My Best Friend's Wedding [Dress]

Last fall I visited my best friend Melissa in Kansas City, and we decided it would be fun to do a shoot with her wedding dress. We went down to an old industrial area called the West Bottoms and made use of the amazing backdrops to work some different emotions into these images. Here are some of my faves.

We also had fun with the nice breeze we had. These images worked great for my first shot at an animated GIF. Easy, I know, but it's fun to know how to do that now. :)

Farmer's Market + Family Recipes = Delicious

Since we moved to Massachusetts, I've gotten into the habit of going to the Farmer's Market for most of my vegetables. There's just something wonderful about buying field-grown, hand-harvested potatoes directly from the farmer, and actually having to scrub the dirt off them before I cook them because they're so fresh. It has also made me pick up some things I might pass right over in the grocery store, because we'd just never tried them before. A couple of weeks ago I sauteed some Swiss chard with dinner one night, and two nights later I shopped up the chard ribs and tossed them into a delicious pasta. Needless to say, the Farmer's Market has certainly gotten us hooked on some veggies.

Last week I picked up a couple of eggplant, not really sure what I would do with them, as that was the first time I'd ever bought eggplant. Well, today I picked up a couple more, and Eric and I decided to try our hand at one of our family recipes, eggplant parmigiana. I got the recipe from my aunt's collection of family favorites, and since no one said the recipe was a secret, I decided to make it my photo project today. It's rather time-consuming, but so delicious you won't even mind!

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Start with male eggplant. (I cannot tell you what an awkward conversation it was when my mother explained to me how to distinguish between male and female eggplant. I have not had to ask since.) Since there were no measurements for the ingredients (you know, family recipes are all done to taste!), we estimated four eggplants. We used all four and it made two 8x8 baking dishes of eggplant parmigiana.

  
Slice eggplant into rounds about 1/4" thick. These will bake, which pulls out the moisture and causes them to shrink and shrivel, so I found that erring on the side of a little too thick was best.

Place slices on an ungreased baking sheet and brush with olive oil. Place in oven heated to 400^o. Cook for 12-15 minutes.

 

Remove the trays from the oven, use a spatula to flip slices over (careful, they will be soft and may want to stick to the pan!), brush other side with olive oil and bake for another 12-15 minutes. They should be brown and softened when finished.

While your eggplant is baking (since it will take a while), make a delicious savory marinara sauce. Coat the bottom of a baking dish with sauce. (I greased my baking dish with cooking spray--you can try it without if you want.) Layer eggplant on top, cover with marinara, and sprinkle with grated Romano or Parmesan cheese and a little bit of black pepper.

Continue layering sauce and eggplant, ending with sauce. Bake for about 15 minutes or until it is bubbling.
 

I topped mine with some shredded mozzarella cheese and put it back in the oven for a few minutes--just long enough for the cheese to melt.

  
TA-DA! Enjoy! It is also delicious as an open-face sandwich on a sliced baguette!


We paired with it some of our favorite wine: Grassy Creek Barbera. If you ever find yourself in North Carolina's Yadkin Valley, you should definitely add a stop at their tasting room to your list!

Kate Spade & Cute Puppies

My new iPhone case came in the mail today, and it's just so rockin' cool that I want to blog about it. It's Kate Spade, and I love Kate Spade's designs. If I can ever rationalize meeting the price on one of her cute purses, then someday I'll get one. For now, I'll stick with my $25 cell phone cover.


Caught the light on the porch just before it was too late.

Also, because she is just so adorable, here's a pic I took of a purebred blue pitbull that was at the Farmer's Market last week. She and her sister haven't been adopted yet. I wanted to take them both home with me, but if I could afford them, then I'd have a Kate Spade purse, too.

Our House in 12 Clicks

I did something today that I haven't done in three months: I went to work. Not an 8-5 like I've had for the last few years, but my own self-defined "work hours" for my photography business. I actually had a list of things for myself to do, too! One thing I'm trying to do is make sure I actually do shoot something every day, limiting myself to 12 clicks, if I'm just doing practice shots, to force myself to be more conscious of my settings and my composition and to be very deliberate when I press the shutter button. So, last night I asked Eric if he had any ideas for a loose theme for today's practice shots, and he said, "Hmm... do you think you can capture our house in 12 clicks?" Well, uhh... I can try!

