instant happiness

photographing the emerald isle

Yesterday we booked our plane tickets for our June trip to Ireland. I am SO excited...and already writing lists in preparation for the trip. What to pack, what to do before we leave, and what to do while we're there. Predictably, at the top of my list is photo gear! Friends, followers, and travel photogs...I'd love your input!

rushing the field

I remembered I had these photos from a football game way back in fall 2009 and wondered how they'd look as a sequence.  I dug them out (hoping I took four so I could have made a square collage, but there were only three) and scanned them...I might find a way to hang them on the wall (possibly enlarged) sometime in the future as a happy little reminder of college.
This football game was one of the best, if not the best, I attended at Virginia Tech, an edge-of-your-seat (who am I kidding...students don't sit) event against Nebraska that, if you can't tell, ended in victory for the Hokies!

port cros

summercamp

upward: beyond shutter-happy

jockey's ridge

middle school "photography"

a year ago today

fall film swap

antibes

ireland: us

tende

One of the side trips we took during my study abroad trip to France was a hike in the French Alps.  I recently chose a photo from that day to put as my desktop image on my computer and so I've been thinking about that hike a lot.  Decided to go through the photos and choose a few to post (there were 254 photos from that day, many of them almost identical cause I mean there were just a lot of really pretty mountain views, ha).

Train ride photos = favorite photos?

via julia-augusta

I'm in the process of backing up my photos to my external hard drive, and in doing so, I keep getting distracted and going through the pictures and remembering things (of course, I also have an essay to be writing and plenty of other things that need to get done before I go back to school this weekend).  Anyway, I'm just sitting here reminiscing about how absolutely gorgeous France was and how I don't think I fully appreciated it while I was there (but now that it's winter, I certainly appreciate its beauty).  Here are some photos from the day we took a trip up a winding road to visit a winery--Via Julia Augusta, if I'm not mistaken.  I don't remember many of the intricacies of the nature of the name or the grapes but I remember the wine tasted nice.  It was my first official wine tasting :)

ireland between 12 and 24mm

After browsing Flickr for a bit this morning, I got to thinking about how I don't use my wide angle lens (that I got for Christmas last year) as much as I should anymore.  The times I've put it to the most use have been during my two big overseas voyages--Ireland last winter and France this past summer.  I think my rationale has been that I don't know if I'll ever get to visit those places again, so when I'm taking photos, I want to capture as much of the scene as possible--literally.  So, much to my neck's dismay (my Tokina is very heavy), my wide angle rarely leaves my camera.  I guess as with any lens, it takes a while to get the hang of shooting with it.  My Ireland photos, as a result, aren't the best (I got on the plane a short 2 days after finding the lens under the Christmas tree) but I'm working on it.  Here are a bunch of wide shots I've selected from the archives.

breil

I just spent a little time browsing Facebook photo albums from a particular day near the end of my study abroad experience this past summer.  It's certainly one thing to take, review, and share a batch of photos in quick succession, but it's quite another to go back through, revisit, and remember a particular collection of photos from a quite different chronological standpoint.  My trip to France was full of activity and photos, but I don't think I've ever taken the time to go back and re-appreciate the experience through the pictures I amassed (perhaps because of the sheer volume--over 5,000 total, I think?  I can hardly remember).  So, taking it bit by bit (day by day) seems like a much more reasonable endeavor.

Anyway, a few days before we got on the plane to come back home, my roommate for the month and I went on a side-trip with our trip advisor to a place called Breil Sur Roya.  We passed through it on the train on our way to the hike we did in the French Alps (Tende--there are plenty of photos from that trip too) and were told that it was a beautiful place, worthy of a visit.  While the majority of the rest of the students ventured to the Italian border to do some shopping, we got on the train to visit this small French town, to meet with someone to discuss future study abroad activities, and to bring our lunch with us up a short but steep hike on a peak to overlook the town.  The hike was tough since I'm never in shape for that sort of thing, but the view was worth it...

A village from the window of the train

botanical gardens

I have taken a particular liking to photos taken inside greenhouses, and would like to visit as many more as I possibly can.  Call it cliche, but botanic gardens are some of my favorite places to take a camera.  I may post some of my favorites from other photographers that I have come across on the internet, but right now I'll stick with posting my own.

National Botanic Garden of Ireland, January 2010