April 27,2011

That day has changed the history books here in Alabama as tornados tore through most of the state. The devastation is enormous!! Everyone in the state has been affected in some way. We are all working around the clock to put our state back together. So far 250 people are dead, and there are 2219 injured. Here are some photos from that day and the days after..

This is a photo of the Cullman county tornado I took from HWY 431 in Marshall County

This is the storm as it passed just north of Marshall County.. the tornado is rain wrapped at this point, however you can still see it over the mountain just to the right of the tree.

These are of some of the damage here locally.

This used to be a neighborhood.

This used to be a forest

This is also used to be a neighborhood.

If there was a silver lining to this storm, it is the kindness of the hearts of otheres!! Communities are helping communities, people from other states are coming together to help, it is simply amazing to see everyone pitching in to help!

How you can help:

Here are a few links that I KNOW are helping.

My church (MVC), Renovation Ministries, and Word Alive International Outreach have teamed up to be able to serve all those affected by this storm. Together we delivered 3 simi-trucks to the areas hit, the evening of the storms, and are making daily deliveries now, as well as coordinating volunteer teams that are working on clean up everyday. Here are the links to the all of these:

http://mvc3live.org

http://wordalive.org/relief/

http://renovationministry.epiclifecreative.com/#/home-1/

Not posting for a little while...

I will not be posting for a little while on here... obviously right? LOL I know its already been a while, I just wanted to make it official. Right now, my oldest child needs help. He has ADHD, and we are struggling because we do not have insurance. We are in the process of trying to get All Kids from BCBS, but so far have had no luck. You would think if you have a child with a disability the process would be just a little easier.. but apparently not. Right now its T-ball season, which is usually one of our families favorite times of the year, but because of all that is going on its not this year. Its just stressful. I am still taking pictures, still doing photography as a hobby, but I just don't have the time to put into it. Sorry guys for starting a 52 and not finishing.. I hate not finishing something, but right now my son has to come first, and getting all of this straightened out is just taking it all out of me right now. I just can't even seem to think about anything else right now.

7/52 - Cake Smash!

7/52 Cake Smash!

I got to take my youngest son's cake smash pics this week finally! I know I wasn't planning on doing portraits for my 52, but this past two weeks have been crazy hectic, so I don't know if I will be able to get something different! If so I will post that to make up for last week! LOL! So

here are a few from the cake smash I did with Josh!

All done in natural light with my new 35mm, at f/2.2

6/52

OOPS..... Yes, I missed this week! I did take pics this week, but I haven't even had time to sit down and download them!

5/52 - flaming shots

This week I played around with my flash a good bit! I saw a version of this on a blog (can't remember which, sorry!) and I had to try it! So I couldn't decide which version I liked better, the lighter one with the reflection or the darker contraster one! So you be the judge as to which looks better!

My set up:
My camera is set in Manual Mode, shutter 1/40, apt 1.8 using a 50mm prime. Off camera flash set @ 1/32, with red paper over it (I don't have gels) aimed at a white background. on camera flash is set to off but since it still has *some* light output to set the off camera flash, I covered it as well as to not get any flash reflection. The shot glass is on a stool about 1 ft off the ground, glass covered for reflection, flash behind it on the floor pointed at the background (which is a white sheet of paper). I filled the shot glass with 70% rubbing alcohol and set the fire.

I played with the aperture a bit to see what the different outcomes were, and this is what I got!

4/52 - Smoke

Ahhhh!!! 11:38 on the last day of my fourth week and I am posting what I just did! LOL! I thought I had left procrastination in the dust after college... guess not! But here it is! Im not totally happy with this one but it was the best out of what I got done, and next time I will buy incense like everyone says to! I used a small candle for this one. One of my kids hard page books, opened with black paper taped to both sides for a background (yeah I know ghetto! LOL!) I had my flash at a 90 degree angle to the candle, set up my camera and blew out the candle and started shooting! I think that when I use incense it will be better, and I will probably turn up the power on my flash next time as well. As always, thanks for reading, and your comments are always appreciated!

3/52 - Batman

Well I am trying to learn a bit more about long exposures... so far its been a bust! LOL! I have taken many many photos that were between 5-15 seconds long. None turned out the way that I pictured in my head. BUT I spent over an hour playing with my camera, which is the reason that we do project 52's! To get the camera in your hand and start experimenting! So yay! Anywho... I ended the evening frustrated that I wasn't getting what I wanted, then looked up and Batman to the rescue! LOL! I decided to take some pics of him and play with lighting.. So here is what I got!

Playing in the snice!

This isn't really apart of my 52, but I just wanted to share a couple pics from our recent ice/snow storm! Part of my reasons for doing a 52 is to get out of my "portraits only" kick I have been in! I take so many pics of my kids (NOT a bad thing!) that I forget to take pics of the beauty around me. (Which IS a bad thing!) So I know I shared one of the building that had the ice on it, but here are a few of my son playing in it! My 1 year old was running a temp, so he didn't get to go out at all so no pics of him this time!

Here is a close up of his happy face!

Here he is trying to eat the ice... I didn't let him, but I did snap a pic of him trying... LOL! You can see how thick the layer of ice was that was on top of the 3 inches of snow!

And this is him playing "ice ball" as he called it.. Leave it to my little leaguer to make anything into a sport.. ha! He ended up tossing a few to his daddy who was using a cardboard box for a bat! The huge pieces of ice would explode into a million pieces and they would all slide across the iced lawn!! It was really cool!

As always... thanks for reading and commenting!!

Week 2/52.. Sniced in!

Well.. we were supposed to get snowed in, but instead we got some snow with a not so nice layer of ice! So we got sniced in! Under about an inch of ice was 3 inches of snow. Not so fun to play in, but really fun watching the dog and kiddo trying to walk! ha! We have electric heat, so instead of chancing a power outage and getting cold, we went to my in laws house who has gas heat! All of my friends up North are laughing because everything has been shut down for 3 days for 3-6 inches of snow. BUT what no one understands unless you live here, our snow isn't pretty powdery you can drive on it snow. Our snow is slippery, slidey ( I know its not a word.. LOL) mostly ice snow... SNICE. When you go play in it, if you stand in once spot for too long you start to slide and when you play in it you end up SOAKING wet! YUCK! I really would love to play in the powdery snow that everyone talks about, it sounds so fun! But since I live here in Alabama when it snows we get snice instead! So week two of my 52, is a picture of what we have been looking at for days... ICE!

New year.. new path!

So this year, I have decided to start a project 52! Basically I am committing to post a photo once a week. I think most people usually give their project a theme, so I am going to just call mine "this and that"... mostly because I don't commit well.. LOL! The point of the project is to get me out there and thinking photographically, practicing taking shots and failing, and learning from that failure. So here it is, the first week! I had a rough time getting my creative juices flowing after so long of only doing portraits and I started to panic! I know I look at things all the time and think, wow that would be a great photo! But most of the time its when I am out and about camera-less! (note to self, keep camera with me more!) So I thought okay, step one.. pull camera out of the bag! Easy enough right?! But then step two... find something to photograph! I walked around the house looking for the right thing and finally saw Caleb'smarkers sitting out. He is so creative, always coloring or drawing these elaborate pictures, so I figured what better way to get my creativity going than to take a picture of his markers he always creates things with! So week one.. here ya go!