day 203 : finally!!

day 203: I've been working on this model for over 2 months. No... not two months in a row... but I built the first piece of this model on my first day in the office and then it went on hold. I'm so glad that it's finally finished! On a side note, this weekend is our 1st wedding anniversary (yay!) and we're going on a much needed weekend getaway trip. We're not bringing along any means of blogging or emailing but don't worry... I'll have my camera and the photos will go up when we get back on Monday.

day 202 : surrender

day 202: Last night I tried in vain to make this be the first time that I had a model deadline that I didn't need to stay late to finish it. Sadly I am WAY too much of a perfectionist when it comes to my models and I don't have a speedy way of working. It's slow and careful all along and at 12:30am I through in the towel. Yes... I gave up. The model won. I decided I'd work better on a couple of hours of sleep (insert flashbacks to architecture school charrette here) so I went home and came back early this morning to finish. Maybe next time I'll win.

day 201 : shameless rip-off

day 201: Since the moon was still so bright and clear tonight and I was still in awe of Erika's awesome moon photo (found here on her blog) I decided to go out and try to take a nice moon shot. Sadly I don't have her 300 mm lens, but this is about as good as I could get out of my zoomiest lens :) Thanks for the tips Erika!

day 200!!!

day 200! I can't believe it's already been 200 days of photo-rific goodness! To celebrate Ben and I headed out to the grocery store to try to come up with as many ways as possible to spell out the number 200. Zeros were quite easy to find but the 2 was always the hard part. Here are three of my favorites... feel free to leave me a comment and let me know which one you like best.

day 199 : nap time

day 199 : Lately between all of the projects I have going on it seems like it's been hard to find enough time to get a decent night's sleep. I think it finally caught up with me this afternoon and I immediately fell asleep for a couple of hours as soon as I got home from work. I'm glad that I have a nice relaxing work-free weekend coming up to recharge!

day 198 : when in doubt

day 198: Yesterday evening we met up with my mom, sister, and grandma at my aunt and uncle's house in Orange County. We wanted to do something earlier in the day as well and it seems that every time we're looking for something to do around there we end up at Disneyland. We only had a couple of hours to spend so we only made it onto two rides, but it's all about the company anyways :)

day 197 : my computer is a robot

day 197: I sadly spent the majority of my Saturday at my computer desk. With work being so crazy busy during the week... the weekend is my only chance to catch up on my photo editing. This weekend I finished editing one of my recent weddings (yay!) and now will let my trusty computer chug away at FTPing all the images to my proofing website overnight. Yay for tasks that the computer can do on its own :)

day 196 : downpour

day 196: It's been months since our part of town got any rain but this evening we got a good old fashioned downpour, complete with lightning and thunder. It is so refreshing to smell the rain... if I could bottle the smell and broadcast it through my blog I would, but for now this photo will have to do. I hope the rain sticks around tomorrow.

day 195 : trip to the beach

day 195: What's a better way to spend the evening after a long day of working than heading out to the beach? We of course had to bring along our new flip video camera and my canon as well. Being the mature adults that we are, we mostly chased each other around the beach with cameras. Here are a couple of test videos. They are much higher quality on my screen but for some reason they get pixelated when I embed them on youtube. I'm working on figuring out how to fix that :)

day 194 : catching up

day 194: I've been spending the week trying to get caught up on all of my photo editing and haven't had much time to go out and shoot interesting things on my free time. I'm hoping to go out this weekend and take some fun photos. In the meantime... here's another image from the "things in our house" genre. As a side note, I've had some people asking how my leg is doing (thanks) it's much better in terms of how it feels, but it's looking more gross every day. I didn't want to make everyone look at another photo... but if you're curious to see what I mean you can click here.

day 193 : flip!

day 193: This evening Ben and I went on a quest to find and buy a flip video camcorder. We really don't think we have any use for a big clunky camcorder (especially since I'm always carrying around my big clunky slr) so we decided to buy one of these super cheap and super fun flash memory video recorders. I'm so excited to use it on our trip to France next month... it will be fabulous I'm sure. Ben was quite excited when we finally got one.

day 192 : i told you i'm a klutz!

day 192: So if you read yesterday's post you saw that I was photographing a fundraising walk and had an accident that left me with a massive bruise. Well today it turned some lovely shades of purple and blue so I thought I should share. Sorry if this grosses you out :)
And yes... it does hurt. A lot. I've been hobbling around all day looking quite ridiculous but it's probably the most painful thing I've done to myself in years. And quite embarrassing as well!

day 191 : avon walk

day 191: Both yesterday and today I had the pleasure of working as a volunteer photographer at the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer in Long Beach. It was an amazing experience and it feels good to get out and volunteer... and I have never seen so much pink in one place in my entire life! Unfortunately I'm super clumsy and had an accident at the end of the afternoon that left me with a massive bruise and caused me to spend the rest of the day with my leg propped up on the couch with an ice pack. Luckily for me Ben was sweet enough to go out and get dinner and some beautiful sunflowers for me while I rested. I couldn't resist the sunset light and the flowers... so today's a two photo day!

day 190 : boat wedding

day 190: On Saturday I shot a wedding with my friends Crissy and Rowena that took place at the Ritz Carlton and with a reception on a yacht! Talk about fancy! I have a lot of fun shots from the wedding but this is one of my favorites. Not your standard bouquet shot (or portrait for that matter) but for some reason it's one of my favorites!