Today's shots are not about giving you a collection of images that you can use to mentally construct our physical house, but about showing you the things that remind me that I actually *have a house* now, and how it is different from the apartment life we've known for the past five years. It wasn't so much an exercise in creativity--some of these images are good and some aren't--mostly about relating my feelings about having a house and, as always, practicing shooting on manual.

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I have never had my OWN place where I could paint the walls! I mean, I could have painted the walls in our apartment, but we didn't live in one place for long, and we'd have had to prime over everything before we moved out, and it just didn't seem worth the trouble to me. Now that we have a house, I get to paint! EVERYTHING! (Believe me, everything needs paint!) These are some color swatches for an accent wall in my office that I picked up at Lowe's yesterday. I had some trouble getting the colors in the image to match the swatch colors, but they are pretty close.

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Our kitchen is tiny. Not a ton of cabinet space. Also, our house was built in 1954, apparently before the invention of the corner cupboard, so we have a significant amount of "dead space," but that's for another post... When we first moved in a month ago and were moving things around, Eric's dad had the awesome idea to put our bookshelf in the kitchen. It works great for extra storage space, and it's always fun rearranging the display! This is my favorite shelf. It showcases the bowls that we bought in Santa Fe on our Western US trip a few months ago. As soon as I started looking at how I could use the bookshelf in the kitchen, I visualized this display. I like the simplicity of it.

 

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Since we bought a house, Eric's family offered to give us his great-grandmother's piano. Of course, there was no way we would turn down a piano, especially one that was such a part of the family! It's nice to finally have the space for a full-size piano.

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In my first home-buying experience, I have learned that the decor is not always up to date--especially in the old, colonial houses of New England. We're inheriting someone else's tastes. We'll have to work on making this place our own... not to mention making it current with the times in general. To answer your question, yes, that is definitely avocado green window trim. Fortunately, it's only on the bathroom window.

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Eric and I both have really enjoyed having a nice big porch. We can hang our plants and wind-chimes without wondering if we are breaching our lease with noisemakers or ruining the "overall aesthetic consistency" of the property, and look out at the yard we have and the street where we live instead of at all of the other apartment buildings in a complex. At the end of the yard you can also see the yellow flowers surrounding our mailbox. We don't have to make a special trip to the office anymore to pick up our mail (or risk the management losing our packages!).

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We have a full basement. It definitely trumps the storage closet we had in our old apartment.

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Recognize this? We didn't either until our ADT rep enlightened us. It's the phone jack for our land line, and, yes, that is our phone plugged into it. We now have a house phone. Neither of us has had our own land line since we left college. In our defense, when we first looked at it, there was an old telephone plug stuck in the jack, missing the wire, and previous owners had painted over it. We had to scrape the paint and dig out the old phone plug. Also, we'd never seen a phone jack box on a baseboard. Did I mention that the house was built in 1954?

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We have hardwood on the first floor. I love it. I have always adored hardwood floors. And, it follows that we also have area rugs! This particular rug is a beautiful, bold one that came from Eric's parents.  

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In our apartment, the best we could do in the way of security is hope that no one jimmied the bolt lock on the front door. Now that we have a house, we can have an alarm system.

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We also have the space to keep lots of things that are special to us. On our way up to MA in July we picked up Eric's rock collection from his parents' house. He has an impressive collection of seashells and marine fossils, rocks and geodes, and Native American artifacts--much of it given to him by his grandfather. 

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We also have enough space now for Eric to have his own man cave (okay, it has a window, but it's still rather cave-like). Before we got married, he told me that I can do all of the decorating in any houses we ever have, as long as he can have one room for his video games and all of his decor. Behold, one of the prevailing themes in the man cave. He is a DP fanboy.

 

 

I ended up having to take two shots of the DP decor to get it right, so I only ended up with 11 useable house shots.  

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Bonus Shot: I actually took this shot last Wednesday. For dinner that night we made salads that included some delicious local veggies from the Farmer's Market-- sauteed Swiss chard, heirloom tomatoes, fried potatoes, onion, cucumber, capers, pine nuts, and some homemade balsamic vinaigrette. It was fantastic.