Thinking Warm Thoughts
- Mar 9, 2015
- 4 min read
Last Sunday I spent the afternoon modeling for my best photographer gal pal in the snow. Besides my hands getting cold and red after a while, I felt great - it was a warm 30 degrees (ha!) with steady flurries and no wind. I stood in her snow covered backyard for a while posing in wacky positions (her assignment was levitation) and all was fine...until I woke up the next day with a miserable chest cold that's been plaguing me for the past week. But at least it was worth it - see a few of her shots from our shoot in the snow under my Modeling Collaborations tab!
Since I've been sick I haven't been able to workout every day like I like to (I tried one day, did not go well - fish outta water status), so I had to think of something else to do besides re-watching Game of Thrones for twelve hours every day (not that that's ever a bad thing). So I decided to revisit the photos I took at the beach this past summer. I had never really got around to finishing editing them - my final semester of college started as soon as I got back from the beach, so I had new photo and graphic projects coming at me every week. When I looked through my portable hard drive I was pleased to see that I had saved all the raw files for the photos I took at the beach, so that I could edit some of them as HDRs using Photoshop's HDR editor. So, without further ado, here are the formerly forgotten photos from my summer 2014 trip to the Outer Banks!
To start out, here are some photos of my soulpuppy Dazey that I took on our first evening there:
Next meet this gummy little cutie:
These little buggers like to hang out on the hot tub cover (you have to be on constant alert so that you don't end up sitting in frog soup while you're trying to relax in the tub), and they hang out on the glass sliding doors by the lights of the beach houses to catch bugs at night. I always like to sit outside at night and cheer them on while I watch them take out bug after bug. I've looked them up and I'm pretty sure this little buddy is a green tree frog, but it could also be a squirrel tree frog.
Here's another odd creature:
I came across this monster mama one morning when I was going out to have an early morning mini shoot with myself by the pool at our beach house. It turned into kind of a traumatizing experience real fast. Besides the fact that she is huge and pretty scary, if you look closely you can see that her abdomen is covered in her tiny spider babies. But that wasn't the traumatizing part. I found her on a boogie board in the pool. I'm not sure how she got herself into that predicament, but it made for a difficult rescue situation. I was too afraid to try to fish her out myself, so I recruited my uncle who was watching me freak out from one of the house's upper decks. He tried lifting the boogie board out but mama freaked out and accidentally jumped ship, and we spent the next fifteen minutes frantically scooping baby spiders out of the pool. It was an upsetting situation, my heart hurt for this mama and her babies. I hope some of them survived to grow as big as monster mama someday.
Next we have these gems:
During the week my sister and I had three mini shoots. We did one on the beach in the evening, one on the beach at sunrise, and one by the pool. She modeled for me, and she also held the camera after I set it and snapped some photos of me that I later cropped and edited. I taught her how to adjust the focal points to focus properly, she was a pretty quick study. Most of her photos I edited at or after the beach, you can find them in the Natural Light section of my photography portfolio in the tabs above, but I came across these two the other day and I had to share them. She was spinning around and I was snapping away and just like that magic happens. A wonderful mid-tumble action shot, before seeing her planted in the sand. You're welcome, Chan!
The next two are from our sunrise shoot. The first one I edited as an HDR to help capture the colors in the sky.
The next three are from our evening beach shoot.
I had to take advantage of the pool and the early morning sunshine.
Finally, I have some photos of our trip to the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. It's a really cool lighthouse with an interesting history, and it holds a place in my heart. The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse is the tallest lighthouse in the nation, and it was actually moved from it's original location due to the encroaching ocean and the gradual migration of the Outer Banks. My family has been going to the Outer Banks since I was little, so I've climbed the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse several times before, but I was excited to bring my camera along this time. Just for fun, here are a couple of pictures I snapped, probably on my old LG Voyager, in 2009, last time I climbed the lighthouse:
And here are the photos I took this time around, which I edited as HDRs:
The view from the top is amazing. Each group climbing up can only stay at the top for around 10 minutes, and it's never long enough. I only had my prime lens on me since it was the easiest lens to carry up the 268 stairs in the 100+ degree lighthouse, but in retrospect I wish I would have had my zoom so that I could have captured more of the landscape and not have had to stand 100 yards away to get [most of] the lighthouse in the frame. But you get a taste of the view in these last three photos!
Well that's all for now. Visit the Natural Light and Other sections of my portfolio in the tabs above to see my older photos from this vacation, if you'd like! Thanks for taking the time to read! :)
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