Beach Fun at I Heart Faces!!!

It's Beach Fun Week at I Heart Faces and that makes me happy because I love the beach. I love the sand. I love the heat. I love the smell. I love the water. I don't love the memory of my four jellyfish stings last year. I love the time spent with family and friends. I love the relaxation. I love the wind. I don't love the mosquitoes. I love the food. I love being lazy. I love drip castles. I love sand dollars. I love the memories.

One of my favorite memories from our beach trip this year was when we realized, while cooking dinner, that the sunset was going to be really pretty. The teenagers scattered to find the perfect outfits, we turned off the stove, grabbed our cameras and raced to the other end of the island to the perfect sunset photo capturing spot. We got there a little past the prime "setting" time but we had a great time anyway.

This is the kind of picture teenagers prefer to take. As the mother of a teenage boy, I have learned to embrace the goofy face picture. I've learned I will always remember what his real smile looks like, so I never want to miss the funny, goofy, silly faces he and his friends make. Those are the shots you can't duplicate and the ones I don't want to miss. Plus, those will be the funny one to show off twenty years from now.

Check out the other fun beach photos over at I Heart Faces.

It's Pet Week at I Heart Faces

Blogworld, meet Velcro! I love him. He is 10 years old and was once a mighty warrior. He's gotten some battle scars over the last few years as he has defended his turf from the younger neighborhood cats. Back in the glory days, he could wander the streets and love on all of the people along his route. He loved our next door neighbor's greyhound. He would reach up, put his paws on the dog's shoulders and stretch. Fester loved Velcro because he let Velcro "hug" him.
Velcro got his name because as a kitten, he would latch onto your clothing and wouldn't let go. He loves people. He likes to eat stewed tomatoes, the dog's food and cantaloupe. I really do feed him cat food. He still hasn't quite forgiven us for getting a dog...four years ago. Secretly, I know he loves the dog.
Over the years he has left me many "gifts": Birds, moles, snakes, squirrels, mice, a rat and a potato. I still don't know where he found that potato. We had a kitty door once but got rid of it after he brought in a live bird, a live mouse and the rat. Thankfully, the rat was dead.
I find myself taking more pictures of Velcro these days because he is in the golden years of his life. I just know that when his time comes, he will see his old greyhound friend again and I'm sure they will hug as old friends do.
I know you probably can't see the cute iheartfaces blog button above. Their blog is going through some updates and some images are not available right now. I guess this is one of them. I don't want to wait for it to get fixed b/c I might miss the entry deadline. Don't worry, you can click on this link and go right on over to I Heart Faces to see all of the other cute pets.

Celebrating teens, which do I choose?

I'm getting ready to enter the challenge at iheartfaces.com and I will be killing two birds with one stone with this post.

1. I will be sharing shots from a fun photo shoot with three fun girls.

2. I will get to see my photographs on the blog and will be able to choose which one I like the best.

With teenagers, there's always a creeper.

Never could get the hair twirling shot right.

Kissy face

Crazy

I hope they don't speak, hear or see evil anytime soon.

Dorks

Another creeper

Gorgeous

I Heart Faces Contest #25- Celebrating Teens

I'm SO excited about the I Heart Faces challenge this week because I have so many pictures from which to choose. I am surrounded by teenagers all the time and they are terrific people. I had such a hard time choosing a picture. I had some dorky ones, some goofy ones, some crazy ones, but I kept coming back to the gorgeous one. Just a few days shy of her sixteenth birthday, she's worth celebrating because she is kind, thoughtful, loving, full of life and just a little bit ditzy.

Check out all the other teens at iheartfaces.com

P.S. Check out the dorky teenagers here.

