Category Archives: photography
Our New Place
We’ve now been living in our house for about a week and a half, and have owned it for almost two weeks. It’s a little strange, still, but I’m happy to report that I haven’t accidentally driven to our old apartment after work, either. The much longer commute is wearing on me already, but I’m into my second audiobook, and that helps hugely.
We have so, so much to do. Dan came up with his ten boxes per night unpacking plan, but between him getting sick, stressful work days and random trips to see about Craigslist furniture (our first time, and oh, what an experience it was!) have all combined to mean that we really haven’t done that. But we are just about done in the kitchen, and the living room is functioning… so we’re getting there, just very slowly.
It’s crazy how very quiet and dark it gets at night. I keep having nightmares about forgetting to take the garbage can to the street. We finally swept out the crap the sellers left us in the garage enough to start parking Dan’s car there (because he gets home before me and leaves later, melodramatic sigh). Baby steps. A few boxes at a time.
I took these photos the day after we got the keys, as a way to really document how it looked when we moved in. We have so many ideas, and I can’t wait to start some projects and really get settled.
the living room, looking into the dining room
the awesome bay window in the living room
the entry way
going up to the 2nd floor (or down to the basement)
the second floor is so open
the dining room
the kitchen
our little deck
the garage
the master bedroom
walk in closets!
master bathroom
i love love love how open the second floor is
the second bedroom
the third bedroom
click each picture to see it bigger.
It’s just so big and so bright and so open. We both feel so lucky to be here.
Cape Cod 2013
When I was a kid, we went to Cape Cod almost every summer with the extended family. Aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents all stayed in this giant house. The weeks we’d spend there consist of some of my very favorite memories – learning how to shuffle cards, watching James Bond movies, sharing a room with my sister and older cousin (trading off whose turn it was to sleep in a sleeping bag between the two beds), buying penny candy, hours and hours at the beach. We stopped going sometime in the 1990s. I think it just got too difficult to coordinate once many of us cousins were in middle school and high school. But I think we all missed it.
My parents started going back a few years ago, right around the time my college friend Pete’s parents bought a house on the Cape. My parents have been renting that house every summer since. It’s a bit strange to restart yearly vacations in this way, picking up where you left off 15 years before. Last year, my extended family rented a big big house over Memorial Day, and I have a feeling that will become a new yearly tradition, too.
Cape Cod is one of those places that time doesn’t seem to really touch. So many of the things I remember from my childhood visits are still there. Vacations on the Cape are repetitive in the best nostalgic ways – there are just so many things we need to do each time we’re there, even if we just did it last summer. A cup of clam chowder at the Squire in Chatham, a new sweatshirt from Cuffy’s, fresh fish from the fish pier for dinner… it’s comforting to be able to continue all of these traditions, and to share them with Dan, now.
Dan and I don’t go every year (and now that the extended family is going in the Spring, going twice each summer is even harder), and we hadn’t been with my parents in August in a few years, so we made it a point to go for a long weekend this year. I’m so, so glad that we did. We both sorely needed a weekend away from everything, knowing how much things are going to explode with the new semester starting at work and that whole Buying A House Or Some Shit thing.
My photos from Cape Cod are sort of unoriginal, in that I know I’ve taken many of them before, but can’t seem to resist taking them again. In our brief 3+ day visit, we visited Chatham, took a tour at Cape Cod Brewing (so interesting! And they only distribute on the Cape!), watched lots of Red Sox games (arguably my dad’s favorite part), bought new sweatshirts, read a lot, and saw the ocean (even getting partial credit for #11 on my 33 before 33 list). It was pretty great.
Freelensing
My current favorite photo project this summer is Operation Photo Butt-Kick, which a few of us started together as a way to kick-start our photography creativity. There’s a new challenge every two weeks, and it has definitely gotten me and my camera out the door taking pictures again. Which is kind of the whole point. The current challenge is to find a photography (or photo-editing/processing) tutorial online and use it to take (or edit) a photo. I bookmark photo tutorials all the time, but almost never find a reason to actually use them, so I was really glad to see this one.
I ended up deciding to try out freelensing, based on two tutorials I found: one from Photojojo and another from B&H. (I also watched a few youtube videos.) I’d read about it once a long time ago and thought it was cool … but that’s as far as it got.
Basically, you detach your lens from the camera to achieve a tilt-shift (or lensbaby-ish) blur, or to get a really close-up macro shot. It’s tricksy, though, because the lens is, you know, detached, meaning that it can’t talk to the camera. I tried this out with two lenses – the 40mm pancake (because it’s my new favorite) and the 50mm (which is recommended in the tutorial).
my two control/test shots; 40mm on the left and 50mm on the right.
