Sunshine Line

I have been paying more attention lately to how the light falls during the day. This was taken a few weeks back at sunrise, and I was intrigued by how the light was divided by the mountains.

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Yesterday after church, there was a benefit for a local man who is battling a bad illness. I went with my parents, an hour after it started and was very startled to see the sheer amount of people there, who were still coming and those that had already left. It was amazing to see the community spirit to help this family. I love small towns :)

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It's been "warm" for days now. Our snow is going away again and many are complaining about the Lower 48 getting our winter this year! Today it's 36 degrees, and wet. It's nice not freezing, but the warmth keeps it cloudy most of the time, which doesn't encourage me to run to the beach for photos. We are gaining daylight though! 5 minutes or so a day. It's bittersweet for me (I like the early sunsets for selfish reasons) but I am so looking forward to summer again!

First Beams

First beams of sunshine coming over the mountain. Might want to click on the photo for a little bigger view to see the rays. I was out early for this sunrise, eyeing the clouds and knowing they would produce something spectacular. I waited and waited, and finally gave up. I went to get some gas, and watched the sky while I did. Suddenly, the clouds absorbed the color finally. And so I rushed back to the beach! The white on the sand is frost.

C's Birthday!

It was C's birthday earlier this week! I asked him what he wanted for breakfast: Safeway run for build your own sandwiches, chow mein and sesame chicken. He doesn't ask for much, I guess! Oh and we opened the sparkling cider we had too :) Wouldn't have been what I wanted for breakfast but it was his choice :)

He wanted peanut butter brownies (from a box) for his cake.

All in all, he had a good day. We didn't do too much but that's how he likes it!

Augustine

The mountains across the Bay have been incredibly sharp due to several days of clear skies. They are not always visible from haze or low clouds, so it has been a treat. I shot Augustine here at sunrise a couple weeks back.

Small Waves

Don't have much to say about this one....it was cold? :)

Chilly Blanket

Snow!

We finally got some snow in January! After several weeks without any, it was a welcome change!

I cleaned off my windshield and then went to take a picture or two. Came back, and it was almost covered again! Less than 2 minutes had passed!

After Sunset

The beach after the sunset. Peaceful, but awfully chilly :)

2 Blogs = 1 Blog

I spent a bit of time this afternoon making something a reality I have been thinking about for a while. I combined my photography blog and my personal blog into one. The next change will likely be plopping this whole blog onto Wordpress, but that will be a while down the road!

Blogger has a great exporting and importing feature that helped immensely. The feeds should be the same, please let me know if you encounter problems! I kept the photography feed separate for those who are not interested in my personal life. Those who are, can subscribe to the improved feed to get all the posts. If you are reading this post from my personal life feed, you are all set!

I hope this doesn't confuse you all too much! I was getting tired of updating two blogs, and was devoting much more time to my personal one than the photography one. I think I have managed to fix many of the links, but it may be a process to do them all. Looks like I lost all of my scheduled posts for both blogs, unfortunately.

Everyone "following" me on Blogger on the personal blog should click over and follow this one!

I apologize for the influx of posts that may have shown up in the feed. I don't know how to not let that happen :(

Thanks for your understanding everyone!

Huge Waves

Yesterday's post was on surfing. Today's is the same day, at sunset. Look at that huge waves! I was not thinking it through much, but I should have taken some quicker exposures to capture how large the waves really were. They were massive.

This was a .6 second exposure, and in that time, the wave started, crested, and crashed and was still going. Pretty awesome.

Jan Sunset

Surf Alaska

I think they are crazy, but when you get waves like this, you just have to surf apparently! Surf Alaska is a new company dedicated to educating people of the opportunities of surfing in this state. They do it often this time of year, and I admire them greatly for it.

It has got to be so frigid, but they keep doing it, so it must not be too bad!

This technique is called Stand Up Paddle surfing, I believe, and while I don't understand, their website I posted earlier should have all the details!

Six of the crew were out that day, but only four in the same vicinity. Looks fun, doesn't it?

October Wedding Photos

My friend who's wedding we went to in October posted a ton of photos a few weeks back. There was no credit, but I believe most of them must have come from her photographers, Lauren and Lincoln.

A rather goofy expression on my face, but "my third photographer" :D

The guestbook was based on Polaroid photos of the guests :) Here is C with ours!

Photo booths are wonderful things :) Photo taken by our friend's uncle.

Me at dinner, drenched from the downpour!

Photo by another friend.

Just wanted to share them :)

Deceptive Storm

More of the big waves. This image does not show the huge ones, but I still love the sunset.

Moose at the Beach

I was walking back to my car after shooting the sunset from yesterday's post, and saw movement in the trees. It was getting dark, but I set the camera back on the tripod and hoped the moose would not move.

I got lucky and got a couple good shots :)

Happy birthday to my mother today!

Front Row Seats

Here, it is not illegal to drive on the beach, at least in certain places. I think it is rather foolish to do so, but many people do not care. I decided to take a shot of the cars lined up on the beach at a nice sunset recently.

We have front row seats to the sunsets and best of all, they are free :)

Spray

The waves on the beach were enormous all day, and they continued to be amazing at sunset. This does not really convey the huge size, but I still liked it.

Crystals

I love ice crystals. I took this with my macro lens and they are much larger in the image than in real life. They are actually on a dirty snow berm, and the black parts are dirt. Amazing how beauty can be found in the ordinary!

Seagulls in Formation

Seagulls seem rampant sometimes. On the first day of full sunshine in a while, they were everywhere.

They can be a nuisance, but they do add to some scenes :)

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I procrastinated very badly yesterday...I read The Hunger Games on my PC Kindle program. I'd been hearing a lot about it and wanted to see what the fuss was about. It didn't take too many pages in to be sucked in. Needless to say, a significant portion of my day was taken up with the book, but after I was finished, I went back to my homework with a vengeance!

I also wanted to highlight some of my favorite songs from the past couple weeks:

• Mercy Me - All of Creation
• Lifehouse - It is What it is
• Cory Asbury - Faithful to the End 
• Jason Aldean - The Truth
• Jason Aldean - My Kinda Party
• Meredith Andrews - How Great is the Love
• Meredith Andrews - In Your Arms
• Rodney Atkins - Farmer's Daughter
• Jars of Clay - Lay it Down
• Jennifer Knapp - If it Made a Difference

Go have a listen :)

Dark Beach

More of the frozen and freezing cold beach.

Bald Eagles

Bald eagles are incredibly common here. After the Eagle Lady passed away (read the book about her!) two winters ago, the eagles still stuck around. Winter 2010, they still hung out, but they were fewer. This year, I have seen very few eagles. They are still around, just definitely not in the large amounts. I don't think I have shot an eagle in nearly a year, but I got one a couple weeks ago. He was hanging out on this business's sign.

I'm pretty happy with how they turned out in the bright sunshine :) As much as I would love to shoot eagles all the time, they are hard to access in large numbers, and it's often a gamble. I have other things to shoot, unfortunately (or fortunately)!

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I'm going to try to do some Link Love again every so often. Here are couple fun things I have found recently:

• I found an adorable link the other day: Firefox Live! Cuteness at its finest!
• Awkward Family Photos from Bobbi + Mike: Fun photographer couple I recently came across and their awkward Christmas card is hysterical!
• Courtesy of Susan, Cool Bath Stops!
• Creative McDonald's Ads

Check them out!

My Squirrel Friend

I have a love/hate relationship with this squirrel. It resides at my work and causes general havoc all year long. In the summertime, when we have the door open due to the stifling air of the building, this little guy curiously creeps inside. It makes us paranoid for sure, but so far we have managed to chase him out.

I have never been able to get a photo of him, until last week! I saw him when I stopped into work, grabbed my telephoto lens, and shot a couple shots while he stared at me. And then he scurried off. He's pretty cute despite the evil nature :)

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I read a great quote yesterday:

It takes a real man to be satisfied with and love one woman for a lifetime. And it takes a real woman to be content with and respect one man for a lifetime. - Dennis Rainey

Good word!

Frozen Evening

Taken when the ice was all over the beach. It made for tricky shooting and traversing, and it was freezing cold to boot!

Sparkles of Frost

Have you ever seen the way frost sparkles on a parking lot? It makes any surface look magical! This image does not capture the effect at all, but I tried :)

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Yesterday we finally got some snow. Sunday, we had -2F here! It warmed a bit more on Monday, up to 16, but it was still strange to get snow when it's that cold. It's nice to have snow again, but I did enjoy the roads being so dry and not slippery!

Today we have 1F and clear skies again!

Sunshine!

A week and a half ago, the sun came back out. And boy, did I try to drink it in! Those of you who live with sunshine all the time have no idea how wonderful it is after weeks of gloomy weather to be bathed in that golden light :)

Melting Frost

As much as I hate scraping my windows every morning in the winter, it does make some cool designs sometimes!

And they have pretty colors too :)

Ivory Keys

C is a wonderful piano player. His parents insisted each kid take music lessons growing up, at least for a year. C really enjoyed piano lessons and continued for quite a while. He played for church and the youth group for years, but is not able to at the moment. His parents have a piano at their house and he agonizes over not having one here. We've looked at keyboards several times, but he has never wanted to take the plunge. We don't have room for one at our apartment, really, but that is a small unimportant aspect.

He feels like he is loosing his ability to play, and I really don't want that to happen. Someday, we will have a lovely piano in our house for him to play whenever he desires :)

Pizza Date

We went to our favorite pizza place the other day. We'd been craving it for weeks and finally made time to go. I have never had pizza as good as there, and while it is expensive, we often end up there once a month or so. They still had holiday place mats up, which made me smile :)

We ended up getting 2 pizzas (the deal for the evening) so C would have work food for the week. He cut one slice in half, and it became a baby slice :)

The Keyboard's Bath

I am terrible, I know, but I almost always eat at my computer. I am a slow eater, and also eat often through the day, and that is valuable time I could be accomplishing something. So I eat at my computer. I am very careful, but sometimes I mess up....like the other day. Enter, chocolate milk all over my keyboard. C and I went on a rampage and plucked all the keys out to clean them.

Now it's good as new. I should have taken a photo of the keyboard to make sure I got the keys in the right spots, but we compared to C's keyboard, so it's fine :)

Moral? Do as I say, not as I do!