day 189 : the rush is over! (for now)

day 189: For those of you that don't know, in addition to photography I spend my days building little teeny tiny scale models for an architecture firm. It's quite hard work (so very tiny, this model is a total of about 2 inches tall at its highest point) and for the the last couple of days I've been in a bit of a deadline crunch to get this last one shipped out to New York. It went out the door at 5:00 this afternoon and I'm quite excited to have a weekend to recover... until the next model comes along :)

day 188 : new toy!

day 188: This evening while I was still at work Ben ran out and got me a new lens I've had my eye on for a while. The Canon 50 1.8 I picked up is truly a toy with its lightweight plastic construction and super low price, but I still think it's going to take some amazing shots. For you photographers out there, yes, I know that the 1.4 is better but at 3 times the price it wasn't something we wanted to do for now. Plus this one can definitely throw the background out of focus and the 1.8 aperture is still a heck of a lot better than the 2.8 on my 50mm macro. I'm excited to start playing with it at a wedding I'm shooting with Crissy this weekend!

day 187 : guest photographer

day 187: The guest photographer for this post is the fotocabina photobooth, which was set up at the party we headed out to on Wednesday night. It was crazy crowded with about a million photographers, but luckily we found a cool booth in the back with a nice breeze and near to the photobooth so people came to us to say hi, instead of us wading through the masses. Definitely the way to go :) In this shot with me are David Baxter (upper left) Bob Davis (lower left, and yes, he shot Eva Longoria's wedding, haha!) Crissy (center) and Michael Norwood (lower right).

day 186 : photographer invasion

day 186: This week in LA pictage held it's partnercon event which brought in lots of awesome photographers from around the country. I'm not a pictage user so I didn't attend the conference, but I did manage to get in on a lot of the fun un-official events, and even hosted some people at our house for dinner Tuesday night. After dinner we headed out to the hotel where most of the conference goers were staying and met up with some people for drinks. This photos is of one of the awesome photographers I met this week, Christine Farah, who strangely enough lives just down the street from us! I'm so excited we finally met... I love meeting other photographers in my neighborhood!

day 185: i'm alive!!

day 185: Yes, I know I've been absent from my blog for the last couple of days... so sad! It's been a combination of a lot of things... a big deadline on a model I'm working on, combined with a lot of super fun photo-related events and happenings. I'm going to get all caught up tonight and hopefully stay on schedule from now on (at least for the most part!) I do have another crazy busy weekend coming up but I should be able to find time to get my blog posts up.

day 184 : the chop

day 184: I always love a good short hair cut and it's been a while since I've gone for a drastic change. In highschool I cut all of my hair off to a pixie cut and dyed it red. While I didn't go quite that far this time, I did get about 5 or 6 inches chopped off this afternoon. I think I was bored. Sorry for the weird face. I always look strange when I take my own photo.

day 183 : ring shot

day 183 : Today I had the pleasure of second shooting a wedding up in the valley. I am exhausted from a very fun and long day. I'm going to post more photos on my wedding and portrait blog tomorrow but for now here's one of my favorites... the ring shot!

day 182 : don't get crabby

day 182: This little guy was in a tank next to our table at dinner tonight and I thought he was hilarious so I had to take a quick shot of him.

day 181 : home cookin'

day 181: When life gets crazy sometimes we don't have time to cook at home as much as I'd like to. To go along with my yoga kick lately we've been eating a lot more healthy food which means more cooking.. like this tasty veggies and tofu with homemade peanut sauce. mmmmm

day 180 : child's pose

day 180: I've been doing a lot of yoga lately... this is my 4th week of attending at least 3 classes per week and I have to say I'm feeling fabulous! I'm so much more flexible and relaxed already and I've only just begun! One of my favorite relaxing poses is child's pose... I had a hard time trying to take a photo of myself doing yoga... it was quite tricky to get positioned correctly... but here's my best attempt. I guess this can double as my belated August self-portrait.

day 179 : whew! all caught up!

day 179: I really hate being behind on my blogging! Ben and I spent all evening hooking up and installing/tuning up my new computer and transfering files over from my old machine. It actually wasn't quite as bad as I'd feared it might be and now I'm almost all set up! Even though it's not as hot here as it was in Palm Springs, I think it's still a little too hot for Rita. She was laying upside down in front of the fan all evening.

day 178 : tramway

day 178: On Sunday we had a little bit more time in Palm Springs, but because it was so hot we really weren't up for much outdoor activity. Luckily mom came up with the great idea to take the aerial tram to the top of the mountains. It was a good 40 degrees cooler up there and what a view!

day 177 : christmas in september!

day 177: My old computer was the laptop that I bought in college and it was definitely on its last legs. It had crashed and been reformatted about 4 times, so it was definitely time for an upgrade! We took advantage of the long weekend to do some research and finally go get me the computer I've been dreaming of :) Look at the beautiful monitor!

day 176: the big event!

day 176: On Saturday it was the biggest rush and craziest day of them all. Ben and I got up at the crack of dawn (ok 630, but that's pretty darn early for us!) to head out to photograph the getting ready shots at the wedding... and we didn't quit until after 10pm. Then we hopped in the car to head out for our Palm Springs weekend.

day 175 : rehearsal time

day 175: Sorry these are all coming at you a couple of days late... this weekend was full of crazy busy days and very little internet access. This first shot is from Lizette & Riley's wedding rehearsal which was held right as the sun started to go down and color the sky a beautiful shade of pre-sunset blue.