I Heart Faces Contest - Yellow

I haven't participated in an I Heart Faces challenge in a few months and I really had no intention to compete this week. The theme is yellow, and while a lot of my Spring shots had yellow pollen in them, they didn't have a human face so they weren't appropriate. I also haven't had a lot of time recently to prepare props or set up a fun photo op. Then I remembered one of my favorite "oops" pictures. I am sharing a shot that came SOOC. It is totally overexposed and on the wrong setting but... he's wearing a yellow sweater. I knew immediately that it would be a "throw away" shot but when I looked at it on the computer, I loved it and it's imperfections. Plus, the overexposure gives it a yellow hue. Ha! A perfectly imperfect shot for Yellow Week at I Heart Faces.

Head on over to www.iheartfaces.com and check out all of the other lovely and properly exposed yellow themed photos.

Playing Catch Up Part 2...The Photos

Here are some of my favorite shots from the last month or so.

My friend Ian in his last high school soccer game.

It was a bad year for pollen!!!

Hummingbirds have returned!!! Actually, I saw my first one back in April, but they haven't been hanging around too much.

My BFF, Rooty the squirrel. He or she is quite convinced I am a squirrel stalker.

Playing with shutter speed. The fountain at Winthrop University.

Some of the over 2,000 hot dogs we cooked and served at our Special Olympics Spring Games

The handsome young men going to prom. I guess I should have included the beautiful young ladies too. Oh well, my handsome young man is the second from the left.

Front porch visitor

Backyard visitor

Spring flowers

Playing Catch Up

I'm going to take a few minutes and play catch up with my blog. Since I'm way behind, it feels like I'll never catch up. Well, here is what's happened since April...

I finished my big, big digital scrapbook project and it turned out really well. I completed a second digital scrapbook for a teacher friend for her end of the year celebration. (I need to figure out how to post video to the blog. I just haven't tried yet.)

I worked and worked and worked at my job. The last six weeks have been super busy but really fun. We had several Special Olympics competitions and lots of fun classes.

I've had lots of fun enjoying the great weather. I've taken lots of pictures and I hope to post some of them soon. I actually have four posts that I started over the last month or so and never finished. I think I will go with the short, but sweet posts for now so I won't get b(l)ogged down.

I'm Still Here

To the few people who read this...I'm still here. I'm enjoying a week off from work, sitting in the sun, being lazy and taking random pictures. I will post them later. What I'm really busy doing is finishing a big digital scrapbook project for my church's 225th anniversary celebration. Since December people have been giving me their old pictures to scan and then I am putting them all together into a digital format with music. I am getting close to being able to get everything in some sort of order because I finished scanning everything today! Whew. Let the creative process begin. I'll post Easter pictures soon.

Bad Shots and Birthday Wishes

New camera = 2, Wendy = 0. I've yet to be really happy with the results I get with my new camera. I really knew how to work my old point and shoot. I'm not complaining and I'm not in a big rush. I enjoy experimenting and reading the manual. I have just been short on time to practice or it has been raining. You can read about the weather here. Now the shots I take in auto or scene modes are good and some are even great, but that's not the point.

Yesterday I decided to take the afternoon off from work and go shoot. My photo buddy Kathy and I decided to see what we could find around town. Kathy has a new super duper lens she's trying to figure out and I was going to play with my polarizing filter. I got some neat shots with the filter. Although most of the time, I forgot it was on so a lot of my shots looks darker than they actually were. Camera = 1 Oh well, I don't mind showing off my good and bad shots. There aren't any real keepers in this post though. I also at some point turned my camera to aperture priority and didn't really realize it. Camera = 2.

Here is an angry goose. He or she, I don't know the difference, was very bossy and was actually chasing all the others away. Luckily, my basic enhancing tool was able to lighten it up nicely, then I cropped it.

Here you can see I got a nice effect with the filter but still had to lighten up the photo. Still nothing to write home about.

I got the detail I wanted in the top flower. Improvement.

I like the detail in this one too, but I had forgotten I still had the polarizing filter on...

so, it had to be lightened too. Not bad, but not exactly true color either. Still working to learn photoshop too. I think I'll let this one go and focus on the camera right now. I am amazed at everything photoshop can do, but I believe you should try to make the camera take the picture you want. Then you edit if needed.

