MomShots

Isn’t this a cute shot?  This is from when we drove out to the snow so the kids could play in the snow.  This is probably B’s first attempt at making a snowball.  Either she is making a snowball or getting ready to eat a huge mouthful of snow.  Both are very probable.

Really this post is not photography related.  It is a story from my life that I think is kind of funny.  I hope you will enjoy it and maybe get to know me a little better.    Read on…

I decided that I wanted to enter Shelle at BlokThoughts’ contest.  It is called Don’t You Hate it When and you tell stories about things that have happened to you and people (that means you) go vote on (for) it.  Previously I hadn’t any ideas of things to write about but then the snow has reminded me of a story that I think fits the Don’t You Hate it When boot.  

Here’s my story:

When Ben and I were engaged, we were living outside of Bellingham, WA.  I grew up in that area but Ben grew up in Southern California; Hesperia, California to be exact.  The High Desert.  Hotter than blazes in the summer and briskly cold in the winter, but not snow country.  I don’t think Ben had ever driven in the snow.  Ever.

So that winter it snowed.  It snowed a lot.  We had about a foot and a half of snow that fateful day. 

Now in some areas of the country when it snows, the roads are cleared with grand efficiency.  The snow is whisked off the road and this ice is swiftly dealt with.  Not so in Whatcom County.  Especially out on Gooseberry Point.  When the roads are covered in snow, they stay covered in snow for a good solid week until the one county operated snow plow can triangulate its way out into the boonies and sluggishly push the snow off the road.  

We get pretty adept at driving in the snow.  I had a bit of confidence in my snow driving abilities.  I loved my then-fiance’ but I didn’t have the same amount of confidence in his snow driving abilities as he had.  

One such snow covered day we found some reason why we had to risk the roads and drive into town.  The reason escapes me now, but I am sure it was a good one.  A very, very good one.

So Ben and I bundled up and excitedly got into his little white Toyota Tercel.  A car that had probably never seen a snowflake in its life since he borrowed it from his parents in SoCal.  We were ready for an adventure and a chance to spend some time together.  

As we slowly backed out of the driveway, I knew we were in for an adventure.  Ben kept saying, “it’s just like driving on sand.  It’s no big deal.”  

I kept screeching, “Be careful!  Watch out!  Go slower!”  

As we got into a slow grove, everything seemed to be going well.  Ben was having fun testing his limits.  I was enjoying the steady flow of adrenaline that was pumping into my bloodstream because my wonderful fiance was having fun testing his limits.  A fishtail here.  A half broodie there.  That sort of thing.  

That is until the road had an incredibly tight hairpin curve down a little hill.  We managed to inch our way down the hill’s crazy curve while somehow managing to avoid going into the ditch.

Now is the time when I should mention the ditches.  These aren’t your little city gutters or even a little foot deep hollowed out indention on the side of the road where a little road run-off might play.  These are 3 to 4 feet deep ravines on each side of the road that help to keep the swollen Nooksak river and Mount Baker’s melting snows from flooding the valley down below.  These could be considered major aquatic thoroughfares in some parts of the world.  These suckers are deep!

So we are now at the bottom of that little crooked hill and the road is relatively straight.  Ben is driving pretty well.  I am screeching at him pretty well.  We were a good team.  

He is still so excited about driving in the snow and he had not tested his limits far enough so he continued to swerve and skid around the snowy, icy road.  This straight stretch of road, with little traffic was too tempting for him as he gunned it and played around in his little white steel toboggan.

We were both laughing at this point and enjoying the winter beauty of the country.  That is until we slowly, ever so gently started sliding off the road and gracefully landed in the ditch; nose first.  

We mightily heaved our doors open and climbed out of the car.  Standing in knee deep snow we surveyed our predicament.  The back wheels of our car were not even touching the snow anymore.  The nose was buried in snow.  We were genuinely stuck.

Then a large, beat up, grey, kid-napper style van pulled up behind us.  He carefully stopped and got out of his vehicle.  Sauntering over to talk to us was a grungy, bundled up man with a beard and sandy colored hair poking out the bottom of his ‘Made in Nepal’ stocking cap.

