Adventures from the beach.

My sincerest apologies for the short blog last week but I believe the payoff for today's post will be worth it! I had my first 'true' beach excursion since moving down here. Andrew and I have been so busy with cleaning, organizing and crafting that we haven't had a chance to head down to the ocean. Plus, neither of us do particularly well in the heat (i.e. we bitch and moan when it's 70 degrees outside). Even with that fact I still love going to the beach very much. The ocean makes me feel so good. Fortunately, his mom loves the beach and being out in the sun.

Unusually pretty seagull! And some rather cute sand prints.

We set out with no particular destination in mind and started to explore near the water. She grew up very nearby to where we live now, so she had a good sense of the lay of the land. We wound up at Redondo beach in no time. There we walked the horse shoe shaped pier and found some very active seagulls. Normally I'm very much a 'birds are weird get them away from me' sort of person, but one that we came upon was quite well preened and had shiny white feathers. He (or she? I'm not sure but it looked like it was wearing lipstick) sat and posed for us for a few shots. We came across another seagull who had managed to find a small plastic bag with a few fish in it. This soon attracted the attention of plenty more honking birds, so we stood and watched them fight and peck over the meat. Fascinating business.

After our brisk walk we decided to get back in the car and go straight for Manhattan beach. That was her primary place of interest and where we ended up spending the majority of our day. It was perfect beach weather and we snapped a lot of fun photos. I decided to get real adventurous, so I walked into the street to take a photo of the pier. Watch out world, I'm not afraid to get hit by cars! (there weren't any cars)

Manhattan beach pier from the middle of the road.

Before meandering down to the sand she wanted to go to the end of the pier. I had no particular objections, so off we went! There were plenty of people fishing and the breeze was lovely versus the hot sunshine. By the time we reached the cafe at the opposite end I was actually getting a little cold. Out over the water things cool down much more than I had anticipated. The view was just wonderful though!

A funny thing ended up happening that very perfectly demonstrated to Andrew's mom why I do such a poor job at talking to strangers; the strangers that talk to me first are always total weirdos. Andrew makes fun of me for my social ineptitude on a regular basis, and his mom didn't fail to notice why he does so. I'm glad she was present for this event.

Beautiful ocean views. I really enjoyed myself.

We were standing at the end of the pier about to head back when two men came our direction. The man on the left had particularly wild hair. He looked at me and started to emphatically ask me about my camera.

man - "Oh hey nice camera, what model is that? Is that a canon? A 60D? That's great! Do you like it?"

me - "Uh, yeah. It's really good."

man - "Awesome awesome. It's so crazy man, fourteen, fifteen years ago you never saw people with cameras like that and now they're everywhere. Crazy"

me - "Yeah"

man - (in reference to my necklace) "Oh hey is that an owl?!"

me - "Uh, yeah"

man - "That's great, that's cool, owls are my favorite bird"

me - (smile)

man - "OK well, you two ladies have a good day, God bless"

And then he and his friend walked away. Now, this exchange may not seem all that bad, but my words are unable to properly convey his body language and how abrupt everything was. He was perfectly nice, but it was definitely awkward. I turned to Andrew's mom and said, "And this is why I'm so uncomfortable when I talk to strangers because that is the kind of interaction that normally happens to me!" and she laughed.

Some classic views of the pier and then under the pier! It's awesome in person.

We continued our excursion down to the sand where I promptly exclaimed that the sand was scorching hot and decided to walk under the shadow of the pier. It was much cooler there. I had a good ol' time attempting to run in the sand, all the while flopping my arms and slipping. It has been a very long time since I was at the beach and clearly I forgot how to maneuver it.

Arriving at the water's edge was a relief; the breeze off the ocean felt amazing and it became less of a mystery as to how people get sunburned! With all that cool air you don't realize that your skin is cooking itself. I wore sunblock though so worry not, my skin stayed safe.

Here's a jumbled mess of photos that I took while we were at The Getty

last weekend. I've taken similar photos before when I was there March 2010.

I'm going to close this entry with a story that is completely irrelevant to anything else.

