Tulip Love

As it was just Mother's Day it is quite appropriate and fortuitous that this post is a dedication to my mom.  There are many things that my momma taught me to love, not the least of which is a love of flowers.  I can definitely remember planting and watching flowers grow pretty much my entire life.  I remember most vividly the roses and the hollyhocks.  These were the prettiest and best of all the flowers we grew I thought.  I adore rose bushes and never minded dead-heading them or taking off all the aphids.  They're just so gorgeous!  The colors that flowers can achieve is ridiculous.  You can't even come close to capturing it on camera, which is unfortunate but even more awesome because you have to get out in them to really appreciate them.
Here's the thing though, we never had tulips.  I remember planting them once and then watching these d*** (but cute) rabbits come up and eat the entire flower in one bite.  So disappointing.  I don't know if that is the reason I never really cared for tulips or what, but basically I thought they were boring.  Just not a very interesting shape I guess.  I always could draw them pretty well though hahah......

And then I went to Chicago and realized that tulips could be fantastically colorful, but still I was not overly impressed with them.  I was more impressed with the fact that Chicago had them ALL over their city.  They really were working on the beautification and it was awesome.  Brilliantly colored flowers with fog was just awesome.  This resulted in a lot of pictures but not a love of tulips.  And then my friends, I went to Holland.  Michigan that is.  Which is apparently the tulip capital of America or something insane like this.  I was in Holland for their annual tulip festival and spent only about 3 hours there, and yet I came away with about 75 pictures of tulips.  The colors were the most amazing things I had ever seen, I wish I could describe.  I had no idea there were so many different kinds and shapes and color combinations of tulips!!  Gorgeous.  Pure Gorgeous.

So in honor of my mother and in honor of a new favorite flower here are some inadequate but still amazing pics of the tulip.

Instead of pondering civil rights

Just quickly some more pictures. For MLK day I decided I didn't need to go to work since I was out of school (although I went anyway later...) and instead spent the day with my ahmazing cousin Julie. She took to this sweet place called Kensington Park. Apparently Detroit metro area has like 17 of these "metroparks" which are just giant natural parks as far as I can tell. But this one is truly awesome, there were tons of lakes and miles and miles of trails and I decided that next Fall I definitely had to go back because just the sheer amount of trees is going to be beautiful. But this day was awesome because it was snowily overcast so it was just pure winter.

Um we saw wild turkeys. It was fascinating. Two of them started fighting and you just couldn't look away.

I was experimenting with the aperature preference feature on my cam

We saw this great tree, it looked like it was glowing. We just ignored the fact that it was probably dying...

Took my pic on this little outlook over a marsh...

There was some random tree that still had their leaves, kind of created a surreal image in the middle of bare trees

And with all the water around there were picturesque streams where you could see deer had been running through

And our last activity of the day was walking out on the frozen lake to take pictures. Julie kept stopping and saying "do you hear that? The ice is cracking!". When she took my picture (now my facebook profile pic) I told her I better not fall through and she responded that she'd give me a nice funeral if I did. Ha so glad we didn't fall through!!

Takin' the new Cam for a spin!

I'm sure at some point someone will get sick of all my pictures. But really I won't so....tough. You will take what I give you! Hahaha. So here are my adventures of today with my new camera. Today we investigate the use the 'landscape' scene mode. I took some self portraits but I wasn't centered in the pictures so the camera focused on the landscape no me......and I can fix that but it was really bright, really cold, and I look like I have black eyes so perhaps this was a blessing in disguise. Or even not so disguised : ).

So here we go. This first pic is of one of the bridges that crosses the Huron river at this point. There's actually like 10 that look like this but as I mentioned it was cold....

I love the wooden bridge look though. It fits so well into the landscape.

This pic is on the previous bridge. I was completely fascinated by the ice and this was one of the few points you could see through it. I was somewhat conflicted though. On the one hand I was fascinated by the ice but the other I was terrified of the bridge randomly collapsing and plunging me into icy cold water. My thoughts were something like "Whoa how cool. Please don't break creepy bridge. Oh man what would I do if it broke? This looks so awesome. Okay I need to get off this bridge."

I was wishing there was more snow on the trees but it's been a little warmer the past couple days. I still think it was so pretty though.

Around this park there are also like millions of wooden benches and I thought they looked so cute just looking over the water. There was one man just sitting in one but I felt weird photographing him.

I then trecked down to the bridge that takes cars across the river (there's a dam which is why it's incredibly wide here) because I loved the look of the rocks with the snow and ice around them.

Again I was just fascinated with how the ice looked. Looking at how the ice formed is like just sitting watching water rush by and how the little eddies and currents form; completely mesmorizing.

In the fall when Abbey came I took a picture of this same spot with all the fall colors. I like the symmetry of seasons and the new tradition I just created for myself.

You may have noticed that I haven't taken pictures of people with my camera... Well here's one. Again we had some issues with the point of focus : ) But I'm working on that and meanwhile that one part of my hair it focused on looks amazing right?!

My efforts into Photography

I don't know if I mentioned it before....but I really love to take pictures. Since my decision to procure a fantastically nice camera I have become even more into it. Until I got my camera I was priviledged to use my Papa Bear's nice camera. That's where most the pictures from Thanksgiving and Christmas came from. But then I got MY camera!! My most favorite gift/purchase this Christmas was my new Nikon DSLR. I'm pretty sure I could gush about it but I really shouldn't because I'm still learning all about it. So the pictures my not be so awesome yet. But they'll improve I promise. But in the mean time I just have to show off some of the ones I've taken.

