The Jewelry Hanger

I took a couple different shots of this things from different angles. I'll post them gradually, interspersed with other pictures. Let me know which one(s) you like best*!

*That goes for the rest of my pics too, which ones are your favorites? Put the link to it in the comments. =)

Perspective

Tree bark has such an awesome texture!

Someday, I want to take one of those really awesome pictures like you see in magazines where the person is in the woods and looking up and all the trees are leaning in towards the center of the picture.

That was a really long sentence. I apologize.

It's kind of cool how when you're really close up to something, you can't tell what it might be but when you zoom out a little bit, you're suddenly like "oh duh, it's an Oreo cookie dunked in milk!"

(That actually happened today... one of my photographer friends posted a really-super-close-up picture of an Oreo on Facebook, and my mom and I thought it was mud... my seven year-old brother took one look at it and said IT'S AN OREO COOKIE MOM. I was kind of ashamed of myself...)

Anybody seen the movie Soul Surfer? The youth leader (Carrie Underwood) talks about this at one point, and although it was a rather cheesy part of the movie (I thought so anyway), it does have some truth to it. Sometimes you need to take a step back from a bad situation so you can find the good in the whole picture. Get some perspective.

I hope that made a smidgeon of sense to some people.
Please feel free to leave your thoughts/questions in the comments.

Have an awesome day everyone!

Christmas Berries!!

Okay, I don't usually use punctuation in my titles, but I did this time. Why? Because CHRISTMAS!!! I started listening to Christmas music back in the middle of October. I get so overly enthusiastic about things... 'tswhat makes me a nerd, I guess! haha

Speaking of nerds, John Green has become my all time favorite nerd. If you don't know who he is, you need to know who he is. Go look him up. Or read The Fault in Our Stars. WHICH THEY'RE MAKING INTO A MOVIE!! AAAHHHHH

Yeah, see? Over-enthusiastic.

But back to Christmas. I like to start getting into the 'Christmas Spirit' before everyone else does. Not entirely sure why, I just do. Maybe it's because it seems so much more personal to me when I can snuggle up with a blanket and hot cocoa before Christmas sales commercials start showing up everywhere? Or maybe it's just the nostalgia when my dad finally starts our pellet stove, the noise it makes sends me back to past winters and Christmases.

Whatever it is, I love Christmas. But my favorite things about Christmas? hmmm...

1)Family and Friends and companionship in general
2)Food, I mean, who doesn't love food? If you don't love food, you have a problem.
3)Hot Cocoa (or chocolate, whichever you prefer)
4)Books and stuffed animals
5)My family's noisy pellet stove that my mom complains about but I love because it's noisy and I can't handle silence.

I could add way more, but that number is divisible by five, so I'll stop there. EXCEPT to add my top two favorite things:

1)It's the time we celebrate the coming of Jesus Christ which has profound meaning to, well, everything. (note how I didn't say it's Jesus' birthday... cuz it wasn't actually his birthday...)
2)CHRISTMAS MUSIC!!!

Merry Early Christmas everyone!

Adventures in Photography

Fall is most definitely my favorite time of year. Thank you God, for fall colors and friends who let me borrow expensive cameras. =D

Tree Bark

Another Canon 60D picture. =D I love having control over exactly where the lens is focusing...

Fall and Friends and Colleges

I recently had the opportunity to play around with a Canon 60D, which was AWESOME. (I'll explain the circumstances in a minute.) Seriously, I kinda want one... Oh well. Maybe someday. I was able to take somewhere around 20 pictures with it, so I'll post some here over the next couple days.

As to the circumstances of how such an amazing piece of machinery fell into my hands, I went on my FIRST COLLEGE VISIT. This just got real, folks.

I went to visit Valley Forge Christian College, which happens to be the school my best friend (EVER) goes to. (Hi, MRJ!) The event was called Breakaway (no idea why, though), a 24 hour stay on campus. I got to stay with MRJ overnight and visit a few of her classes the next day. I went to some by myself though. Which was incredibly nerve-wracking to this particular introvert. But I did enjoy it, all the same. :)

One of the classes I sat in on was Intro to Video Production, which I found very interesting. The class was working on group projects, so the professor mostly focused on answering Breakaway-er's questions about the Digital Media Studies program. He explained that there were several different branches of the studies program, one of them being Photography. =D He asked who might be interested in what majors, but when he got to Photography I was the only one who raised my hand... *awkward*. So much for blending in in my little corner at the back of the room... haha.

Anyways, after classes were done MRJ and I headed back to her dorm so she could pack (and spend the weekend with us!! =D), but before that... we headed to the Dig. Media Center and rented a Canon 60D for an hour.

!!!!

While she packed some things to take to my house, I ran around campus like a crazy person taking pictures of anything and everything. I had a very limited amount of time though, since mom was itching to leave (she had things to do for co-op classes on Monday), and we had to get the pictures off of the camera and the camera back to where it belonged.

I have yet to schedule more college visits, but I am planning on visiting more. Milligan College, Taylor University, and John Brown University are pretty high on the list. I'm mainly looking for a school that offers both a good science and art program so I can have a good range of majors to choose from. For that reason, I'm not really considering Valley Forge as a serious option, because they don't really have any science majors (like chem) that I'd be interested in. It's mostly a digital media school, from what I observed.

Anyway.

I have college on the brain.

Scary thoughts.