When I first arrived in California in May to visit with Andrew before officially moving down, we started to decorate our bedroom. He has a lot of prints and original drawings and sketches from various artists and he wanted my input on deciding where on the walls they should go. In addition to all of his prints he had also purchased some empty frames that I could fill with my own work (what a sweetie!). Seeing as I didn't have anything prepared, we decided to hang the empty frames on the wall just so we'd know where they were going.

A fair amount of the frames are over the bed, and some of them are a little large and heavy looking.

me - "I don't know if I like them over the bed."

andrew - "Why not?"

me - "What if they fall?"

andrew - "They're not going to fall"

me - "There are earthquakes here."

andrew - "The frames aren't heavy enough to hurt you"

me - "Those ones are."

andrew - "Well if they fall they're going to land on me, so you'll be fine."

me - "But then you'll get hurt! Broken glass will hurt you, you know."

A brief intermission of the final story to show you some progress from

my garden! The bottom photo is the same cucumber as the upper left

photo. They're getting so big! It's very exciting.

Initially, our sleeping arrangement had Andrew closest to the wall, but then he had to clamor over me to get up for work, so now I sleep closer to the wall. My paranoia of falling frames has grown over the past few months, especially once we added one particularly large and heavy ~36x36 print. Sometimes I lie awake and stare at them, wondering how fast I can curl up to protect my precious squishy inner mass.

All has been well though, and my fears were unfounded.

Until the other night.

There we were, sleeping soundly in bed. I opened my eyes, half awake, and looked at Andrew before rolling over to the wall to snuggle deeper into the blankets. With my right arm up behind my head I rolled face first into the pillow, severely misjudging how close to the wall I was. My elbow collided directly with said wall, shaking it hard enough to knock down the topmost heavy rectangular frame directly onto my ribs. Corner down, might I add.

I awoke completely with a loud yell, and Andrew jerked awake immediately concerned but still pretty much asleep and therefore essentially oblivious to what had actually happened. Silly sleepy boy.

me - "The frame fell and hit me in the ribs!"

andrew - "Oh I'm sorry"

me - *whine*

He began to rub my ribs while drifting off to sleep, before I asked, "Uh, can you put the picture frame on the floor...?" which he did, and then off to sleep he went. I have an invisible bruise, and it does not feel good.

-MJ

P.S.

Hells yeah, the beach!

I forgot to share this little anecdote. 

Andrew's mom and I took turns taking photos of one another to share with our families. You know, just a little bragging rights to us being in the sun at the beach. I guess karma got me back asap though, because moments after I sent my photo out to friends the tide rushed in shockingly high and washed my sandals out. Spoiler alert, I ended up getting them back. It was a close one though.

Hello from the beach!

Coming to you this week is a brief run down and only one photo. I'm currently at Redondo beach with Andrew's mom and we are having a lovely time in the sun. She flew in on Friday and the three of us have been busy since then! Disneyland, the Getty and now the beach! Unfortunately Andrew has to work, so she and I are making sure to have enough fun for him too :D

I have a fair amount of photos that have been taken this week, and also some exciting developments in my garden! You'll all have to wait until next week though because I'm out laboriously enjoying the sun, sand and ocean. Pity me.

-MJ

Happy children and engagement photos.

I suppose I should get an obligatory, "happy fourth of July!" out of the way before I start this post because I don't have anything Independence Day related to talk about :O I could have taken photos of the fireworks downtown last night, but I didn't bring my camera. More on that later, actually.

Nephew and niece.

So while I'm sorry that I don't have anything patriotic to share, I am delighted to say that I had two extremely successful shoots this weekend. After a week of being lazy and hardly taking any photos (I had reasons but shame on me all the same!), I had two full-out shoots to round off the week with. I just ended a sentence with a preposition and for that I am sorry.

My sister and her daughter Emily and son Elijah.

On Saturday I packed up all of my gear and went to my sister's house to take photos of her children. My nephew Elijah will be four in October, and my niece Emily turned one in February. They're certainly not the easiest age range to work with! My mom, sister and I encountered a fair amount of issues while attempting to get them to cooperate. We ended up down by the beach because there are some lovely photo taking areas, but they ended up being too excited about being in a new area.

