JD and Emmalee

I was able to go have a great day with my boyfriends brother, and his soon to be wife, and take their engagement pictures! Here are some of the proofs. Tell me what ya think!

The 2nd Annual Graff/Buffalo Wedding

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On Sunday, June 12th,  I had the honor of photographing one of the most beautiful weddings I have ever been too. That of Russ and Anna (Graff) now Buffalo! I thought that I would give the family as well as the bride and groom, and all of the other followers a little sneak peak of the pictures I took. We will see which ones the couple like best when I meet with Anna today!

Peter Gasser

 Peter Gasser is one of America's premier artists. He specializes in the art of photography. An art that is so hard to be excellent at,
Peter Gasser really has the art down and knows how to produce amazing images. As this quote from one of the Getty's many books published on photography, Gasser states that photography is an act of love, it can reinstate the world around the photographer and the viewer. I fell the same about photography as he does, in fact, this quote basically sums up what I think about photography.


He was born in Switzerland in 1947 and has always had a strong connection with the arts. He loves music an has since he was a child. Gasser feels that music can determine a persons photography more than they know. There is a strong connection between the photography a person takes and the music that a person listens too.

He has recently turned from landscape photography to shooting people, which is where he resides in his art today. He has had many famous icons that he loves to study, such as Ansel Adams, Brett Weston, and Paul Caponigo. Like them he is a superb crafts man when it comes to his photography. He produces his own prints and develops them himself in the old style in a darkroom.

His photography is quite amazing because he isolates a certain element of an area and focuses on them specifically to create unity in his pictures as well as a sense of individuality for the subjects that he is shooting. He has a way of making them look special and unique.
They are some of the most beautiful pictures I've ever seen. I have just recently found this artist and can not stop looking at his prints because they are just so very beautiful! I love them! I like how he plays with light and makes the subjects look so interesting and deep. He is just an amazing photographer in my opinion, and I would one day love to shoot images like he does. The complexity in his pints is also amazing because they just have a way of stunning the viewer whether its the first time you have seen his pictures, or you are a follower of this artist. I just am in love with these and they are truly a form or art for me. It seems as though you can really tell exactly what he was feeling and thinking when he takes each and every one of his photos and that it what I love about photography.

Final Project #2

So today we finished our projects for our final. We also started installing a little bit. But the majority of our time was spent painting the figures and putting them back together after they began falling apart during the weekend. It was somewhat disappointing to see them all fall apart, but we figured out how to get them back together, and it was better from then on. They look pretty epic, and I'll have pictures on thursday about them.
I think that I will continue to write on my blog, however I'm a little hesitant because I don't really like it. But I think I will post some of my pictures so some of my friends that I don't see a lot can keep up with my photography. I do think its useful for that.
I find blogging a really interesting subject because of the way that many people feel about it. It bothers me mostly because of the fact that whatever I put up here is accessible to everyone and it will never go away. Which is why I'm a bit hesitant  to put my pictures up here because people could steal them. So that's a little unnerving. However, I do put watermarks on my pictures, so that will help a little bit.
I have an art history test this week. I'm not really excited about it. Its our last one however, so that'll be nice! It covers Romanesque and Gothic art mostly. I think that these two time periods are really interesting because its like they forgot about the classical artists and styles and just started doing whatever. It is very interesting to me how the arts were only used to teach people about religion and not really for hte sake of doing art. It makes me somewhat sad. I guess, however if we didn't have these times we wouldn't have the art we have today, so for that I am happy!

underwater photography

So lately I have become really interested in the art of underwater photography. I think that this is a really unique art form because of the way that people look underwater. The liquid has a unique ability to catch almost everything that makes up your body and move it in a way that makes it beautiful. You can shoot many things underwater, but my favorite pictures that come from under the water is of human bodies.
This is an extremely challenging  area of photography because of the special equipment that is used as well as the fact that water has a way of distorting things that shooting around can be really hard. One of the major things that water distorts are the waves lengths of colors that the person, animal, plant, or other subject puts off. It can be especially tricky to get what you see in real life to translate onto the camera's memory.
I think that this is probably one of the the challenges that the photographer meets with a happy heart. I believe that you have to be a pretty dedicated person to work on your images that hard to ensure a beautiful shot. There are ways to prevent the loss of color from happening as bad however. You should always use a wide angled lens so that you can get extremely close to the object that you are shooting and you should use a flash to restore some of the color in the object of your focus.
Many times you can shoot underwater with the camera that you already own, you just have to buy some simple things, like a water proof case and flash, to keep your equipment safe. Many like to shoot underwater because it produces beautiful pictures and they are ones that can not be replaced.
I have never shot underwater, but I really would love to try it out. I think that it could be a really fun experience and it would help me further my portfolio and my skill set for the future job that I want of being a photographer.

