Thanksgiving in East Texas

I always love driving five hours out to the middle of East Texas to spend time with my wonderful family. Cramming sixteen people into a small 3-bedroom house for three days was difficult, so I spent a lot of time outside. My week was filled with campfires, fishing, kayaking, and lots of food. It was great.  We had some pretty spectacular sunsets and sunrises, and you'll see that there was an American flag that was just begging to be photographed.

AMERICA.

My uncle and sweet little cousin out on the canoe

This next one takes some explaining. Exactly last year, I went out to the lake house and took a stab at photographing the stars. If you stalk my blog back far enough, you'll see that post (and see how badly I failed). Well, after learning quite a bit in the course of a year about ISO and whatnot, I decided to try it again. Voila! Of course, I still can't do star trails (plus I might have frozen to death had I tried), and you can see some lens flare from the annoyingly bright moon, but overall...I like it.

Nicole

I've never really had the opportunity to work indoors while doing a photoshoot. I always just go outside and use the natural sunlight to light my portraits. Well, one of my best friends, Nicole, wanted some pictures of a more serious quality, so I decided to see what I could do indoors.

Being an amateur, I don't have my own studio, or any good lighting equipment. I literally have a tripod and a remote to work with. Using some index cards, a tissue, a folding table and a house lamp, I finally got my makeshift "studio" how I wanted it to be.

And here are the results!
(Yes, the last two are the same, we just couldn't decide on B&W or color)

Self Portraiture

I've always been interested in this brand of photography- mainly because I don't really trust anyone else to take my picture and make me look good. Unlike many photographers, I am quite the opposite of "camera shy." I love having my picture taken.

The thing I love about self portraiture is that I can take my time to really portray who I am. I love to smile, I'm very silly, I laugh a lot, but I can still be serious.

Halfway through my shoot, I realized that "self portraiture" is just a really fancy name for a selfie. Except photographers usually aren't standing in bathrooms, making a duck face, or using cell phones as cameras.

Two hours and one wrecked room later...