As he walked up to us he started talking.  Maybe ranting, even.

“My friends all call me Alaska Joe.  I am such a good snow driver that they have all nicknamed me Alaska Joe.  When ever it snows, my phone rings off the hook because everyone wants Alaska Joe to drive them places.  Drive them to the store.  Drive them to town.  Drive them to their mothers.  Alaska Joe gets asked by everyone to drive them all over.  

Alaska Joe is such a good snow driver because he is careful and slow and doesn’t take risks.  I understand the snow and the snow understands me.  I am Alaska Joe! 

Now it looks like you need some help here.  You need someone to pull you out of that ditch there.  It looks like it would be a pretty easy job.  Just tie a rope onto your axel and pull you out.  No problem.  Alaska Joe could do that.

But I won’t.  

I saw you driving back there.  You were swerving all over the place.  You were going too fast.  You were not driving safely.  You were not being a good snow driver like Alaska Joe.

Alaska Joe could pull you out, but I won’t.”

Then Alaska Joe got back into his cruddy old van and slowly, very safely, drove off.  Leaving Ben and I next to our up-ended car with our mouths open and our jaws around our knees.  We didn’t know if we should be mad that he wouldn’t help us when he could have or if we should laugh because he was such a nut.

We chose mockery.  Good old fashioned, immature mockery.  We were strutting around with our chests puffed out saying, “I’m Alaska Joe.  I’m such a good snow driver but I won’t help you.  You’ve got a lesson to learn here.  I’m Alaska Joe.”  We laughed about that guy for a while.  His ranting.  His ability to switch from first person to third person in the middle of a sentence.  His general Alaska Joe-ness.  It was all hilarious.

Luckily for us some real neighborly fellows, in a big truck with a winch rolled by and kindly helped us out of the ditch.  No stories about their nicknames.  No chastisement about our snow driving.  Just nice guys who ended up helping out a couple of knuckle-headed kids in love. 

So Don’t You Hate it When you slide into a ditch and Alaska Joe gives you a lecture on how he is such a great snow driver and then tells you he that he could help you but won’t, then Alaska Joe gets in his van and drives off leaving you stranded in the cold? 

Well, if you made it through that long story, please go leave a comment for Shelle and tell her to pick my story, OK?  ;)

On a recent driving adventure with my sister in law and our two oldest children (I was driving in the snow so therefore it was an adventure), we stopped at a grocery store.  Katie, my SIL, went into the store while I stayed in the car with the kids.  B was sleeping but Uly was awake and starting to get restless.  So in an attempt to stay off the inevitable freak out session that would likely ensue, I pulled out my camera and told him to make funny faces.  

The light was very low and so I had my ISO boosted to about 800 and and my shutter speed was super slow too.  It was a fun experiment for both Uly and I.  He got to explore his funny face arsenal and I got to try to get a low light photo that wasn’t blurry without using my flash. 

After a bit, B woke up and joined in the fun too.  She was pretty sleepy still so her silly faces were mostly just sweet angelic expressions.

So I am thinking that there is a MomShots tip here somewhere.  Perhaps the tip is one that I have gone back to a few times and will probably continue to go back to: the camera doesn’t have to be a solitary observing activity; it can be an activity for the whole family.  I think MomShots are a chance for the whole family to enjoy the fun and unity that we enjoy, plus you get the added bonus of being able to document those fun moments.

Now go photograph some fun!  Make a silly face!  Encourage your kids to be wiggly and precocious!  Then get your camera out and snappa! snappa! snappa!!!

How about it?  Is this grandparent Christmas gift worthy?  

Really, I’m just kidding.  I was thinking about Anne’s post about the one’s that won’t make it to the Christmas card.

I am trying to get a photo of all three of my boys together looking happy and loving and wonderful for a Christmas gift for the grandparents.  This is one of my typical results.  Chaos.  Pure unadulterated chaos.

Obviously there are other issues besides the un-cooperation; framing and clothes would be a good idea.