Some more of my pictures and what I think about them

So I took this picture this summer, actually when I was driving up to come to orientation for college. It was taken somewhere in Oregon, and I really like it. I think that its a little different than the stereotypical picture of person with camera in car mirror because of the surroundings that were happening when I was taking the picture. I think that my mom was like freaking out because I had just gotten my new camera, and I was literally holding it out of the car to get the shot, and my dog was like nudging my other arm, we had all been in the car for like ever!, and everyone was pretty tired of this trip lol.  So what do I do? add some excitement to our trip and start taking pictures. :) I also think that this picture is down right sweet because of the fact that the mirror is perfectly crisp, but the outside is blurred, this is pretty hard to achieve, and I kept taking the picture until I got this effect. I also like the mountain in the back....... kinda looks like a pyramid (my art history nerdyness coming out, sorry). Any ways, I just really like this picture, and it kinda means a lot to me because if you notice it shows my class ring on my finger, so its kinda like looking back at the past, high school, while the current is passing by me, which is something that I try to avoid, because I want to live my life to the fullest.

So this picture I took at a wedding a few months a go. It was some of Ben and I's friends getting married, it was super cute! Anyways, this was after the wedding, and we were getting ready to leave, and someone handed me this rose. I thought that it was beautiful! So, since it was a wedding, and there was white everywhere, I layed it on a white surface, because monotone is very appealing to the eye in pictures like this.
This is actually one of my favorite pictures that i have taken in a long long time. I like how the rose is a bit worn out, and how you can really see that in the picture, it really makes me have an emotional reaction to this scene because you don't know if it was at a wedding or prom or something, without me telling you. It is not very specific to the event, which I think in some pictures, works. This is one of them. I really love how the depth is also portrayed in this picture because of the way the stem lays in the background. It is just a really beautiful composition.

Last one for today. I took this picture at a county fair in Twin Falls county, where I'm from. It was at the rodeo, and I was so excited to be going! It was the first rodeo that I'd been to in awhile, so it was pretty awesome! I love the sun-rays that are present in the picture and how it bounces off the lens, hence the dots. I think that the image content is really cool too, because I love horses. This may not be the best picture, but it is definitely not a bad one I think. I really just love the ruggedness of the dirt and the whole idea of the beginning processions at the beginnings of rodeos, so its a really stunning picture for me. I also like how it reflect something that this part of the country takes seriously, and that is the sport of rodeo, and also the beauty of the opening scenes of this epic sport.

Owyhee County Historical Society Museum

This weekend I had to the chance to drive the treacherous roads to Murphy, Idaho. Apart from it being a learning experience for me, since I am just learning how to drive, it was a trip that was packed with information about the Owyhee Indians. Much of what remains of the historical things that these Indians used are in this museum, preserved for all to see. I really wished that I had my camera, so I could show you what the museum looked like, but I forgot it. I should really start carrying it around with me, so because it seems lately you never know what I'm going to come across in this great land. Just in case you don't know where Owyhee county is, I've included a map. Its the biggest county in the state of Idaho.

Any who, I loved this museum. It was small and personal, which are the exact museums that I like. There were so many things to looks at when you first walked in, but it was not overwhelming, so I read it all! First there was the history of the Horny Toads that populate the land, then a day in the life of an Indian that would have lived there, then there was the history of what happened when the westerners came over and displaced the Indians, and even an first eye account of how the Indians fought back.
My favorite part of the museum was, well I actually had several, but I think that the one that resignated with me the most was the exhibit that included around 200 spurs and 500 or so bits for horses. I liked this one the best because I am an avid horse rider, and love the metal work that goes into these pieces of art, or at least that is how I view them. I thought that many of the pieces were wonderfully crafted and you could tell that they were made with expertise. The most amazing thing that I found out while I was there was the fact that all of these artifacts were collected by one man, and he kept record of everyone that he had, as well as where he got them from, and if the history was given about how old it was, who used it and such, he had it down. I truly believe that if we did not have people like this man that collected all of these things, and really searched for the history of each item in his collection, a lot of our history about this land would be gone. We have already lost so much history, it a shame, but without individuals like this, much more would be gone.
I thought that this was a really interesting museum and it held a lot of old art and artifacts that I think have become so everyday to us in our society that we quickly forget to realize the art in everything.