a new start...

It has been a while since I've blogged.  It has been a while since I have done anything really creative, for that matter.

But I guess now that so much has happened in my life since I last blogged my trip to the Great Smokies in the Fall of 2015... so many experiences (the great, the bad, the ugly even), I feel I should make an effort to reflect on things, at least for myself, by keeping a journal of the things I find important in my life.

I can't wait to share more. Stay tuned while I gather my thoughts.

Stroll through the Great Smokies with my sister

E-Shoot! Rachel & Scott: April 14, 2012, Jackson, MS

Expecting! Maternity Shoot: Alla, August 2011

A couple of months after her wedding, Alla and I got together again to do her maternity shoot.  She was due soon so we had to act fast!

I was all nerves during the shoot - I've never done a maternity shoot before!!  But I think it went very well and it helped that Alla was so beautiful and comfortable in front of the camera and willing to try anything.  It was definitely a first for both of us and I'm hoping I'll get to do a lot more of these :) 

Here are some of my faves from that day.

Wedding! Sue + Tommy, August 2011

I got lucky with another great day for a wedding with another great couple.  Sue and Tommy were so in love and were super laid back together.  They had so much support and help from family and friends on their wedding day they didn't have to worry about a thing!  Tommy worked at the Freedom Run Winery and loved the barn there and so that's where the ceremony and reception were held.  I was thrilled about a winery/barn wedding and couldn't ask for a more rustic and beautiful backdrop!

The day started with Sue and the girls getting ready at her home.  It was quiet, laid back and stress free!  I loved it.

Here are a few of my favorites to help tell the story of their day :)

Alla + Dennis, June 2011

Though I was one of the invited guests, I got the chance to "second shoot" Alla & Dennis's wedding last year in June.  It was another beautiful day for a beautiful bride.  She and Dennis made such a cute and loving couple and they looked so happy together!!  My responsibilities and main focus were to capture Alla and her bridesmaids getting ready and the details which made up their day.  But I also got to tag along and capture other moments throughout the occasion! 

Meghana + Justin, May 2011: Part II

I am on a mission and as promised, I bring you Part II of Meghana & Justin's wedding from last year in May.

The day of Meghana & Justin's wedding was beautiful as can be.  The sun shone brightly, the sky was blue, the trees were full of green, and spring flowers were abloom.  She had her ceremony and reception at the Spaulding Lake Club in Clarence, New York - a ritzy little neighborhood nestled in a suburb of Buffalo, NY.  The Clubhouse was nice but the backdrop of the lake was very pretty!

The day started with Meghana getting ready.  Her mom and aunt helped with her hair and makeup for the Christian ceremony.

Meghana + Justin, May 2011: Part I

So this post is a bit overdue... well MUCH overdue - about a YEAR overdue!!  But, it's here now, so I hope you enjoy :)

To be quite honest, this was my very first wedding I ever did (well if you don't count the one I captured in Ukraine with a film camera of which I didn't keep the negatives).  I jumped at the chance to photograph my friend Meghana's wedding, though I was also so terrified at undertaking such a huge responsibility.  Looking back there were some things I could or should have done differently but one lives and learns from experiences, mistakes and taking risks... and one also has to start somewhere!

Even though the wedding happened a year ago, I still recall a lot of details about the event.  Meghana had a Mehndi party a couple of days before the wedding and I jumped at the chance to document the occasion.  I've never been to one but I was familiar with Henna.  She supplied henna for me and our friends in highschool and I've actually decorated my own hands with it and then saran wrapped them overnight!  I was really excited about seeing a skilled Mehndi artist decorate the bride before the big day so couldn't let the opportunity pass me by.

Some of my favorite images:

Meghana's sister applying henna to one of the girls.

Meghana getting hers professionally done.

Chickadees

We have a chickadee family in a bird house right on our kitchen windowsill!  I think there might be four or five little chicks in there and they are so incredibly cute!

Mom and Pops work hard every day to keep them well fed and make sure their nest is clean and tidy.  It's all so fascinating to watch them work so hard every day.  It will be a bittersweet when they all fly the coop... I hope I can capture some more images before then :)

Sneak Peak ♥ Robin & Ben ♥ Engagement

Albany, New York

As they always say, "Better late than never!"