At this point the Grands may be getting a montage of individual photos.  It is starting to look pretty grim!

Wasn’t that a cool post by Anne?!?  I had so much fun reading it and thinking about the ones that aren’t going to make it into the final running of my Christmas cards and photos.  Please share your Christmas or Holiday ideas with us.  Leave a comment and let us know what ideas you are pursueing, leave a link, whatever you feel comfortable with but please share.  

I, personally, am in much need of inspiration lately.  I have been going a million miles a minute for the past few weeks and not getting enough sleep.  Consequently my creative wells are feeling a bit low.  I enjoyed looking at the links Anne shared so much.  I hope to see what you are doing this year as well.

This leads me into our AWESOME Tip of the Week - I is for Inspiration.  I was so thrilled to read Tye’s latest creation that I could hardly contain myself.  What a great Tip!!!!  Like I said above, I have been feeling a bit brain dead lately and so these ideas and thoughts about Inspiration are like a breath of fresh air.  I really am looking forward to checking out the links that Tye provided and coming up with some new ideas too! 

And finally, because Momshots is all about photographing our children, I have to share with you just how sweet my 4 year old is.  He is learning to read and write and this morning he wrote this special birthday note to me:

If you can’t read it, it says, “I love (heart) mom”  He’s such a sweetie!

Before I go, I just want to beg you to share your Christmas ideas with us.  Spread the inspiration around and we can all benefit.

I should at least login and say, “Hi”…  I have been missing you all a lot but have been burried in all the going ons of our move and trip to California.  We officially moved in on Tuesday the 2nd.  This was a totally exhausting move as we had to move on a weekday and so didn’t have any help except for my wonderful brother in law after he got off work for the day.  He saved the day when we were exhausted beyond belief!  My two oldest kids actually helped much more than I thought would have been possible.  I never knew how much work a three year old and a four year old could do.  They were great.

The bottom line is that we have too much stuff…

But our house is really cool.  We have this incredible view of Utah Valley and Utah Lake.  Plus, our house is shaped like an octagon so that makes it even cooler!  We are excited to be here.  

I realized last night that this is the first house I have ever lived in that had a family room.  I feel so decadent - a living room AND a family room!  It’s nice to be able to stretch out and be able to find places for all of our junk!  Or at least that’s my plan.  We still have boxes everywhere.

So our trip to California for Thanksgiving was great.  We had a wonderful time.  I had a blast taking a ton of pictures and am now trying to find time to go through and edit some of the good ones.  

I was excited to do a little photoshoot of my new niece, but we didn’t have time.  We only got to see her when we were having big family get together time so it didn’t really fit in.  I am a little bummed about that but did manage to get a few snapshots. This is one of the three of them. I was one of many people snapping away so it isn’t the best angle. Oh well; I’m happy I got at least one of them!

I tried to get all creative on Thanksgiving night.  We have a tradition to go bowling in the evening and so I had my camera out and was snapping away.  I got these two shots that I love.  One is more snapshotty but I really like it.  I think it really shows Gar’s emotion well.

However I did get a chance to do a bunch of maternity shots of my sister in law, Trena.  It was the first day of her third trimester.  It is fun that we got a chance to document that with our shots.  I think we got a few good ones.  She is such a beauty and a fantastic model too.  We took some shots at my mother in law’s house and then we went down the street to a shopping center where they had a whole bunch of different colored walls.  The walls all made for interesting backgrounds and came out nicely.  

Oh, by the way I just want to reiterate how much I L-O-V-E this little nifty 50 lens.  It rocks.  I love the depth of field.  I love the quick focusing (when used with the D100), I love the large aperture and I love how much fun I am having playing with it!  I know a lot of you can relate.  If you are trying to decide if you should buy one, I whole heartedly recommend it!!!

I still am a gimp when it comes to using it on the D40x.  I am not so good with manually focusing.  Back in my day of using my manual film SLR, my lens had a little thing that you had to match up and then you would know if it was in focus.  This lens doesn’t have any indicator (because it is not primarily designed for manual focus, me thinks) so I am constantly guessing if it is in focus.

