One of my favorite times to photograph is right after a rain storm. The sky is cold, dark, and sad making everything else seem over saturated; the colors just pop.
Plus, I absolutely love shooting flowers (or leaves) with the little water droplets on them. Justin was amused I was abusing my powers of telephoto lens and pretending it was a macro lens when I was taking this picture.
Over the weekend, the wedding shoot I was planning and prepping for canceled on me. It was frustrating in that I had made a few purchases I would not have made otherwise including my lovely new 60d. I'm excited that I will have awesome equipment for taking on the many vacations that Justin and I have coming up, but, because of said extra expenses that we could not afford, Justin and I decided to attempt to conquer our food budget goals. (That was the only area we felt we could really cut down on.) We went on a trek to a bunch of food places to see where we could find food the cheapest.
The one place we wanted to go, The Restaurant Depot, was closed due to a power outage, so we traveled on to Costco. While at Costco, we found 2 whole (young) chickens for $10. Apparently, one chicken is that price at the Farmer's Market. We bought the chickens yesterday thinking that maybe if we include more meat in our diet, we will be better able to buy in bulk and save money on our overall grocery budget. For the past year our diets have consisted of mostly fresh vegetables (not always on sale) and only rarely would we include meat of any kind. I'm hoping that by being more inclusive of meat, Justin and I will be able to expand our meal options without expanding our budget.
Just before heading home, we did, inevitably, stop by the Farmer's Market to get some fresh vegetables and yogurt.
(Julia Child always says to respect your food. I'm not quite sure how cutting up a chicken is being respectful, but, if anyone was respecting it, Justin was. I would probably have been doing my best to not even touch it!)
Personal lessons I took away from this weekend:
1. Don't buy equipment until you have a signed contract. Verbal agreement is not an actual agreement even a week before said shoot.
2. My photography is worth something. The time and effort I have spent perfecting my skill is really showing through with my new camera. All of a sudden, getting a good shot is almost effortless. Rather than struggling to get the right shot, I get to worry about perfecting the right shot. It takes one's photography into a totally different ballgame.
3. Food is expensive, but two chickens provide a lot of meat.
Lessons you should take away from this:
1. Don't ever let close friends and family shoot your wedding. The lady I was going to shoot for decided to go with her son-in-law. I can almost guarantee you that the photography will suck if she gets it back. I have been to two weddings where this has happened and both couples were glad someone else (me) was there to take images. In the first wedding, the friend ran off with the images never to be seen or heard from again. In the second scenario, the photographer provided the images, but they were all blurry. Do you really want either of those situations to happen to you?
Here's what you don't know about photography. The time you are paying for goes to preparation for your shoot, shooting you, and then editing afterwards. Preparation for your shoot begins the minute your photographer first touches a camera. Hopefully, they have had a mentor in their life to guide them and help them develop their skill. Preparation also usually includes the equipment needed: a computer with Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, a DSLR camera, a flash, lenses, other various equipment, and a website to share your images with you. After your shoot, you can expect any number of things to happen including color adjustments, sifting through images so that you only get the very best, and small edits that clean up your pictures. Your photographer probably even knows (and has researched) the very best places to get your images printed or designed into an album. So unless you know photoshop, you are getting a pretty good deal by choosing a photographer.
2. Always let your husband cut up the chicken. ;)
So there you go. In a nutshell, that was my weekend (and rant about photography).
