It Had Been Brought to My Attention ...

... by my youngest daughter that I hadn't written anything new on this particular blog in a very, very long time and by golly - she was right! It has most definitely been collecting digital dust but I guess with everything else going on like trying to write two other blogs and occasionally do some honest-to-goodness reading in addition to all of the time I seem to spend at work, I just hadn't even thought about updating here.  Besides, I guess I figured I really didn't have anything of any interest to say either.  Not that something like that ever stopped me in the past of course but this time it did!

So anyhow, here it is, almost the first weekend in June and we're going to be going from cold enough to have to turn the heat back on (again) last Saturday to our first potential heatwave of the year.  Ah New England ... I love you in spite of your lousy weather but I would have loved you more had we actually had a spring of some sort this year!  Alas, no such luck.

What makes it even worse is that I have a wedding to photograph on Saturday - an outdoor wedding in a lovely park on a hill in Manchester which is in a part of the state where storms like to gather.  Even though I get the feeling that it's going to be hot and humid enough to melt fondant (something that doesn't melt easily at all!), I just really hope that we don't get any big thunderstorms blowing through.  I've heard it said that rain on one's wedding day is good luck but I'm thinking thunderstorms are overdoing it a bit!

This will only be the fourth wedding that I've photographed so I'm a bit nervous about it but I've almost got myself talked into not stressing about it and just doing the best that I can.  The nerves come from not wanting to mess up someone's special day but considering that everyone and their brother/sister/aunt/uncle/cousin brings a camera to a wedding these days, even if I mess up some of the photos, there will be plenty of others out there.

I  think I know what my biggest problem is going to be though ... as I was looking through some other wedding images today to perhaps get some ideas for photos, I found myself starting to tear up more than once so I think I can pretty much guarantee that I am going to get all teary-eyed at least once or twice during Saturday's ceremony.  Sentimental fool that I am, I no doubt will find it darned hard to look through a lens with my eyes all watery but I could bet you right now that's exactly what's going to happen!  Guess I'd best make sure I pack tissues along with my other photo supplies!

Anyhow, I think that's it for now, I figured I should at least pop over here long enough to toss up a new post and clear out the cobwebs so that Jamie wouldn't question me anymore about my lack of new material.  Kind of funny how I used to make sure to blog everyday and now I can go weeks and/or months at a time and not feel the least bit of guilt.  Well, at least over here, I still feel guilty about being so far behind on posts for The Distracted Wanderer and Travels With Nathaniel!

Speaking of which, I gotta go ...! 

Love Really IS a Many Splendord Thing!

Okay, I'm probably really showing my age with the title of this post but years ago when I was just a little girl I received a musical jewelry box from my beloved grandfather for Christmas and it played "Love Is a Many Splendord Thing" as a little ballerina twirled in front of a mirror.  I think I may still have that jewelry box somewhere now that I think about it but this post isn't about that, it's about the trip I made up to Vermont yesterday to photograph the wedding of a young couple at the Inn Victoria.  Jess, a staff member at the inn, was asked to put together an "elopement" and she contacted me to ask if I would be interested in doing the photos.

Now I've only shot one other wedding before for my friends Frank and Dawn so I wasn't sure if I had the best credentials to be their photographer but Jess apparently quite likes some of the  pictures I've taken so she thought I would be perfect for Mallory & Michael.  Needing the practice - and always looking for an excuse to go to Vermont - I said 'sure' and made the drive up to Chester early yesterday morning on what was a rather cold but very pretty day.

If I had any trepidation about how well things were going to go, that was pretty much alleviated when I met the two young people who had decided to skip all the hoopla and foolishness and make their special day about themselves and not everyone else.  They do plan on having a more elaborate service in about a year but for now they just wanted to share their love with each other and become husband and wife in a simple ceremony in a romantic setting.

I'm going to share just a few photos with you as I still have a lot of editing to do on all of the photos that I took but there is no doubt in my mind that these two are quite in love as it's very easy to see that shining through in their pictures and I wish them nothing but happiness as their love continues to grow with each and every day.

Oh, and may I just say that it's darned hard to hold the camera steady and take pictures when you're trying not to cry along with the bride.  I am always, and will forever be, a hopeless romantic!

Their wedding cake that Jess made - it was so cute! 

Mallory's beautiful bouquet

Mallory reads her vows to Michael

Michael & Mallory at the town gazebo

Tea for two!

Enjoying their champagne! 

Like I said, love really IS a many splendord thing, isn't it? 

Of Weeds and Weddings

While out and about with the Nikon the week before last, I decided to play around with the aperture setting a little bit in a poor attempt to learn how to do bokeh shots like my friend Lisa who is an amazing mom and photographer and person in general. If you haven't looked at her photography, you don't know what you're missing - especially her flower pictures which are so beautiful you could swear you can smell them just looking at them!