It would probably help if I got surgery on my eyes or would wear my contacts, but I don’t.  So it’s a big guessing game.  

Well…  Sorry to abandon you all for so long.  I am back in the saddle (or at least trying to be).  I will post up the “I” tip of the week, hopefully today but don’t hold your breathe.  It maybe tomorrow…  I will be back soon with more posts and some holiday related tips.

Have a great day!

Last night I was so inspired I couldn’t sleep. I laid in bed trying to will myself to sleep while my uncooperative brain kept running around like an over active 4 year old.

Earlier that evening I spent some time cruising the Internet. I was looking at galleries and portfolios of professional photographers. I was specifically looking at baby and maternity shots with some older children thrown in just for good measure.

You see, we are going to visit our family in Southern California for Thanksgiving and we have recently had a new member addition and another to be born in early 2009. I really want to try my hand at both photographing babies and pregos. I was looking at all these sites to get ideas of shots I could emulate and props I could use. I am hoping that I can produce something that looks halfway professional.

I’m planning on bringing both the D100 and the D40x. I decided on using the D100 with the 50mm lens because then I can use the auto focus feature. My eyes play tricks on me and when I think it is in focus it isn’t. Then I also plan on using the D40x with the kit 18-55mm lens so I can utilize the zooming features. Plus that lens will auto focus with that camera. I was thinking that I had better be using auto focus because I don’t want to have to reshoot the same shot over and over and over and over and over again while I’m trying to find my focus. Anyway… just some thoughts about that.

So the new baby is a girl, which is totally fun for me. I’m the mom of three boys so I don’t get a lot of sugar and spice photos. I get a lot more frogs and puppy dog tails kind of photos. That’s kind of where my mind is most often so it is really fun to think outside of my self-imposed box. So I’ve got a piece of pink textured faux fur, a hunk of black fleece and a cream colored sheep skin in my mental prop arsenal so far. I’ve also got a basket. So those are a few of the things I’m thinking about bringing with me… I am sure her mom (on the left) will want some pictures taken with this tutu wearing sock monkey (made by her sister on the right) as well…

Suggestions for props or sites to be inspired from are MOST welcome!

Well, back to our regularly scheduled Tip of the Week. We’ve got a great Tip for you today and I really hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Tye really makes a good point, but I won’t spoil it for you. Read it for yourself and give it some thought.

I hope you have a great day. I’m having a lot of thoughts running through my head that I want to share with you but I think I’d better save those for another day. I’ll leave you with a Momshot I took of Gar last Friday. We went up to a ranger station and got a tag for a Christmas tree - this is a ticket that lets you go out into the National Forest and cut down your own tree. We went for a walk in the snow and I took a few shots of the kiddos.

I feel like today is Christmas.  Except it isn’t cold, I don’t have to cook a whole bunch and nobody else got presents…  Why?  If you didn’t guess why from the title of this post, it is because I got a new camera today.  Well, it’s not new new, but new enough and new to me.  We have a friend who bought my current dream camera (a Nikon D90) and generously sold his old Nikon D40x to us for a song.  While I am still saving my pennies for that future D90, I’m going to go hog wild using this great little D40x!  That’s right HOG wild.  Oink!  Oink!

Right now the battery is charging and I am watching carefully for the charge light to go off.  Who knows what might happen if I don’t watch it?  Who knows…  So I am watching carefully.  Actually, I’m not.  I’m sharing my exciting news with you.  Then the second I finish this post, I am going to immerse myself in the user manual and see what this little camera can do.  

It is little.  I feel like it is so little.  It’s just so cute.  I put my old lens on it and the old lens weighs more than the camera.  The new lens is going to be so much fun to play with too.  It is 18mm to 55mm so I get to experience a whole new layer of photography since my old lens is a fixed 60mm.  I get to play around with zooming.  Watch me zooooommmm!!!!

