The hours before my engagement, I was making Dez mad by taking photos on my phone in the middle of boot camp. :) WHAT ARE YOU DOING.
Sorry Dez! The photographer’s heart in me is never still.
What.
I am engaged?!
FYI I had not a single inkling on Tuesday night that the question was gonna be popped!
I actually went to boot camp and took the hastiest shower I have ever taken, had thrown on a tshirt, jeans and shoestring-less shoes and run out the door with wet hair into J’s car.
NO FRIGGEN IDEA.
As far as I was concerned we were just being our goofy selves as we drove down to Atlanta, singing Katy Perry loudly in the car along with my good bud Vargas.
When we rolled into the GT Hotel and Conference center I automatically asked to go to the top level so I could enjoy the spectacular view that I loved up there. J had the same idea. I didn’t even get it when I saw ALL MY TRIVIA FRIENDS PLUS SOME COLLEGE BUDS at the top. I thought to myself that they’d all been invited because it was a grand ol’ in-town trivia night!
JEREMY had to literally say “THIS IS ALL A LIE” before it dawned on my stupid stupid face that I was about to be proposed to, damp hair, hobo clothes and all.
He had this beautiful little speech that he spoke.. before asking me to marry him.
:) :) :)
Notice the pink GT on the wall? How randomly appropriate.
All sorts of cameras and phones were flashing around me. I couldn’t imagine a better place to be proposed to by my best friend in a circle of my wonderful, wonderful buds from all phases of my life, from elementary, to post-college. They had all planned this to fully surprise me and catch me off guard and man was the plan executed well. The fake e-mails, the changed plans, vargas & ami keeping their mouths shut all through boot camp.
I couldn’t ask for better friends or a better executed plan to surprise me.
Immediately after the romantic moment they dominated us with silly string. Best friends ever? Best friends ever.
Thanks to my good friend since middle school, Steve (in the giant beard) for these photos.
Afterwards we popped a large bottle of champagne, and spent the rest of the evening at Cypress Street. :)
It was a perfect night.
And for all you ladies that wanted to see the ring, here it is. :)
I love this photo so much. I took it this Saturday and everything about it came out perfect. I love the little bokeh created by the glow on the berries… and the color is spectacular. I can just see it as a 60 x 40 on my wall.
The autumn colors are coming out in stunning rainbow hues when matched against a stark blue sky.
Hello beautiful fall. :]
As an artist as well as an engineer I work hard and I work often. I can work for hours while still allowing my mind to break from the critical thinking in the free moments in between ideas and execution. This is where I would like music comes in. When I am heavily focused I can’t listen to music with a well-defined words. I have a mind that will follow along with the words and that really detracts from my ability to think. And if an engineer can’t think and focus on new things they arejust another code monkey. An artist repeating the same methods to produce images? They’re like a printer more than a creative being.
And definitely don’t want to be a monkey printer. But I still wanted music. I just decided not to have it at critical times.
I used to just turn all sounds off and work in silence. The atmosphere of silence, in long durations, can be uncomfortable for me, and tiring.
The other day I was browsing the Spotify feeds on Facebook and my fb friend Andrew Choi was listening to Tycho, an ambient music artist I had never heard of. Usually “ambient music” makes me think of elevator music or awful saxophone music played in cheap chinese restaurants. I’m all for trying new music though, and love exposing myself to new sounds because it actually impacts my creativity and it usually impacts it positively. Keeping an open mind towards other things in your sensory space is one of the keys, in my humble opinion, to being an evolving visual artist. I fired up Tycho’s latest album, Dive.
I LOVED IT.
It reminded me of Owl City but no words and more mellow. Gentle guitar mixed with soft synth noises and a beat that reminds me of a solitary summer morning filled my ears but didn’t go further. My mind was able to focus and my subconscious relaxed its shoulders a little.
I worked for a while listening to one album after the other in queue while I coded and wrote documentation at work and later at home while I processed photos and contemplated new angles and poses. This music is as much a tool now as my Wacom tablet. It’s a support for a part of my mind that needs to lounge while the other part works hard.
Check out Tycho. It’s a good, easy listen. And I didn’t realize this until today when I was looking for the album cover for this post but the artist is also a graphic designer. I love the multiple talents all of us have including our ability to share and improve everyone’s working experiences by just doing what we love. :)
Dive is my favorite Tycho album. Check it out on Spotify or on the Ghostly page.
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The last couple of weeks had me thinking this autumn was destined to be less than spectacular when it came to the colors in the trees. Everything appeared to be succumbing to a drab metamorphosis of dull greens and browns instead of changing flamboyantly as I had hoped.
I had resigned myself to the fact that fall would be visually skipped by nature and that we’d be ushered unwillingly into an early winter. The only color I had seen was in a parking lot at work, where all the trees were a dazzling red.I woke up early on Saturday to do a couples shoot in the park, already tinkering with the photos I was about to take inside my head, formulating all sorts of methods to bring a fall color set into what I thought would be dull photos.
It was cold as a dead dog in Russia that morning but the colors at the park were ON FIRE.
Completely unexpected!
This is a SOOC (straight outta camera) image. I have not touched a thing on it save for a resize.
I took like 600 pictures today of all the fall wonder that suddenly cropped up. I can’t wait to share them all!
J took the best picture I’ve had taken of me in a long time today. :)
It’s kind of awesome to have your S.O. be interested in your hobbies too and be good at it naturally. :)
He also managed to catch a rainbow across my face in another one. :) I thought it was kinda cool.
The sun says hello on a rainy morning
I saw a sexy car, enjoyed the fall, envied some birds and watched my beautiful kitty sleep. A good week for mobile photography don’t you think? :-)