Robert had a post-doc interview at Albany Medical College in Albany, NY around October 13th and I took the chance to accompany him to see a city I've never seen before.  Lucky for him, I drove all the six hours there so that he could catch up on his reading and review for the interview.

We arrived at the Hilton Garden Inn with an hour or so to spare before his dinner with his potential fellow post-docs.  I was planning to get comfortable at the hotel and do some research into what I wanted to do the next day while Robert was going to be at his day long interview, but shortly after Robert left, he called me and said I was invited to come to dinner, too :)  And so Robert and I and his potential fellow post-docs all went out to dinner.   I don't recall the name of the restaurant we went to, but it had an eclectic vibe and had an in-house brewery.  What I do recall is that I had French Onion soup - one of my favorite soups, ever - and it was very delicious.

The next day while Robert was on his day-long interview at Albany Medical College, I decided to tour a little bit of Albany's Empire State Plaza.  It was raining on and off and some very scary looking clouds were rolling in, but that didn't stop me.  

My first stop was the 42nd floor of the Corning Tower, where I got to see beautiful views of the city below, the Hudson River and the storm rolling in.

Random Animal & Bird Facts

I'm actually volunteering right now at Reinstein as I am typing this out.  I had work from 5am to 10am and then came in at 12:30 until 4 to volunteer.  Whew!  Long day!!

I'm reading Critters of New York: Pocket Guide and I've discovered some really interesting new facts.  I'm so excited about them that I just really wanted to share.  So in now particular order, here they are:

• A beaver can chew down hundreds of trees each year.  One family of beavers may consume as much as 2,000 lbs of bark in a single winter!
• A red fox can leap 15' in a single bound.
• A moose can store over 100 lbs of food in its stomach.  It has weak eyesight and has been known to mistake cars for potential mates.  Males attract females by making wallows (patches of muddy ground where they urinate).  Yuck!!
• Muskrats create a V-shaped wave as they swim and that's how you can distinguish them from other critters. 
• The Virginia Opossum has 50 teeth, more than any other land mammal on this continent.  (We humans have 32 teeth.) 
• The Northern Raccoon, contrary to popular belief, does not wash everything that it eats. 
• The Eastern Gray Squirrel can hide 25 nuts in an hour.  It usually finds 4 out of 5 of the nuts it buries.  They can smell a nut buried beneath 12" of snow.
• The Red Squirrel is very territorial and occupies a range of 2-5 acres.  It's also called fairydiddle, boomer, pine squirrel and chickaree. 
• The male and female Red-winged Blackbirds do not migrate together. 
• The Eastern Bluebird has tremendous eyesight and is capable of seeing an insect 100' away.  The bluebird will generally return to the same nesting site year after year if it is properly maintained.
• The Northern Cardinal is very territorial and has been known to attack its reflection in windows. 
• The Blue Jay is very aggressive and often scares other birds away from feeders.  It's a very bold bird and commonly taunts and mobs birds of prey such as hawks and owls.  It also raids the nests of other birds and eats their eggs and young. 
• The Common Loon has solid bones (unlike the bones of most birds which are hollow and lightweight), which helps it to dive to depths up to 150' in search for food.  A loon's legs are located so far back on its body that it has great difficulty walking on land so spends most of its time in the water.
• The Great Horned Owl can eat nearly 1,000 mice each year and is one of the few animals that will kill skunks. 
• The American Robin occasionally uses anting to rid itself of lice and other parasites.  It positions itself near an anthill and allows ants to crawl all over its body.  Robins must turn their heads from side to side to look at things because their eyes are placed far back on the sides of their heads. 
• The average lifespan of a Snapping Turtle is 30-40 years!

I hope you enjoyed these random tidbits of information :)

The Dog Days of Summer...

I'm not going to go into the commentary in any of these....... I just want to post up a compilation of photos that I've taken over the past couple of weeks of things we saw and did.

I hope you enjoy!

Charlie's Canoe and Allegany Adventure

So we decided to go on a little canoe adventure.  It was initially going to be just to two of us - Robert and I - but Charlie got to go, too.  Robert was fiercely resistant to the idea of Charlie going.  His reasons were #1: Charlie would be whining all the way there; #2: Charlie would be whining relentlessly in the canoe; #3: Charlie can't swim; and #4: Charlie would just be an overall pain in the A$$.