I am happy with the colors in this shot, although the composition is just blah.

So there you have it. Although I don't have breathtaking photos to show off, I learned a lot.

Happy Birthday to my dear friend Patsy. I wish I was celebrating your birthday with you. I hope you have a great day! This will not make sense to anyone but Patsy, but here is your poetry tidbit ...

We walked in the bar

and gave our ID's

Chris at the door said,

two dollars please.

What kind of beer?

That was the question.

Bottle or can?

She had a suggestion.

Pitchers it was!

We'd save and be wise,

cause Chris at the door

liked to see Patsy kiss guys.

Have a great weekend everyone!

Rain and Funny Faces

In my neck of the woods we are waterlogged, soaked, growing gills and just plain tired of the rain, sleet and snow... but mostly rain! Since December, we have had over 16 inches of rain. Here is a recap of our weather since about November. It's been raining, cold, raining, even colder, raining, snowing, really cold, kinda cold and raining. We've had days where the sun was shining but it was on one of those cold days. UGH! I'm a warm weather gal. I need a warm day with sunshine soon. Since the weather forecast says it is supposed to rain tomorrow and I'm kinda grumpy about it, I will cheer myself up by posting some of my favorite pictures from Special Olympics.

One of my favorite things about taking photographs of people is when they are acting silly. My friend Kathy would always have the children she photographed make a silly face at the end of a session. They always looked forward to it and sometimes those were the best pictures. I run a camp in the summer and we had a counselor who always cracked us up when she was in a picture. She was always doing something crazy like pretending to pick her nose, making strange facial expressions, sticking out her tongue, etc. Pretty soon we would just say, "Lindsay, make a funny face." A tradition was born and the kids and adults would line up to pose for a funny face picture. We take funny face pictures all of the time now. Sooooo, I have many pictures and I love the personalities that shine through each photograph. Last weekend I was helping coach our bowling team at our state's Special Olympics competition and I took these pictures of one of my favorite athletes. He makes the best faces. He also won a medal and was very proud.

Make a funny face

Woo Hoo, way to go!

Coaches can make funny faces too.

Water fountain at the waterfront park in Charleston, SC

The muddy water looked like it was boiling as it rolled in on these tiny waves.

Enjoy the weekend. Have fun. Spend time with your friends and/or family. Set your clocks forward because it will be daylight savings time this weekend!!! Can I get a hip hip hooray because that means Spring is on the way!!!!

Jump For Joy

The photo challenge this week is "Jump for Joy" at i♥faces. This picture represents joy for many different reasons.

1. We were celebrating sweet Anna's 15th birthday.
2. It brings back memories of a warm summer evening spent with friends and family.
3. They jumped at the same time!!! Oh Joy!!!
4. This shot captures their personalities perfectly. They were being goofy teenagers. My son picked up a toy sword and she was wearing stickers on her face from The Little Mermaid.
5. It is a joy that they are in my life, my sweet son Tyler and our friend Anna.

Go check out all of the other photos at i♥faces by clicking on the logo.

I Heart Faces # 9 - Hilarious Outtakes

Here are my hilarious outtakes for the weekly photo contest. The ones I thought of immediately were of my friend's son right after he fell into a pile of sand. I had been taking pictures at our church softball game and as we were both running to help him I said, "Wait! Don't wipe his face, I want to get a picture." The first one was taken while he was still unsure of what had happened to him and the next he was starting to ham it up for the camera.

In this photo I was being attacked by a baby holding one of those glow sticks. One minute he was posing for a sweet picture and the next thing I know he attacks. It is one of my favorite pictures.

While this photo doesn't have a human face, it cracks me up. It probably won't qualify for the contest but I couldn't resist adding the squirrel that gave me the side eye!!!

Thanks for checking in with me. Have a great week.