Anyhow, Lisa does this really cool effect where the background is blurred and the foreground is crystal clear and pops right off the page.  It's a matter of fooling around with the aperture setting on the camera and a few other technical thingies that I won't bore you with (as well as not really being able to properly explain) that then produces either good bokeh or bad bokeh - not that to the untrained eye you can really tell the difference between good and bad bokeh but trust me, there's a difference according to all of the websites I've looked at!

As it turns out, I didn't manage to get either good or bad bokeh as I got no bokeh at all - just a soft or blurred background that I actually rather liked.  The picture below is a weed - I think - but I rather liked the shape of it so I decided to try snapping a picture on aperture mode and then fooled around with it a little bit to turn it into what you see below:


Not knowing what kind of plant it really is, I'm going to call it a Starburst or a Fireworks Weed as it sort of reminds me of the type of fireworks that blow out from the center and then little bursts of light waterfall down. Oh, and that white blur in the background?  That's my hand holding the darned thing still as it was pretty windy while I was trying to get the picture and the poor plant wouldn't hold still!

The reason I was playing with this weed and trying to see if I could get a bokeh effect is that I'm going to be photographing my very first wedding this coming Saturday for a couple of friends and I want to be able to get some shots for them using the blurred background effect as I see a lot of those on wedding photography sites and they always look really, really nice.  I know I'm not a professional by any means and don't claim to be but the last thing I want to do is mess up the photography at a wedding - one of the most important days in a couple's relationship - however by the same token I don't want to produce simply the same-old same-old shots.  Wedding pictures should be more than that.

I seem to do okay with landscapes and stationary objects but on Saturday I'll be taking photos of a couple in love on their special day and I want the pictures to reflect that so when they're celebrating their silver anniversary and beyond they can pull out their pictures and easily recall the moments when they said "I do" and became husband and wife - united in love and faith in each other.

Of course, it would be okay if they forgot the fact that I practiced for their wedding day using weeds!

Lastly, if I could ask you all a big favor ... right now the weather forecasters are predicting rain for Saturday which is totally unacceptable - especially consider Frank and Dawn are having an outdoor ceremony - so I was hoping I could get you all to send up good thoughts for good weather on Saturday.  Maybe if there are enough people wishing for the same thing, Mother Nature will cooperate and send sunshine for the happy couple.  Thanks in advance!

Pictures From My Past

One of the advantages of moving (other than the chance to clear out a lot of clutter) is the possibility of finding things that you thought you were long gone - or better yet - things that you had completely forgotten existed to begin with! Such was the case while clearing out a back room at my old house and coming across a couple of photo albums whose existence had long since been erased from my memory banks. Funny thing is, what with one of them being an album of pictures from my wedding in 1991, you would think that I would have remembered it!

How those albums came to be in an unused, blocked off portion of the house (a room off of the back mud-room that my former landlord had always promised to turn into a second bathroom/laundry room but never did) is beyond me. I thought that the albums had gone with my ex-husband when he moved out in 2001 or had just been tossed and I honestly hadn't given a thought to them in years and years so it was quite a surprise to find them.

After getting them back to the new place and looking through them a bit, I thought it might be fun to scan a few of the pictures and post them here to show you what I looked like almost 18 years ago when life seemed a lot simpler than it is now. Obviously, the years have not been good to me and it's rather dismaying to see how much I've changed over the years but I guess that's all part of the progression of time, isn't it? Honestly, though, I'm still trying to figure out where all those years went!

I'm afraid that the quality of these pictures is none too good being that they were sitting rather unprotected out in that back room (they all need to be taken out of their current album, cleaned up, and put in a new one) plus they lose a bit in the scanning process but hopefully they'll pass muster here. All of the wedding pictures were taken by Judy, my former roommate from California, who flew out for the occasion but whom I have lost touch with.

This first picture was taken on the morning of August 17th, 1991 at my grandmother's old house where Mike and I were living before I remarried. The mirror that I'm looking in was hers and I'm not sure if I was more worried about the necklace I was wearing or the butterflies that were gathering in my stomach but I guess you could say that I look rather contemplative. Or is that scared?

In this next shot I'm getting into the limo that had come to pick up myself and my bridesmaids to take us from my home in Canterbury to the church at the Naval Base in Groton. My ex-husband was a Navy man and we got married in the Chapel of the Sea (though it was nowhere near the sea!). Due to the massive amount of butterflies churning in my stomach that had increased exponentially since I was looking in the mirror, I told the limo driver to go to either New York or Boston instead of the chapel but he obviously thought I was joking and continued on to Groton! He had probably dealt with a lot of brides with a case of the nerves and I had a major case!