Not 100% sure how I feel about the one on the left. I think I'm headed in the 

right direction but it's still incomplete. Love the one on the right though!

Emily's primary interest rested in tossing rocks into the water, which was adorable, and it did not lead to many good photos. Perhaps someday I'll invest in some waist-high waders, but on this day I had no way of getting out into the (super cold) water to get pictures of her face while she threw rocks.

 Face snuggles and kisses from her kids.

I did my best to remember what I had learned while at the first studio in Ireland. It was a family and child portrait studio, which is not my forte. However I did pick up a few useful tidbits on how to photograph children and I tried to put them to use on Saturday. Cassidy and I had ideas in mind about what kind of photos we wanted, and the kids were having none of it. Eventually we gave up and tried to just go wherever they wanted to go, but they still lacked the interest and cooperation to look at the camera.

Elijah. Not sure what he was going for but

he was looking at me so I went with it.

As we were preparing to leave, dejected and resolved to trying again another day, the two became enthralled with a big toy/jungle gym type play structure that was in the park. We stood and waited for a few minutes before I decided to give it one more go. I climbed inside and attempted to get a few photos that way, but still no luck. Finally Cass climbed inside of it with Elijah and that's when the magic happened.

Little Emily playing at the bottom of the slide.

We were finally able to get the photos that my sister was hoping for, it just had to be on the children's terms. Even though I knew that, I was still uncertain of how best to go about it. The whole day was a learning experience, to be sure, and I'm guessing that the next time I have a photo shoot with her kids things will probably go a bit smoother. On a final note though I am bummed that the one place they chose to finally cooperate included the big green wheel that was covering parts of their faces in a lot of shots. What am I supposed to do about that sort of thing? I almost fell off of the big toy a few times because I was balanced on a wooden slide and was holding on with one hand while swinging out in front of them. Danger!

After viewing these on the computer I wanted to scream bloody murder

because of the people standing in the background. But hey, nothing 

I could do because it was a public park. Either way this is a great photo

of Elijah and Emily laughing and playing together :)

On Sunday I had another shoot with my friends Rachel and Zach. They're getting married next summer and asked if I would do their engagement photos. I was happy to oblige.

All of yesterday was a raging success of beautiful picture after beautiful picture of them smiling happily in various places downtown Poulsbo. Rachel and I took a walk through this particular park earlier in the week and she absolutely loved it. It proved to be a great place for their photos.

I thought this was a cute idea. Feedback?

We had a really fun time finding different places to shoot, and they did a great job with the variety of outfits that they brought. Rachel and I had discussed a few different places over the phone, and also brainstormed over the different outfits that would go best with the locations in the park, and I'm really glad that everything came together so well.

They were wonderful models, and I'm also going to take a moment to congratulate myself because I think I managed to create some great and natural photos with my knowledge and suggestions for how they should interact :] I've been spending a fair amount of time doing research looking at engagement photos to see which ones I like and which ones I don't. There are so many different options and styles and some are (obviously) more appealing than others.

Under the boardwalk.

While editing a small selection for today's post I began to wonder how long it will take for me to develop a style all my own. Some photographers really have it down, and I know that I haven't been shooting consistently enough to figure out something that's "mine". It's difficult because I enjoy a wide variety of types. Sometimes I am really into hyper processed images, and sometimes the colors are so perfect that I don't want to touch the photo at all. Occasionally I feel that black and white adds the perfect touch and brings out an emotion that simply wasn't present in the color version.

Original in color.

I'm all over the place! I guess it may boil down to whatever my client wants and then I'll go from there. Curious. Can't wait to see what I end up doing.

 Good edits? Bad? Better in black and white or color? Does 

the yellowish/sepia/high contrast on the left even work?

For the fireworks last night I made a conscious decision not to bring my camera. I knew that it would be busy and crowded downtown and I didn't want to have a bag banging around behind me. I wanted an easy night of focusing on enjoying the company of my friends. Fortunately I don't regret the decision, but as the fireworks were going off I found myself wondering which camera settings I'd be using if I had brought my camera and what I'd have to do to get a great picture of the explosions. I really need to get a functioning tripod.

