Busy Sundays and my first "photo shoot"

Man, yesterday was crazy! We had a lot on our plate and managed to get it all finished, too.

Morning: Breakfast with the Olds extended family. Grandma Olds even flew in from New Hampshire. They were all together for a funeral, which is slightly more depressing, but they were TOGETHER. That family is more scattered than freckles on a sunburned redhead.

So we had breakfast. Then we went to my parents' ward. Then we went to my parents' house. Then Anthony was ordained an Elder (yay!).


That's three generations of Melchizedek Priesthood right there. Cool.

Then I had a mini photo shoot with Sara!

I think she's beautiful. We set up a photo shoot with a bunch of her friends so I can get more pictures for a "portfolio". Let's just leave that in quotes. :)

Then Nathan came in and let me take pictures of his handsome face.

Seriously, that boy's a stunner. But we're all kind of incomplete without our darling Max dog.


He's a good dog and we sure like him! Even Ester. She follows him around saying, "Dah! Dah! Dah! Dah!" and occasionally making, "Oof, oof!" noises. Peter caught her copying Max in this picture.

She's such a cutie and getting so big! Grandma and Grandpa Woodbury came over for Anthony's ordination, so we were able to get a picture of Ester, Grandma Fillmore, and Great-grandparents Woodbury. Sometimes it's really weird to me that Ester would see them as great-grandparents. Imagining my mom as a grandma isn't weird, though. Which I suppose... is weird. haha.


Then Amy and I made homemade chicken noodle soup. Mom made the noodles, but she had to leave, so we finished. Then we made oatmeal cake for Anthony's birthday (he's 18!). Then parents and Nathan got home and we ate said dinner and cake. Then I drove Amy up to Logan and Peter came and picked me up.

Needless to say, we were out of the house for a long, long time and came back pretty tired.

But while I was driving Amy up and Peter was giving us a head start (let's be real here, he gets places at least a half hour before I do), Peter was cleaning the house.

This is my "I love my husband" face. :) He made the bed (complete with folded-down comforter and sheets!), cleaned the sink, washed the mirror and did some other things he won't tell me. What an adorable man!!

The moral of this post is that I love being married and I particularly love being married to Peter. <3

Date to Timpanogos

This weekend, we drove up Timpanogos canyon and took some pictures. I like going on dates where the main objective is to take pictures. :)

Bella, no?

We saw some cute little critters! We drove up a crazy dirt road and saw some amazing mountain scenery:

Beautiful! I love the mountains. My brother-in-law is very careful in his pronunciation of that word.. it makes me smile. He says it mountain. None of this Utah soft-T thing, nosirree.

It kind of makes me sad when people carve their names into trees. It reminds me of Fern Gully every time I see one. Only not that specific clip. The "Can't you feel its pain?" part.

The name is Batty, the logic is erratic... :)

Here it is! Go to 8:20 or so and laugh with me.

Peter took this one and then started singing Lady Gaga.

He's on the edge of glory! The edge of glory also happens to be the edge of a river that is very, very cold. He slipped after a few minutes and his legs went super numb. And he was already wet, so why not get into the lake?

This is Silver Lake! I think it's probably 40 degrees in there. Brr. Obviously, I was not enticed to enter.


It was sure pretty, though! And then...... the raccoon!

As we're driving along, we see something on the edge of the road. We stopped the car when we saw it was a raccoon! And not a big raccoon, either -- it was a baby! I took a bazillion pictures and then it crawled out into the road. And under our car. I got out to try and scoot it away and it just crawled further under. It took a little bit, but we finally got him out. I was kind of worried about him not having a mom to teach him that cars are bad. But, what do you do?

Anyway. I'm going to go and finish the laundry and eat lunch. Also, watch more Avatar.

xo -- eo

Bokeh

Some of you have asked what bokeh is... so I'm going to show you!

Admittedly, I'm not an expert on this, so I'll send you to someone who actually knows what she's talking about first. :) Here's a really good explanation of bokeh and some amazing bokeh pictures. The Pioneer Woman is easily my favorite blogger ever.

Okay, so now for the inexpert explanation! Basically with a camera lens, there's a little hole that lets in the light. This is the aperture. The bigger you make the aperture, the fuzzier the background is. It lets you focus really well on your main subject and separates them from the stuff behind them (aka "depth of field"). So, basically, bokeh is just when the background fuzzes into beautiful little bubbles of color.

