It's a bird...It's a plane...It's....

   Super Dog?

Happy Friday!!

   Today was such a beautiful day. It was the kind of day that makes you want to go find a hammock and a good book. Or lay out in the grass just because the sun feels so good. Or make flower necklaces, which is what I did. The hammock idea was really tempting though.
 

   Spring is one of my favorite times, when the flowers bloom and the trees bud and turn green again. It also makes me want to take pictures. Here are some more that I took today:

I love these buds when they start to open.

I also happen to have the best dog in the whole world.

Her name is Lucy. Get it...I love Lucy. I randomly give her extra names like "Lucy Lou" and "Lucy Goosey". Happily, she loves me anyway.

Here she is posing as Lazy Lucy. That's her sidekick, Snow, that looks like some kind of washed out monster in the background.

Photo-shoot

   I know I've been away a while, but I'm back now. I haven't quite caught on to this whole blogging thing. It's hard!
 
   The trip to Arizona was great. We really appreciated my great Aunt and Uncle opening their home and letting us stay with them. Not only that, but they carted us all over Arizona and showed us all the cool things there were to see. We all had a lot of fun, but I've got to admit: I was really happy to get on that plane coming home!

 
   On a very different note, I finally mustered up the courage to ask someone to let me take their picture. The amazing part is that he said yes! Even more amazing is the fact that I didn't chicken out at the last minute{although I really, really wanted to}.

   Chris and I met before class and took a few pictures. He was a very good model and thankfully didn't tell me something along the lines of "don't quit your day job". Especially since I don't have one to quit. He really was a great model and seemed totally natural in front of the camera.

   Thanks Chris. You did great!

Cactus Land

  
   I've been told that it hardly ever rains here in Arizona, but for some reason it has hardly stopped since we got here on Saturday. Today, it finally cleared enough for us to do a little sight seeing. We drove around some and I got my major impression of Arizona : CACTUS. There are cactuses everywhere! I'm not sure there's anything else to see. There are so many different varieties, too.

   I can tell you one thing for sure: I sure wouldn't want to meet up with this guy in a dark alley all alone. At all for that matter.

   My aunt described the many cactuses well when she said, "It's a forest of a different kind." On some of the mountains and hillsides it truly does look like a forest of cactus. It has a beauty totally it's own.

  

Exploring

   Hey ya'll. I'm back. I really never left, it just seems like I did because I haven't blogged in so long. That actually wasn't totally my fault either. For some reason, our internet connection has been awful the past few days.

   A few days ago I was having major camera withdrawals, so I grabbed my camera and set off to "make" some pictures. I wandered around for a while, took a few pictures {okay, so quite  a few}, then came home to view them on my computer and see if I liked any. Have you ever taken a picture thinking it was going to look really good, then when you looked at it on the computer it didn't measure up to what you had in-visioned? Well, I do that all the time only to look at the pictures and think...wow, that really didn't work. I'm realizing more and more that photography is a continual learning process, and sometimes a hard one. So after I looked at my pictures and figured out which ones "didn't work" I went out and re-took those.

   Here are some from my explorations:

 

 

   The rust patterns in those last two pictures really fascinated me. I'm sure our textures study in Dig. Photography had something to do with that.

                           

  

  

   Nature is so beautiful and I always get inspired when I go out to simply walk around and photograph whatever catches my eye.  Everyone should try it at some point.

   I will be leaving tomorrow to go to Arizona for a {unintended} vacation. I'm really excited about photographing somewhere that's completely new to me, and will try to update and share what's going on as much as possible while I'm there.