Sunday Stills Challenge - The Color Red

You wouldn't think it would be all that difficult to find something red to shoot pictures of, but this proved to be a bit of a challenge this week! Especially since I was determined not to pull from archives again!

I'm not super thrilled with the pictures I got, but they qualify so here goes.

First off we have our resident red head Sugar. I never realized she was the same color as the barn until I loaded these pictures.

Later that night when we were eating barbequed bratwurst on the porch, pretending it was summer already, I heard a plane flying over. I could tell it was a small plane and was watching the sky for it to clear the trees. When it finally did I realized it was RED! So here I am trying to grab my camera, turn it on, zoom in, find the blasted plane high in the sky when I am all zoomed in, try to get the stupid camera to focus enough to take a picture that you would actually be able to tell what the thing is, all with a brat in my other hand, trying not to drip mustard on the camera. With all that messing around I only had time to snap one picture before the plane went back behind the trees. It was interesting. Not a great pic, but it was funny and it's a very red plane so I have to post it.

Then I hit Home Depot and found these cute little flowers that completed my third project from last weekend. Before & After coming soon! They are kinda magenta/fuschia-ish, but that qualifies as a shade of red, right?

I also purchased some plants to go in my new "tropical paradise" office/craft room that I'm painting and decorating. I picked out some house plants that I thought looked tropical to stick in there and on the way home realized that this one was red and I could take pictures of it for Sunday Stills! Wohoo!

So there we have it. A few different shades of red for ya. Happy Easter!

Spring is here!

Or so I hear.



As jrosey said on her blog, I don't think Mother Nature has gotten the memo yet.

I took the camera outside last night to try to find some lines (this week's Sunday Stills challenge) since it wasn't raining at the moment. I didn't do so hot with the challenge, but I did end up finding some evidence that spring may indeed be on it's way.

The trees are coming back to life. The weeds are sneaking in. The grass is growing again. The birds are chirping. The boyfriend also mentioned that the frogs were noisy again. I love listening to frogs. To me they are the epitome of spring and summer and nice weather. They are also a great lullaby. I was really happy when we discovered we could hear frogs in the evenings after we bought our house last year. Life just wouldn't be the same for me without the sound of frogs at night.

This morning when I left the house I heard them for the first time this year. I had to take a moment to enjoy it. It put a smile on my face. And I could take a moment to pause on the deck this morning because, as my truck informed me, it was a balmy 45 degrees this morning. Never thought I'd be so happy to see 45 degrees! I didn't even crank on the heat when I got in my truck. It was weird.

I'm getting all excited to get outside and do some yard work. And no, I didn't imagine I'd ever in my lifetime utter those words. I might have to take a trip to the store this weekend to get some new gardening gloves and see what other fun things I can find to get me inspired. I've got a lot of work to do this year!

Sunday Stills Challenge - Self Portrait

This week's Sunday Stills Challenge is Self Portrait. I'm still a little up in the air about this one since I have not posted any real pics of myself on this blog yet. There are a couple pics that show my reflection, but that is it. It's kind of nice to maintain a certain amount of anonymity. But at the same time, it might be fun to open those flood gates. There are certainly plenty of pictures that I have thought about posting but didn't because there was someone in them.

On a side note: does that make me a bad mom since I consider my animals my children and freely post pictures of them every where?!?

Anyways, once I read what the challenge was this week the first thing I did was google "self portrait". I wanted to find a definition of it to see what I could do to still take the challenge, but not put a head shot up. Self portrait is defined as a picture of oneself taken by oneself. Well, that sounds like something I can work with. The only request in the challenge was that there wasn't a camera in front of your face and no pics from the archives. I guess it does imply that it should be a head shot, but it doesn't say that it needs to be a full on face shot.

Doing some more googling on self portrait tips, there were hints and tips for taking them, ways to make them interesting and then I found this interesting webpage. In reading thru it, I found the words I was looking for..."A self-portrait doesn't have to be of your face..." Yes! My get out of jail free card! :-)

So this week I've tried to get some interesting self portraits. I've tried some different ideas and this is what I've come up with...

I tried the shadow across the ground. Cheyanne was helping me take pictures so that lump by my leg is her.

Then I tried the barn wall.

Again, Cheyanne had to help me.

Then Mister decided to join the party too.

Then I convinced Midori to stop playing with the lens cap long enough to snap a pic...yep, that's me with the totally cheesy grin reflected in Midori's eye ball.

Then I tried doing just part of my face, zoomed in on my eye. I like it that you can see the trees and sun reflected in my eye on this one.

These were actually my first attempts at the self portrait when I was still debating whether or not to post an actual picture of myself. I decided eh, what the heck...

I just balanced the camera on the back of the couch, turned all the lights off in the house and used the flash and macro setting. The portrait setting wouldn't focus so close. Then I used the 2 second delay so I could get both my arms in the picture and voila!

There were plenty of pictures of me smiling, but for some reason I liked these serious ones better. No clue why.

So there we have it. I opened those flood gates. Not sure if I will continue to post pictures of me or not, but those are my self portraits.

A little late, but...

The boyfriend and I decided to more or less ignore V-day this year. It's amazing how much money you can save when you don't buy birthday, Christmas and v-day gifts for each other!