Ok, I think I’m getting a little silly here.  I am going to leave you with a photo I took of my neice, Cora.  It has nothing to do with this post except that it was taken with a camera…

So enjoy your day, my friends.  I am going to be quite click happy for the rest of the day!  I will get back to you soon to let you know my thoughts on all the cool new features I have access to on this new little camera.

I love the early mornings.  Mornings always make me feel like the day is full of wonder and anything can happen.  I start thinking about fun stuff to do with my kids, photos to take,  things to make, where to go…  the list goes on.  We have been making Halloween decorations and today we are going to make a ghost garland.  Autumn is in the air!

This really isn’t a Fall photo shoot, it is just one I did last week. Ben, my husband, needed some photos for a website he’s working on.  So he gave me an assignment - to put Gar shirtless and in overalls and take some photos of him doing things that could be done in the 1920’s - things that aren’t dated.  I got some pretty good shots, but I need to reshoot because now I have more information.  I shot most of my photos in portrait orientation and he needs them to be in landscape orientation.  It was really fun to just take photos of Gar.  He did so well at following my instructions.  It was really hard to get him to look at me and smile but he still did fantastic.  It was kind of a special time for us.  Just mom and Gar time.  He ended up being my special little buddy all day.  It was really fun!

I think this week, I am going to focus on getting some Autumn photos of my kids.  Bundle them up and take them for a walk up one of the stunning Wasatch Mountain canyons.  We’ll see what we can create.

What does this week have in store for you?  Any photo ops coming up?  Any fun things coming your way?  Have you taken any Autumn photos yet?  How did they turn out?  Where did you take them?  I want to know the whole scoop!

Hopefully.

I have had a couple of crazy weeks.  A few days after we got home from Moab, my parents came to visit.  We had a great time and got all domestic.  We canned a box of peaches and made soup base from about a million tomatoes.  We tried a new BBQ restaurant in my neighborhood (It was super yummy so if you are ever in the Springville, UT area and are hankerin’ for some meat, try Charlie Boy’s.  Pretty good Carolina BBQ)  and we spent a lot of time visiting.  

Part of the craziness I was feeling was because Ben, my husband, went to Santa Fe with my cousin’s husband, Ben McPherson.  Ben M. is an awesome painter and had a gallery exhibition at The Blue Rain Gallery.  My Ben went with him to help transport his paintings, offer moral support and (here I think is the real reason) so they could hang out.  You put those two in a room together and they don’t ever stop talking.  They are always working on some kind of project and are currently working on a really cool screenplay.  

The show was a success and they made it home safe and sound.  It’s nice to have my hubby home.  He’s my rock.  

We went for a Sunday drive yesterday afternoon.  We saw beautiful foliage putting on their Autumn colors.  We saw turbulent clouds, vivid blue skies and smiling faces.  We found a really cool little park in a planned community that seems have felt the recession and doesn’t look like the houses are being currently built.  There are some really good sledding hills in that area so we will be back when sledding season is on.  We call it the Secret Park.  My little guys loved it.

So I have been thinking about some Momshot stuff lately.  I haven’t really been posting much lately.  A lot has been going on in my life but I still need to take a minute and share my new photographic discoveries with you.  I have some ideas for posts and I suppose instead of just thinking about them I should just type them up!  I will make you a promise.  I will do better.

Oh, before I go, I wanted to mention something about the photos in this post.  The one in the top left is my favorite.  The reason is because Uly was trying out his new “Sponge” smile.  He said, “Mom, do you want to see my Sponge smile?”  Of course I said yes!.  He then proceeded to show me that cute smile and various renditions of it.  If you look closely and use copious amounts of imagination, you can see a resemblance between Uly and Spongebob Squarepants.  I love that he is experimenting with that kind of thing.  I think it is adorable and very fun!

I am finally getting my act together and have created a Technorati account.  I know, I’m slow…

Any Technorati love you’d like to show Momshots would be greatly appreciated.  Just click on the link in the upper right corner. Or here  Anyone can do it.  You don’t have to have a Technorati account.  

Just click.  

Easy.

Do it now (please).