One of my students asked me to take her senior pictures for her. I was extremely nervous because I take mostly pictures of plants and mountains, not really people.

We took her pictures at Gardner Village in West Jordan. These are my top 9 favorite photos. (I only took about 350 or so.)

This is Carly’s favorite!

While I was shooting Carly, she said that I would get the biggest smile on my face. I loved every moment of it. If I could do this for a living, I totally would. But there are so many photographers out there, so it will probably stay a hobby.

I recently drove from Riverton, Utah to Riverton, Wyoming for a job interview. Of course I had my iPhone on me and I snapped pictures from my car. Yes, I was driving, but hey, I was careful.

The long road ahead.

Sheep being herded on the road. I loved it!

Baaaaa!

Red Canyon

I drove through a wildlife preserve. They didn’t fence in any of the natural wildlife. So they had some great signs to warn you of the animals. Here are my favorites:

Slow moving traffic! Ha!

Who knew Antelope could run that fast?

Love the windmills!

It was a beautiful, sunny day for a drive.

You have the control.

The number 2 reason: you are actually smarter than your camera.

For example:

My mother and I recently went to look at the hugest fish you will ever see in your whole life. Seriously. They were like 8 foot long Sturgeon. Anyways. I wanted to get a picture of my mom in front of these giant fish and one very old and ugly salmon. I set my camera to automatic and this is the picture I got:

Umm, yeah. This just isn’t going to cut it. I didn’t know about the lighting and the glass and so I thought automatic would take care of me. Nu-uh. Terrible, terrible. So I opened up my aperture and slowed down my shutter speed, held really still and then I got this picture:

Much better. My mother actually has a face.

You might be asking, “But Lesli, couldn’t you have just used a flash.”

“Well yes. But then you get a glare and reflection off the glass.” So, you see. Don’t always trust your autmatic settings on your fancy cameras. Switch to manual. Then you have the control and the power over what your picture looks like. Because baby, you are much smarter than a piece of machine.

If you don’t have a fancy camera, well . . . . . This is probably the number one reason why I got one. I wanted all the power and control.

But I’m not a control freak.

I promise.

Okay,

maybe just a little.

While I was home for spring break a few weeks ago, we had one really good day where the sun was actually shining.  So, me and my mother went for a drive to the waterfalls that are on the Scenic Highway along the Columbia River Gorge.  Here are my best shots from the day.

This was near Multnomah Falls.

Horsetail Falls

Latourell Falls (That bright yellow is moss. Yes! Moss!)

And my best picture of the day . . .

Multnomah Falls

I think I am going to have this one printed on canvas.

I tried with all of these photos to extend the shutter speed so that it looked like the water was flowing. I’m really happy with the way these turned out.

I think that speaks for itself. But I must say that I’m glad I haven’t completely damaged my camera just yet.

Two new, yummy cheesy and minty recipes to come this week. That doesn’t sound right. One is cheesy and the other minty!

Recently a friend of mine emailed me to ask how to do a recipe I posted. I felt like a famous chef! Here is a pic she sent me of her husband.

He is making my Spicy Beef Enchiladas.  And they made them for a dinner party they were having – pretty brave to try a new recipe with guests.  They turned out nice (or so they tell me).  I love Jeff’s expression on his face.  Jeff – I too hate touching the messy sauce, but it is so worth it!

Also a student asked me to take get senior portraits. I feel almost like a professional photographer.  We are going to shoot her photos at Gardiner Village.  I can’t charge her because that would be unethical to do since I am her teacher, but I don’t really care.  She will pay the sitting fee for taking pictures at Gardner Village.  I just hope they turn out nice.

I woke up bright and early this morning to snow outside.  It was 8 am and I couldn’t sleep any longer.  (That is what happens when you give up caffeine I guess).  When I saw that it had snowed, I was just so excited.  This whole winter I have wanted to take pictures of the snow on the trees, but either I had to go to work, it was too dark, or it was really snowing badly and I didn’t want to ruin my camera.  But this morning was perfect. So I put on my shoes, got dressed, and bundled up to go for a walk and take some pictures.  Here are my favorites of the day.  None of these have been edited.