Even though I really, honestly would have been perfectly happy ignoring the whole thing, I am still a girl and I like to get flowers. Since v-day is pretty much the only time I get flowers from the boyfriend, and because of my addiction to macro shots, I did still request flowers for v-day. I couldn't help it. I've been dying for some flowers in the house to take pictures of and just haven't been able to justify buying them for myself.

So when I came home to this bouquet of flowers and a cute/cheesy card I had to smile. Partly because it was cute and I totally appreciated the thought, but mostly because it was a very pretty bouquet with lots of different, fun flowers and colors to take pictures of. I'm sure the boyfriend realized that's why I was so excited too.

I totally went to town taking pics of all the different flowers. I did some experimenting with different settings and lighting. I just plain had fun taking pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. The ones you see here are just a few of my faves.

Sun!

I was SO excited to wake up to sun yesterday morning!

It's been foggy and gray and gloomy around here all week, so Sunday morning when I woke up to a strange bright light in the sky, I could hardly wait to grab my camera and enjoy a bit of it.

Actually, I have to admit, I was a total camera nut yesterday. It's going to take me a while to go thru all of the pictures that I took, but here are a few from my first trip outside. In my jammies. Because I had to catch the early morning sun. Like I said...camera nut!



Unfortunately, with the clear skies came the cold. I don't like wearing gloves while I'm taking pictures, so my hands were pretty much popsicles by the time I came back in. At first I just went out in my slippers and a sweatshirt. That only lasted about 5 minutes.



I had tons of fun taking TONS of pictures though and it didn't take too long to defrost when I got back inside so it was a great day!



And I've discovered my new favorite thing...taking pictures of the sun. It's a bit of a challenge to get it to peek thru something just right for the picture, but boy did I have fun experimenting!

My Midori

While I was out taking pictures of the snow, Midori decided to come say hi. She's usually pretty camera shy, which is the one characteristic that I can surely tell you is not like her "mom" (me).





She let me take quite a few pics before she got completely bored of me. I credit the new camera. :-) I can't wait to take more pics of her when she's not a shaggy, hairy, soggy mess!





Speaking of a shaggy, hairy, soggy mess...here she is in all her glory. She is perfectly dry and warm under that blanket, believe me, I check. A lot. But still: barn is priority this summer!!!!!! We are pretty darn sick of the hair (and dreading shedding) and swear next year they are getting lights, heaters, heavy, heavy blankets, the whole 9 yards because they will not be hairy next year!!! Maybe.



Here she is with the sun behind her. She was drying off a bit.





Here she is trying to decide if I'm really important enough to come say hi to. Notice Sugar peeking at me under her neck. Sugar is a peeker. I rarely see her look up and over the fence, she always peeks thru it. She's funny like that.





Midori finally decided to walk over and see me and she was greeted with a big glop of melting snow from a tree above falling right on her head.

She still stayed and visited for a few minutes.

I love my pony. And I love horse's eyes. Can you tell? :-)

More snow!

We got more snow the other night. It was a complete surprise to me this time as the last forecast that I saw only included rain, rain and more rain. I wasn't terribly upset about it though since I had a long weekend ahead of me, no commuting required, and I didn't have anything better to do with my time then go out and take pictures with my new camera! I was particularly thrilled when I saw that there were also sunny blue skies. Wohoo!

So almost 200 pictures and very numb fingers and toes later, these are some of my favorites.

Chey had fun digging things up to play with. Crazy dog!

The ponies weren't so amused by the snow. They were actually pretty darn soggy.


This threw me for a loop. The snow was accumulated on the bottom of the rails... ??? How does that even work?

My new toy!

I decided that I needed a new camera. Sort of like I needed those Steve Madden platform, peep toe, white patent leather 4" heels. Though I did get them on a clearance rack.

Ok, ok...maybe it was more want then need. But I wanted a new camera in a bad, bad way. I wasn't lucky enough to find the camera on a clearance rack, but I don't regret a penny that I spent on it. I've already gotten hours of entertainment out of it, which is more then I can say for the heels.

This is my new camera... I think it's kind of hot. For a camera. It's the Nikon Coolpix P80. It's got 18x optical zoom. That's going to be fun! It's got lots more dials and buttons and settings to screw with then my last camera. Don't get me wrong, I still love my old camera and it'll probably still get carted every where with me just because it's small and fits conveniently in my purse, but this new camera makes me drool.

There were quite a few reasons that I chose this particular camera. One, after my other camera, I love Nikon's. They are great and this one still felt very familiar to me even with all the cool new options. Two, PW, or rather one of PW's contributors Ivoryhut, inspired me with what can be done with an advanced point and shoot. Hers is a Canon, but this Nikon is basically the equivalent and I'm biased. I also think it's a great way to dip my toes into the great sea of photography without spending too much money or being overwhelmed. I really think playing with this camera will help me learn all about aperture, shutter speeds, exposure and all that other crap and then I can see if I want to spend the dough to step up into an SLR. I think this one should keep me busy for a little while atleast.

I've already taken almost 300 pictures just screwing around. Since the Christmas tree is the most interesting thing in my house at the moment (and I'm still having fun with macro) that is what you get.

And just in case you're curious (and because I need something other then the Christmas tree to take pics of)(and because they are very cute and fun but hell to wear, so I need to show them off some how) here is a pic of the heels...