Like this!

This is bokeh by itself. Obviously, you wouldn't want to hang that up in your living room -- bokeh exists to showcase things, objects, foregrounds... otherwise it just kind of looks like you got the wrong glasses prescription.

All I did with these was manually adjust the focus on my lens. Twist until fuzzy, then click. If you have a point-and-shoot, you can achieve a similar effect by using the macro function, getting your camera to focus on something up close (hold the button down halfway until a green light appears) and then move the camera and look at something else before you click it. It basically does the same thing.

There's the same-ish picture in focus. The horse moved. Darn horse.

Obviously, that's a boring foreground.. but for the sake of bokeh, it's nice. See how the background isn't just fuzzy, it's almost bubbly? That's bokeh.

Again with the awful foreground (really should have picked something that was a different color than the background) but I LOVE the bokeh in this one! The light and the green played really nicely together.

Weird focus, but love the bokeh. Are you noticing how different colors make it look better? The more variation you have in the background (with light, of course) the more interesting the bokeh is.

Last grass bokeh, promise. I like how the bokeh isn't quite circular on parts of this. The lighter foreground on the darker background also makes the focus pop (haha, good job, self!). But, but, see how the bokeh isn't as intense in this one as in the last one? That's cause this one is directly in the sun, while in the previous one the sun was at a different angle. Lesson learned: move around a lot.

I go back and forth with this one. It isn't quite bokeh, but I like it anyway. Do you see how the flowers that are in "focus" (I know it's blurry) look further away from the fuzzy background? That's why we use the bigger aperture. Fuzziness and distance.

While the bokeh isn't as intense in this one, it still achieves the desired effect: puts the focus directly on the subject (in this case, the pretty purple flowers) and puts "distance" between the background and the foreground.

That, in a nutshell, is bokeh! Make more sense now?

Now go out and take pictures! Make bokeh! Then show them to me! (really, if you have bokeh pictures, I want to see them. We could start a facebook group for bokeh-addicts.)

xo -- eo

Camera

It's official: I have a camera.

Now if we only had a cat, it would be that much more entertaining!

Peter doesn't like cats. I can't say I particularly love them, either, but I want something in the house besides me. And him, when he's home.

We did have a fish... but it had a bad weekend. Kamikaze-like, it threw itself out of the bowl while we were out. We got home and the fish (who normally had beautiful, fanned-out fins) was on the carpet, dry as death, and his beautiful fins were all pointy. :( I am ashamed to admit that I had an urge to take a picture of it with my new camera. I resisted. Surely you are all grateful. Sure he was dead, we stared at him (and I felt sad) and then this happened.

FISH: *jumps out of bowl*
ME: *feeds fish* Wait. Where's the fish? FISH! YOU ARE DEAD!!! D:
FISH: *flops* *squeaks* I'm not dead!
PETER: This fish knows Monty Python!
ME: Quick, save it! Him!
FISH: *flops, tries to breathe* *fails as he is surrounded by carpet*
ME: Even though I really don't want you to die, touching almost-dead fish is just kind of gross.
FISH: Hello? Can't breathe here.
ME: Right, right. Into the tank you go!

Okay, so he didn't actually quote Monty Python. (shame, really..) But we did get him back into the tank where he lay on the pretty blue-and-white rocks and flopped occasionally. It was quite sad and more than a little traumatic for him (and me).

In the end, he died. And I consoled myself by crying a little tear and then taking my awesome camera and making bokeh with light. Yay bokeh!

(see teh bokeh?)

Then Peter, being the darling man that he is, took me out to a mountain and we took pictures! Aside from being ridiculously attractive, he also happens to have an EYE for photography. Seriously, peeps. It's kind of unfair.

MOUNTAIN: *is majestic*
ME: *snaps several shots* One out of seventeen actually looks like a mountain! Happeh!
PETER: Can I take one?
MOUNTAIN: *poses*

PETER: Eh, that was okay.
ME: *gapes*
PETER: Oh, look, flowers!
ME: There are flowers here?
FLOWERS: *pose for Peter*

ME: Maybe we should get you a camera!
PETER: Nah. What for?
ME: ....... Can we print some of these?