I found that the 40mm was reeeeally hard to manipulate and focus once it was off of the camera (duh) because it’s so small. It worked better if I got much, much closer to T-Rex. I also got better/more noticeable results if I tilted the lens farther away from the camera than I needed to later with the 50mm.
The 50mm has a longer focal length, and that was pretty apparent with this experiment. It also let in WAY more light, so almost every freelensed photo I took was really blown out, even adjusting the settings to try to compensate. I had to stay a little farther away, but got subtle effects with not a lot of tilt, and then some pretty wacky/over-exaggerated effects tilting it farther.
My camera’s live view mode was awesome for helping to focus, for sure. And I definitely should have done this with a setup that didn’t involve photographing something very small that was directly on the ground, because it meant sitting with my elbows on the concrete trying to balance, and hunching way over to get close enough. Don’t do that. I would love to try this in the recommended types of scenes – streets, cube farms, etc, but I also wanted to do this in the safety of a relatively static environment where I could take a ton of shots and mess around without getting caught. But all in all, this was a fun experiment. Will I use it all the time forever? Probably not. But I’m also glad I tried it.
Featured!
I submitted one of my favorite honeymoon photos to dsktps.com (one of my favorite sites for desktop wallpaper), and it was featured today. I’m pretty geeked about this, to say the least. 🙂
Summer Fridays
Summers at work are quiet, which means that Summer Fridays are nearly silent. And after so many weeks of oppressive humidity and daily thunderstorms, a gray morning with the windows open and a fresh, almost-cool feeling breeze blowing my papers around feels like heaven. Sure, it’s supposed to storm again later, and then the heat and oppressive humidity will return, but I’ll take cool, quiet moments these days.
I had to walk to a nearby office to pick up some paperwork this morning, and took a few photos while I was out. When I couldn’t decide which photo I liked best, I turned it into a series of my path through a Summer Friday. So here you’ve got our front steps, the crosswalk, the (much prettier) brick steps of the other office building, my office, making copies, the surprisingly lush front lawn, and our (very) well-worn porch. To give you a sense of the quiet, I have seen two people so far today (the lady at the other office and the FedEx guy). I’m only likely to see two more actual people this afternoon (the mail guy and the cleaning lady).
But it’s Friday, and weekends are the best. We’re going to celebrate a first birthday this weekend and get to see some friends we haven’t seen in way too long. And on Sunday, we’re going to go see some more houses. Next week is our birthday week (Dan’s on Thursday and mine on Sunday), and birthday week is never anything less than awesome.
I leave you with my current favorite song (which is resonating even more having read all the lyrics).
Have a good weekend, dudes.
Sneak Peek!
Guys. I am SO excited to share these photos with you. Our wedding photographers were Liesl and Randy from Photo Pink, and they were so amazing to work with. They kept us calm, took the stress out of getting the portraits we wanted, and just made everything so easy. We didn’t have to miss our cocktail hour, we didn’t tie up the bridal party half the day, and if these sneak peeks are any indication, they took some truly fantastic photos. I was so surprised to get some sneak peeks so soon, and I’m so, so jazzed already.
our first look
the whole bridal party – don’t they all look so awesome here?
just married!
outside the brewery
black chucks for him (a surprise – I had no idea he had this planned!) and glitter for me
they handed out tiny beers during the cocktail hour
our first dance, to “Just You & Me” by Chicago 🙂
one of the photos Liesl took along the railing, looking down on our loved ones. One of our favorite moments of the day. (also: bokeh!)
I secretly wanted to use a photo like this for our save the dates, so I’m SO glad Liesl got this one.
seriously. LOVE.
(All photos in this post were taken by Liesl and Randy from Photo Pink.)
Engagement Photos!
We had our engagement photo session in New York City with Liesl from Photo Pink back in November, and we were both SO nervous. (Or, okay. I was nervous, and Dan was not 100% looking forward to an afternoon of getting his picture taken.) We stopped at Stout for a few beers before we met up with Liesl near the High Line, and that really helped. (Should I not advertise the beers part? hehe). We were originally going to do this photo session on the boardwalk in Asbury Park (well-documented as one of my very favorite places EVER), but since we’d booked it for two weeks after Sandy hit, it really didn’t seem like the best idea. (I still haven’t been to the boardwalk and I’m kind of afraid to go to see what state it’s in now.)
I was afraid we’d look awkward, or feel awkward, or smile too big or not know how to stand or act. But Liesl was awesome at getting us to chill out; we laughed a LOT that day and I think the laughter and general happy comes through in the photos we’ve seen so far.
Liesl kept telling us to, you know, act like we were just chillin on a stoop in the West Village, and we’d giggle about how that’s totally what we normally do on a Saturday afternoon. But these photos look like us being ourselves which is the whole POINT.