My most favorite thing about Christmas decorations are the lights. Really in any form. I could drive around for hours just looking at lights. But the best lights are the ones that light up my Christmas tree. I love sitting with all the other lights in the house off and just the tree on and watch how the light goes off the ornaments. So this year I wanted to take some pictures of it.

I love pictures where one point is in focus and the other points are not so I'm especially fond of this pic. I also love the look of the pearls that my momma always puts on the tree.

The gold sparkly is so pretty in the lights.

And this one just looks like candy which I also adore : ).

As a treat for actually finishing my finals I bought myself my favorite flowers. Lilies. These ones were perfect because they happened to be pink and I couldn't resist taking a picture of them.

I thought this one was pretty. It captured the color well and I love the look of the wood behind it.

This is tag that I got on my Christmas present from Abbey and I thought we should take a picture to remember even more.

And with the end of these pictures so ends my year. I do know it's past New Years but I've just now caught up. And I will also stop talking about Christmas now. But I won't stop taking pictures : ).

Fam Time

So I know I'm ridiculously late with this but the past couple weeks have been kind of insane. But this is about the weekend that Abbey and I had when she came to visit! I had so much fun and it was so nice to forget for a little while that I am 1500 miles away from everyone.

Saturday: Game time. So we played Delaware State which meant that it was pretty much a blowout, but it was still really fun to show Ab the hugeness of our stadium (ya it's bigger than Lauren's) and we had all kinds of fun with the wave (that's what the crowd does when we get bored). It was a little bit cold though so we only stayed until about the middle of the third quarter.
OH! the coolest thing about the game was at half time Delaware State's marching band performed, which while their football is terrible they have a competitive marching band that was awesome. They did a montage of Michael Jackson songs and the entire band did the Thriller dance! It was amazing.

Sunday: Road Trip. We took about a 2.5 hour trip to St. Joseph/Benton Harbor on Lake Michigan and went out to this cool little tiny lighthouse. I say little tiny not out of any real knowledge because this was the first one I'd seen, but just in my head I imagine them bigger. But we took a lot of great pictures out there, and generally had an awesome day. We also had some of the best cherry truffles ever!

This was the most awesome sign on the walk out to the lighthouse.

Abbey all serious.....me not. This wall though was aweomse, it was like natural photoshop!

So then I relented and we were both smiling!

Then we went to go we climbed down the cool little ladders.

And then just prettiness.

Monday: Shopping and daddy daughter time. No pictures from this but it was great fun to go shopping and find many wonderful things and then have dinner with daddy who had flown in for the day. I did take some other pretty scenery pictures that I could  mess around with and have fun so I of course need to show them off!

And my fav:

Giddiness

There are some things in my world that makes me so happy I would qualify it as giddy. I think about them, I'm immediately happy, I smile no matter what is going on (which occasionally makes me look like the village idiot), and sometimes when speaking about them I just laugh because I'm happy. Most of the time oddly (or in a more philisophical sense, more telling of my mental health) these this things are small, and really random. Because I'm happy, I write. And I promised Abbey I'd show her.

Acorns. I am from the desert. I have of course visited other regions of the continent but never long enough to study, really study, the trees. So this is the first time I have come in contact with acorns. And they make me happy. First because they are so small and yet so perfectly represented by tv and movies. This acorn is less than an inch tall. And they're exactly how I imagined them (and despite the inference I do not spend massive amounts of time day dreaming about acorns). Second, a great deal of my fascination could possibly come from Ice Age because Scrat and his acorn quest is one of the better parts of that movie. I also maybe don't know what my fascination is but I really can't deny that they're just awesome. They're so perfectly small.

Alright so I am, as previously mentioned, from the desert. The land of cacti and trees that don't change color all year round. There have been accusations of those two things translating to 'ugliness' but I really like it. The snow on green trees and cactus is really something that everyone should see. But as  we only have conifers in my region I have not been exposed to the changing of the leaves. And everytime I see a tree with changing leaves I really want to take a picture because some irrational part of me feels like I may never see this again. This can also serve as a warning that there will be many more pictures of trees in your blog reading future. I have only had the opportunity to take pictures once though so I just have a couple today.

I had to mess with this picture a little bit using my lame photo editor so you can't see the sky which was pretty awesome since it was about to downpour, but the tree is there...

Um can you even look at this and not think it is the most gorgeous thing ever? This is what I get to watch as I drive around and so it must not be surprising how it can make me giddy. I also messed with this pic a little bit just to get the colors to pop since my camera isn't the best thing ever (just wait though because someday soon I'll have an excellent camera! If Kara helps me that is : ) But just to prove that the picture is still amazing here's the original:

I absolutely adore that you can look at one tree and see so many beautiful colors. There is one kind of tree here that I've not yet been able to capture that is relatively skinny and tall and kind of sparse but the color change starts at the center of the tree and turns the dark green leaves to a beautiful blood red. The color radiates from the center. I almost can't describe it because it's so gorgeous. I wish I could capture the beauty as I see it, but I'll keep trying!

New Purchase

I've decided the next thing I want to buy. First though would probably be a purse. And normally, that would be exactly the correct thought. But my attention has totally been diverted. So come the end of October, I know what I'm going to buy.


Maybe not this exact camera, but one like it. I want a real camera that I can take amazing pictures with. And I'm going to read the entire owners manual so that I can try everything out. I'm so set on it. I can't wait. Now I just need to do the research to find the right one to buy and the best place to buy it!

Vote

Okay I'm working on my graduation announcements and I need opinions on what picture I should put on the announcement. So please let me know: