Happy Friday! I have finally added three new albums – “Hawaii”, “Birds, Bees, Flowers” and “Colorful Things” – in the Galleries section of this blog. Over the next two weeks I will be blogging about the wedding I second shot a few weeks ago and also second shooting another wedding! I can’t wait!!!
Here’s a sample photo from each of the three galleries…
Aloha! Rory and I traveled to Kauai and Maui two weeks ago for our joint 30th birthday celebration! It was an amazing vacation filled with stunning landscapes, waterfalls and rainbows, warm sand beaches, ziplining and helicopter adventures, and adorable animals (sea turtles swimming in large waves, monk seals sunbathing on the beach, and wild chickens running around everywhere). It was hard to balance lounging on the beautiful beaches and driving around the islands taking awe-inspiring photos.
While I haven’t had a chance to go through all of the photographs from the trip just yet (I was eagerly finalizing the photographs from the beautiful wedding I second shot a few weeks ago!), I wanted to share a quick sneak peek of a handful (or three) of photos in the meantime. I’ll upload the full collection to the gallery section next week!
A quick story about the photo below – We had just pulled up to a market to buy some poke and I couldn’t believe it when I saw these three cars parking across the street. I immediately ran over to take a picture, deciding that the poke could wait although it was 3pm and I hadn’t eaten all day. The cars all belonged to one family, who I thanked immensely for parking their three awesome cars on the street. They were equally intrigued and asked me to email them a few of the photos that I took, so I can’t wait to share this photo with them!
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This past weekend was INCREDIBLE, and I couldn’t leave for my “Flora and Rory joint 30th birthday celebration vacation” without giving a sneak peek of the pictures sitting on my hard drive. I attended not one, but two weddings last weekend, and they will always be perfectly etched into my memory (the pictures will serve as a good refresher as I get older though).
First, I was invited to assist an amazing photographer, Marielle Hayes, at a wedding in Berkeley on Saturday. Let me just say that Marielle is so much fun to be around, and the love and beauty she captures in her pictures is incredible. I absolutely adore her, and hope that we will not only get to work together again, but also become friends! In addition to working with Marielle, I was so lucky to have the chance to photograph Clarissa and John’s wedding because they are such a wonderful couple, amazingly talented singers, and threw a beautiful wedding filled with laughter, singing, crossword puzzles, and milkshakes! I have pulled just a few of my favorite pictures, but will have more to share in a couple of weeks.
The second wedding I attended was for my friends, Thomas and Terry. I was a guest at this wedding, but managed to sneak in a few pictures of the absolutely gorgeous ceremony and reception! Terry and Thomas got married in Jackson Hole Wyoming, against the backdrop of Teton Range. Their wedding was gorgeous in every way, and it was so fun to celebrate their day with amazing friends!
And now for the sneak peek…
Clarissa and John’s wedding:
Terry and Thomas’ wedding:
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Now I know this is technically my second blog post, but I am still considering it part of my first long-winded “why I started this blog” post. I promise part two will be filled with more pictures, and ones not taken with a disposable wind-up camera from last decade.
Photography has been a hobby of mine for a long time, and over the years my hobby turned into a passion. Nothing can describe the love I feel when I look through that viewfinder, and compose a memory of that single moment. During my childhood I used to think that I didn’t have an artistic bone in my body – I can’t sing or play an instrument or draw for the life of me – yet when I pick up my camera, attach just the right lens and set the aperture and shutter speed just so, I am finally able to be creative and compose something beautiful! When I hold a camera I feel happy and excited and worry free. Photography has become not only my passion, but also my addiction.
I know I still have much left to learn, and at this point becoming a photographer feels more like a dream than a reality, but something in my heart tells me that I have to explore that possibility. I hope one day I will have brides and grooms and fiancées and fiancés and families looking to me to capture their special day and their endless love. In the meantime, I will do everything I can to assistant and second shoot with photographers who are living their dream and capturing happily ever afters! I can’t wait to get to know couples and families beaming with love, and meet amazing people along the way. On this blog I will write about my journey behind the camera. I will share my own stories, and the stories of the couples and families in the photographs…the love behind the smiles, the stolen glances, and the tender embraces.
I have been working on pulling some of my favorite pictures that I have taken over the years to post in the gallery section, but until I get them all organized and up there, I wanted to share a few pictures in this post. They range from Boston’s sunsets to Santorini’s caldera, from hummingbirds to gargoyles, from real boats to toy boats, and lots of colorful things in between.
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There is a lot of pressure when writing your first blog post (ever)! Where do you start? Perhaps with the “hello world” ice breaker? Or maybe reciting my life story from birth to the Dunkies k-cup coffee that I’m currently enjoying? Maybe I’ll just start with the obvious – I LOVE PHOTOGRAPHY!
I can recall exactly when I fell in love with it. It was the summer of 1997, and I was spending a summer abroad taking Physics and Shakespeare classes at Oxford University. What I came back home with was not books, but rather 24 rolls of film. It was the wind-up, one-time-use disposable camera kind – no preview LCD screens, no do-overs, no auto focus, no manual setting – and for all I knew it was going to be a big expensive blurry mess. In those days, you had to develop a roll if you were ever going to see what was on it. It cost around $7 to develop each roll and, needless to say, when the cash register rang in at just under $200 I felt guilty as my mom reached for her wallet.
The pictures, to my delight, had come out pretty well for the high caliber technology used in capturing them! There was one picture in particular that stood out, which has been fading and collecting dust in its 4×6 frame in my childhood bedroom for the past 14 years. Here it is, scanned and uploaded (apologies for the poor quality):
While it was no Ansel Adams, I probably should have started pursuing photography right then and there. After all, I did have a thirst for photography in my genes – my dad loved photography too, and in his 20s and 30s was always taking black and white photos of me when I was a baby and developing them in his own dark room. In fact, when my parents were immigrating to the United States from Ukraine (I was 6 at the time), they brought very little with them, but one thing they did bring was my dad’s Zenit-E SLR camera. While in Italy, en route to Boston, a pickpocket stole my dad’s wallet (which contained our only money for the trip), and my parents had to sell their most valuable possession – the camera – to get to the US.
Well, since this post is already a bit long and since I don’t think anyone aside from my wonderful husband and family will even know that I’ve started this blog, I will pause here for now…
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