Once I got through the wedding service itself (I distinctly remember wondering if it would be really bad if I went and sat on the steps in front of the vestibule for awhile as I was starting to feel really sick at one point), I seemed to finally relax a little - as this next picture which was taken after the service shows ...

Of course, what you don't see here is the champagne glass that was next to me on the roof of the limo! I don't think, though, that it was the champagne that had caused me to finally relax - it was just knowing that the stress of the whole wedding was over. When I got married the first time, it was in the reception area of a dentist's office in New Jersey (the guy was a Justice of the Peace) so there was no pomp and circumstance or ceremony but the second time I got married, I wanted to do it right - hence the white dress, et al. The dentist's office was much easier!

In looking at these pictures now, the main thing I keep thinking is - "wow, my hair looked kind of nice!" I showed a few of them to one of my co-workers when she was over on Tuesday helping paint Amanda's room and she told me what a really nice smile I had (considering she said "had", I've got to take it that means I don't smile all that much now which is not a good thing).

Getting back to my hair, this last picture was taken in the White Mountains of New Hampshire while we were on our honeymoon. Feel free to tell me how very 90's my hair was as it's true but at least I had hair that wasn't flat and impossible to do anything with like it seems to have become 'lo these many years later! Just goes to show what ten years of marriage, giving birth to two more children, and going through a divorce will do to a person ... ah, if I only knew then what I know now ...

I hope you enjoyed this brief stroll down Memory Lane with me. Perhaps I'll get the chance to scan a few more pictures to share with you sometime in the future; I'm sure there is a lot more "undiscovered" stuff hiding in the boxes piled up around here - finding it can be one of the fun parts of moving!

Happy 1st Anniversary, Mike & Laura!

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Last weekend my son, Michael, made the trip from Rhode Island to Connecticut (a good stone's throw if you're any good at throwing stones!) to put in my air-conditioners for me. Having a bad back, I know it's paramount that I don't do it myself so it's a good idea to either rely on the kindness of someone with a strong back at work or call in the Prodigal Son. Considering that the Prodigal Son also had a second guitar peripheral for Guitar Hero II that he wasn't using that I wanted to borrow it made for the perfect "kill two birds with one stone" situation. Hmm, perhaps it was the same stone that was thrown over from Rhode Island?? Well, either way, I digress.

While Mike was here he asked me why it was that my blog always referred to my having two daughters but there never seemed to be any mention of a son. Granted, I have made mention of he and his wife in past posts but he's right, I haven't really mentioned him much at all recently and with my template and pictures, etc. it would be very easy for one to say "what? you have a son? I had no idea!" I hope to rectify that error of omission with this post!

Tomorrow, July 1st, marks the very first wedding anniversary of Michael and his bride, Laura. If I remember correctly, it was an awfully hot summer day in Rhode Island but the humidity wasn't bad so that was a real plus!

Mike & Laura's wedding was only the second wedding I have been to in Rhode Island and it wasn't all that far from the first wedding I attended there which was that of Mr. & Mrs. Bulldog, a regular commenter on this blog. I have to say that both were very special occasions and, despite the fact that I have stated that I don't dance, I reluctantly admit that I danced at both weddings. I had actually completely forgotten that I danced at Mike's wedding until Jamie reminded me of it recently just as Bulldog reminded me that I danced at his. I'll chalk it up to old age that I had forgotten both occasions - well, either that or I really, really, really wanted to forget them and was hoping that everyone else had also! Sadly, that is apparently not the case!

Anyway, all talk of dancing aside, I find it rather hard to believe that it has already been a year since my son who proclaimed that he was never going to get married proved himself wrong. As my cousin Amy likes to say, don't ever say you're never going to do something because as soon as you do, you're going to end up doing it (that and "only idiots buy soundtracks", right cuz??).

If Mike had chosen to never get married based on his mother's track record, I could certainly understand that. I haven't exactly been a shining example of wedded bliss having tried and failed twice at the "till death do us part" thing. However, where I have been less than a beacon of light when it comes to matrimonial success, my parents' marriage was a perfect example and two of my brothers seem to be doing pretty well with it, too. I hope that Michael emulates them and not myself or his father - another not so shining example though at least he had the good sense to have only tried marriage once!

To Mike and Laura - I wish you many more years of happiness as well as a successful partnership as I think that's really what makes for a good marriage. It's not easy to put your own needs aside and take into account those of your partner and children but many, many people (other than myself) have proven that it can be done. Happy Anniversary!!

Oh, and for those who didn't realize that in addition to having a son and a daughter-in-law I also have a grandson, may I present to you Mathew Kendall? This isn't a recent picture but that's because my son who owns a digital camera never sends me any new ones! Hint, hint!