went to the campus to visit and got a refresher on the whole college world.  I miss the whole feeling of a new school year, the challenge of classes and being around academia in general.  The leaves were just beginning to change and it’s almost time for sweaters, scarves and the smell of pumpkins and cider.

I love the picture above, because it looks like the petrified books are turning the plants to stone as well.

Needless to say the campus was beautiful.

My little college student wasn’t as entertained by my constant photographing.

Neither was the black squirrel I had a stand-off with.

We also tracked down the memorial to the students who were killed there, as well as finding a bullet hole in a sculpture nearby.

My God Daughter Paige just turned 2 and the only way to celebrate is with massive amounts of sugar.  And fairy wings of course.

The fact that she kept the wings on during the whole party took all of us by surprise.

The cake was delicious, but oddly enough Paige liked to eat the fondant numbers that decorated it the most.  Needless to say, she was the only one who ate them.

After much cake, cookies and baby chasing, a nice nap was had by all.

This has been a week of very big decisions.  I decided to give applying to grad school a try.  The earliest I could get in is next fall, but even with that long time frame the thought is absolutely petrifying.  I think this is the next step for me, but making this step means leaving everything that I am comfortable with.  After an hour of watching the sunset at the river, I think I have finally come to terms with my choice.  I don’t think that any of these images can capture how absolutely peaceful it is at the river, but it is worth a shot.  So wish me luck, here it goes.

This past weekend we went to a lake in northern Michigan.  It was a very much needed trip.  We got to get away from the every day and completely relax.  Coffee on the dock, swimming, boating and only a slight sunburn!  The above image was taken at twilight, the clouds were still very bright while the color all around the lake faded, one of my favorite times of the day.

I also learned how to shoot a gun….while completely scary, it was also really exciting!  Below is a picture of the boys taking their turns shooting, I really like how you can see the smoke directly after it was fired.

We spent quite a bit of the weekend building fires and cooking on them.  It is so nice to do everything different than you have to day in and day out.  We got an amazing fire started right before a storm moved in over the lake.  The storm was so beautiful we didn’t mind the interruption of our fire.