As soon as Cass, Rachel and Zach have picked out which photos they want I'll be posting more, but for now the images posted today were ones that I particularly enjoyed and wanted to share on my blog. I'm not sure what next week's entry will bring. As far as I know I don't have anything big planned for this week. Maybe I'll take some nice photos of Slinky, a new dog that I've come to know. That could be fun. I enjoy animal photography.

-MJ

California Day 2, The Beach

So we were so ridiculously busy the entire time we were in California that I only had a chance to blog on the first day that we were there! Good times were had by all and I'm glad that we had a full agenda. I am sad that I didn't get the chance to blog daily about the goings-on though.

With that said, my plan is to update about each day and post a few photos. Here we go!

Venice Beach!

Day two of our fabulous California excursion brought us to Venice Beach. We had amazing weather and beautiful deep blue skies. Our method of transport? Bicycles, of course!

There's me, bein' awesome on a beach cruiser bike. We rented them from this great little place near Andrew's house. We received a free scoop of ice cream from the adjoining shop for doing all day rentals! A great start to the day.

Andrew dropped us off in his car then drove back to his place and biked down to meet us. That down there is Jake waiting.

He always looks so cool. I love that about him, along with many other things. 

This happened to be a great time to do some flash with daylight work. I like the result.

We biked about 7 (I think) miles to the beach. I can't remember the last time I was on a bike before this little adventure, so I was super shaky on the bike. Plus, beach cruisers are a bit different from regular bikes. They have really wide handlebars (which I wasn't used to) and they're supposed to be more... wobbly, I guess? Hence the "cruise" in the title.

They took getting used to, and I almost fell off a few times.

Since we were going to Venice Beach and all, we rode through the Venice Canals of Los Angeles!

They were beautiful, the houses were amazing. We stopped at the first canal for a short break and I took the opportunity to snap this photo.

Also this one here. Directions for the canals!

We did a lot of bicycling through traffic, which made me incredibly nervous. A lot of people bike comfortably in LA, but I'm not one of those people, especially not on a strange bike. I was pretty sure I was going to get hit by a car. Every time I tried to look over my shoulder to check for traffic I started to fall to that side.

So we finally made it to Venice Beach! The photo at the top of this post is probably my favorite from the day, with this shot of the pelican coming in at a close second!

This bird was monstrous, and also quite calmly sitting on the end of the pier. He didn't mind people getting close. I hate birds, they scare me, so that was taken with my 18-200mm. I was about 6 feet away or so.

The beach was beautiful. We went to the very end of the pier where people were picnicing and fishing. We admired the view for a while before heading back to land and locking up our bikes so we could walk around.

We dined at this fine establishment:

It was pretty good. I love a good hot dog stand. We need more in Washington! There's just something about them that are (is?) so quaint and enjoyable to me.

So we ate our dogs and enjoyed the amazing view. I did my best not to people watch, because the people at Venice Beach were kind of scary and skanky.

But look how beautiful the scenery was! It was just amazing, I really fell in love... I think.

After we finished eating it was finally off to the water!

The bathroom facilities were disgusting. They were beyond disgusting. Revolting? Horrifying? Moist cesspools of God knows what? I hardly know the words to describe the situation.

Needless to say, it was a difficult and upsetting situation to change into my bathing suit there. But I did it, because I bought the suit the day before and dammit I was going to wear it.

Andrew and his awesome friend Andrea went into the water. I decided that it was too cold. Warmer than Washington water, but still far too cold for wimpy little me. So Jake and I guarded the hole that Andrew was digging.

This bird looked right at me. I mean, directly. You probably can't tell in this small photo, but if the full sized file gets zoomed, he is in an eye-to-eye DEATHLOCK with me. I hate birds.

And with that, I leave you with a final gorgeous photo of Venice Beach. It was a full day, to be sure. There were amazing photos to be taken, along with delicious food to be eaten and fun people to spend time with. I guess it wouldn't have been a true big city experience if it weren't for the horrific restrooms though. -MJ