The snow plows have been down the street

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

I love all the mixtures of branches going every which way in this shot.

I feel a little sad for all the buds on the trees. They totally thought it was spring, but don’t they know that it always snows around conference?

Can you tell what this is a picture of? Look closely, then guess, then scroll down and see if you are right. Come on, play along, it will be fun.

.

…

…….

………….

Okay, it is the street. Under a small layer of ice, there are bubbles trapped. As I stepped on the ice, the bubble would move around. I was fascinated. And I almost didn’t even notice.

Now that this snow storm is over, we can finally welcome Spring. Goodbye Winter. I, for one, will miss you.

One of my favorite books and movies is A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean.  The writing is simple and beautiful.  His writing as a gentle poetic quality to it.  I just love it!

While taking photo’s the other week in the canyon, I came across a fly fisherman.  I sat entranced by his simple, rhythmic movements.  So, while I’m sharing the photos, I thought I would share some of my favorite quotes from the book.

“If our father had had his say, nobody who did not know how to fish would be allowed to disgrace a fish by catching him.  So you too will have to approach the art Marine- and Presbyterian-style, and, if you have never picked up a fly rod before, you will soon find it factually and theologically true that man by nature is a damn mess.”

“I could see the sun ahead.  The coming burst of light made it look from the shadows that I and a river inside the earth were about to appear on earth.”

“We sat on the bank and river went by.  As always, it was making sounds to itself, and now it made sounds to us.  It would be hard to find three men sitting side by side who knew better what a river was saying.  I river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.”

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.  The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks fro the basement of time.  On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops.  Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

I am haunted by waters.”

As I’m learning more and more about aperture and shutter speed and shooting on manual, I like to go out and experiment.

One thing that I read about was capturing water.

You could take a perfectly sharp photo of a creek like this.

Or you could stretch out your exposure time by adjusting your shutter speed. For the photo above, my shutter speed was set at 1/200. But the photo below was set at 1/4. That means that the shutter was open for 1/4 of a second thus allowing the water to move and the camera to capture it.

One important thing to remember when you are trying to capture water moving is to tighten up your aperture. Because your shutter is open longer, more light is coming into your camera, so you have to increase your aperture (which is really shrinking the size of the hole in your camera that captures light).

For example, in this shot the aperture is set at 5.6, the shutter speed is 1/125.

For this shot the aperture is set at 25 and the shutter speed is 1/13.

Because the shutter is open longer you have to close the aperture so that you don’t get too much light in and end up with something like this:

I hardly ever take pictures of people.  One of the main reasons is that I don’t really have too many people around me who are screaming “take pictures of me please!”  Because of that, I shy away from taking pictures of people.  But the other day I read this great blog post about taking portrait photographs.  Basically, it mentioned that the best focal length to take portraits is 70-100 mm and to stand 6-10 feet away.  I was really impressed by it and thought that I wanted to try it out.  So, I took my camera to a BBQ that a member of my staff was giving and took some shots.  They knew I was taking pictures, but most of them didn’t know I was taking pictures of them at the time.  I really liked it!  You see, when you zoom in on people, but stand further away, the backgrounds get a little blurry and soft and I really like that look.

These two are brothers. So cute!

Jeannie caught me and smiled for the camera. I’m not really happy about the lighting on her face. We were under the tree, in the shade. The sun was pretty harsh overhead and all the pictures I took of people not in the shade didn’t turn out. Since then I read this post about taking pictures in the sunlight.

I loved catching people as they really are. Russ like to talk with his hands and his father is more quiet and a listener. You can really see that in this photo.

My principal. He is a soft talker. You know the kind that you have to lean into to hear properly. When I look at this photo I can totally see that.

What a goof – Hannah!

Joel’s a little embarrassed. I think at the time we were teasing him about his girlfriend.

Anyways – I really did enjoy taking impromptu portraits. Over the next little bit, I want to try and take more and more portraits and try to get just a little bit better.