But, Charlie hardly whined on the way there, hardly whined in the canoe, he DID know how to swim and he wasn't as much of a pain in the butt as we had expected.  He was a good boy!




Beautiful blue skies with just the right amount of happy clouds :)

Fishing, Nature and Ducks!

Robert, my father-in-law Frank, and I went on a tiny little fishing expedition a couple of weeks ago.  It was during the week when NYS waived the fishing license requirement.  We were all looking forward to a "beautiful, warm, sunny day".  Satellite imagery showed not a single cloud in the sky.  However, we were met by ominous looking rain clouds, cold, gusty winds, and some fine drizzle.  Of course, all that unpredicted weather went away as soon as we left and it turned out to be a beautiful, warm, sunny day after all.

We didn't catch much on our expedition - just a couple of little perch - one of which swallowed the hook.  I wasn't expecting to have any fatalities...  but Frank told me that it was all part of fishing :(

I learned a very important lesson from Frank that day... I learned that "fishing is about a jerk on one end waiting for a jerk on the other."

Through the Fog

Robert and I debated a couple of choices for our Saturday early afternoon trip.  Choice one: a drive to the Tifft Nature Preserve, which we've been wanting to go to for a while; or choice two: an outing with our dog Charlie to the UB bike path.

We decided on Choice One, so off to Tifft we went.  It was really foggy when we got there and I thought it looked so amazing.  I'm not a morning person so I've never really been able to experience fog, but I got lucky this time in that it was rolling in around noon.  My kind of time frame :)  It was surreal walking through the fog... I felt like my eyesight was blurry or that my glasses weren't the correct prescription.  The fog completely subsided after about two hours and then it was nothing but sunshine.

We ended up spending at least four hours there... and yet didn't get to see ALL of the preserve.  We'll have to go back there again.  We saw so many different kinds of birds - many we have never seen before.

It felt so unreal at times that there we were, just south of Buffalo on a *relatively* tiny patch of land, and we were seeing things like the Indigo Bunting, the Yellow Warbler, the Blue Winged Teal, the Magnolia Warbler, a House Wren, the Eastern King-bird, the Common Yellowthroat, a couple of Ospreys, many Orioles, several different types of swallows, various sparrow species, and several other bird species that we haven't ever seen before.

It was a little sad leaving the preserve because we know we won't see many of those birds outside of it.

My post isn't complete without some photos.  Unfortunately I wasn't able to take any photos of any of the "exotic" birds we saw because of the limitation of my lens and because they were so swift!

















A female red-winged black bird.






House Wren.


 

It turned out to be a beautiful day and we were both in awe of the abundance of wildlife we got to see.  It was definitely worth our time and we look forward to going back there again :)

We still ended up taking Charlie out for his walk to the UB bike path after I got out of work on Sunday.  He was thrilled =)

So I finished the semester off with a BANG!  I had a heavy course-load of 19 credit hours - but my hard work paid off.  Five A's and two A-'s, so altogether a GPA of 3.88!  I'm quite pleased :)

Thanks for reading!

No More Teachers, No More Books!

Well at least for a few months ;)

My blogs are not complete without some photos, so I wanted to post some that I've taken this spring of things I find interesting, beautiful, or both!

Just some spring blooms...

I think of Dinosaurs when I think of ferns..

At the surface of the sun.  A bittersweet dandelion in my yard!

White columbines in my garden:

I think my neighbors think I'm crazy... always walking around with a camera and taken pictures of their trees and flowers.

My black tulips..

Baby grackle in my neighbor's forsythia bush!

Dancing daffodil!

Chipping sparrow.  A very common sparrow that has a distinct  "chip chip" song it makes.

Balancing act at Reinstein..

Sunbathing chipmunk.

I like the simplicity of this shot.  Actually, I was trying to capture the bokeh of the sparkling water behind these branches, but the bokeh was too bright and big.

I've heard cat birds all over at Reinstein all the time but never personally saw them.  I was quite happy to finally see one, even though it was trying its best to stay concealed.  Once the shrubs completely leaf I won't be able to see anything.

Snapping turtle - basking in the sun!  I think snapping turtles look so ancient..

This blue jay was eating a snake up in the tree!  It was really high up so I couldn't get a decent shot, but you can still make out part of the snake dangling from the branch.  The day we saw this blue jay, we saw many more... more than I've ever seen in one place at one time.

Thanks for reading!