I love them. I can’t wait to see more. I’m so excited for Photo Pink to be there on our wedding day, too.
Wedding Wednesday: My Bridal Shower!
I have to be honest: bridal showers aren’t always my favorite things, and when I first got engaged, my shower was probably on the list of things I was sort of dreading, rather than the things I was looking forward to. Showers just never seem very “me” somehow; the idea of being the center of attention, and people giving me so many gifts, and games and applause and hugs… it just seemed so overwhelming.
Planning my sister’s shower this spring really helped snap me out of that kind of thinking, though. Being the guest of honor at a shower is VERY different from being a guest at a shower. It was so hard for me to remember that instead of knowing a handful of people in attendance, at MY shower, the room would be full of ladies who I know well and love and WANT to be surrounded by. The center of attention part was a little overwhelming (you can see my face getting redder and redder as the photos progress!), but it was overwhelmingly GOOD to be in a room full of so many people I like so much.
I knew what day the shower would be on (December 1), and I had a guess as to the location, but that’s all I knew. Dan was remarkably silent on the topic, which is impressive given how much I tend to badger him when he’s trying to keep a secret. (It’s a lot. Sorry, Dan.) I knew what time we had to leave, but not how long it would be until we got there; that morning I was a wreck. When we got to the restaurant and rounded the corner, I caught the first glimpse of my sister’s pretty hair and okay, I was still pretty nervous and agitated… but I kept noticing who was there and thinking “aww, I’m so happy X is here!” with each face I saw. (There were a few very close friends and family members who weren’t able to come; this isn’t to say that I didn’t miss them and wish they were there – because they’re awesome, of course.)
I think one of the coolest things (even cooler because it was something I was anxious about ahead of time) was seeing how these people from different parts of my life interact with each other. Logically, if I think all of these people separately are awesome, and they think I’m awesome, why wouldn’t they ALSO get along with each other? And yet, when you’re talking about internet friends and Dan’s sisters and my sister and my cousins and former coworkers and college friends and wives and fiances of Dan’s friends who are now my friends… what if it was silent and awkward and each person only talked to the one other person in attendance they knew before? But I was – and still am – so, so jazzed to see them all at the self-described Cool Kids’ Table, laughing and breaking into the centerpieces for cheese balls and having an awesome time together. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy. Just like seeing Dan’s sisters and my sister get along. Worlds mashed together, people, and it was so cool.
The details of the day were also crafty and bright and simple – which is exactly how I’d describe myself anyway, so nice. They framed recent pictures of me and Dan (downloaded from my own flickr page, I might add, hehe), made a bunch of tissue paper flowers (like I made for our apartment; now I have way more!) But the coolest were the centerpieces. I think Lindsey said she got the idea from Martha Stewart – each centerpiece was a vase filled with a selection of my favorite snacks, tied with a bow, and then filled with a selection of super pretty flowers. As I said hello at each table, I couldn’t help saying “wait – is that centerpiece full of Swedish fish?!”. They color-coded them too: lemon heads, butterscotch candies, cheese balls, strawberry hard candies, mint m&ms (green), weird blue candy, skittles and Mike&Ikes for a rainbow…. so awesome.
It was such a happy day, and I loved seeing everyone together. I got some amazingly thoughtful gifts, and I just feel so lucky to have such awesome ladies in my life.
I couldn’t narrow down the photos I wanted to share, and this post is already novel-length, I’ve put a few more photos behind the jump. 🙂 Continue reading
Willpower
Dan and I have lived exactly 175 steps (I counted, obviously) from a homemade ice cream shop for over a year now… and we’ve only been there once. We may be the only people on earth who could resist ice cream for that long. The lactose intolerance on my part helps, but I don’t know what Dan’s secret is. Either way, we realized last week that we haven’t had ice cream all summer (!) so it was high time to fix that. So one night after he got home from softball, we took a walk.
We walked past the tow truck place, the auto glass place, and the strange lot with lots of trucks. Barbed wire and a cell tower sure make a pretty sunset even prettier, don’t they?
We were greeted by creepy paintings, neon window coverings, and the 50s satellite radio station.
There was also a walrus.
Dan got his very favorite: cherry vanilla. (How did I not know that was his favorite? These are things you should know about the person you’re marrying, aren’t they?)
And I get my favorite, which is soft vanilla in a waffle cone with rainbow sprinkles: the ice cream I hardly EVER get because when you’re driving to and from the ice cream store, you don’t get a cone. But when you’re walking, no problem!
We watched the sunset get prettier and prettier as we ate our ice cream, and it was such a classic summer evening thing to do. We probably should do this more often.
she likes stripes 