Not As Long As It Looks

Seriously, it isn't. I know that this blog post looks terribly loooooooong... but it isn't. The length lies in pictures, and you don't even have to look at the pictures you don't like, so I predict it won't take longer than five minutes to go through the whole thing. (Unless you pause to have conniptions over adorable animals, that may take some time.)

Thursday before last, went to the Calgary zoo with our homeschooling group. (Or, well, I went. Lizzie changed her mind at the last minute.) And did I say that the Olivers' backyard was a photographer's heaven? It was only the Garden of Eden, the zoo is heaven. (A heaven that I could only spend four hours in, unfortunately.)

I went through two sets of batteries in those four hours. And I got 100 good pictures out of it. Here are the 29 pictures that I painstakingly picked out of the pile of tempting options to put on here:

My first successful attempt at: 1) taking a picture of a bird 2) having a sharp foreground and blurry background

My first truly successful attempt at a silhouette

Ooh! Birdie!

Awww...

Not entirely sure what this thing is, but it's cute.

I don't know about you, but I definitely believe that zoos encourage laziness.

"Hey! I can touch my nose with my tongue!"

(Conceited sniff.) "Well, I just won a scholarship."

"Huh?"

So gloriously pristine.

I know gorillas are probably horribly violent animals, but doesn't he look sweet? (Happy squeal)

Run, run, run, little piggy.

Stomping Prohibited

I always knew they were evil

Just So You Know...

I saw a humorous circle graph on the computer a while ago that had, 'real photographers' and 'teenagers with a fancy camera who call themselves photographers'. Teenagers, as you may guess, was far bigger.

This made me laugh so hard. I wasn't offended in the slightest because, you see, I don't call myself a photographer. I don't actually plan to sell photos or anything. Mom convinced me to sell my pictures at our family auction and I did it, but it was really embarrassing.

I take pictures for a couple reasons. One is that I like to. Seriously, it's just fun. Here is a picture of the time I first discovered my love of photography:

Look on my face: "Huh? What are you doing? I'm the one with the camera!" (Photo taken by Grandpa at an aquarium in Seattle)

Another reason is that - besides the above picture - I don't have any other photos of me when I was taking pictures. I hate it when people take pictures of me. I have a select few pictures that don't look awful. But no one ever takes pictures of the photographer. Well, except Grandpa.

Reason three: Research. Memories. A couple months ago, I looked out the window and saw this picture:

And yes, the rainbow was just as faint in real life.

I thought, "Wow, that's beautiful. I have to remember that so that I can put that in a scene." But how was I to remember it if I didn't take a picture? So I did.

Fourth reason: I need a picture that doesn't exist. A while ago, I was looking through my list of names for the Espritans (think Dryads, tree people) of my book and I saw two names that brought characters to my mind, Peach and Wolf. I thought, "Those names are such opposites, wouldn't it be hilarious if they got married?" And the plot was born.

Now I like to have pictures for my character. Pictures that symbolize them. For one character, I have a picture of a tiny green sprout poking out of a pile of rocks, for another I have a red fox, Peach needed a picture. And it needed to be of a peach, of course. And I knew exactly what I wanted it to look like.

So I looked up 'peach' on Google images. It was extremely unsuccessful. I wanted a soft, sweet picture, not a picture of produce on a tree (or video game characters, for that matter). Dad bought peaches that evening. So my way was clear. I set up my wonderful studio...


...and took this picture (among many others):

So that is why I take pictures. I don't think my pictures look professional in any way and I don't want you thinking that I do. I'm a teenager with a nice camera, a wild imagination, and a very exacting idea of what I want my pictures to look like. That's all.

Oh, and here is the picture I found on Google for Wolf. It isn't exactly what I wanted because I don't actually have the resources to take pictures of wolves. But it works anyway:

Perfect Poses

I enjoy taking photos of people when they don't know they're being observed. (That's why it's so nice to have the zoom function on cameras.) Lizzie is the most fun in the family to photograph. One reason is because she's photogenic and the other is that she is constantly posing. Seriously. I will stand in the window and watch her sitting on a bench, amusing herself, and she keeps switching glamourous poses.

So a little while ago I was looking through my pictures and I saw that she had all these unsuspecting pictures in which she was in practically the same situations. (Sarah says they aren't but she doesn't understand this. No one else ever captures in nearly the same positions.) Here are a couple pairs:

Would you ever guess that this picture was taken through hole where the doorknob ought to be? Like I said before, the zoom function.

Kind of funny, isn't it? Or maybe it's nothing to do with her, maybe I just happen to take pictures when she looks the same. Or maybe they aren't the same positions at all and I'm just imagining things.

Anyway, this post is relatively short so I'm just going to add some more pictures of my beloved sister:

That is all for today. Arrivederci! (Yeah, I'm learning Italian.)

Picture Procrastination

I know I promised more than a month ago that I would give a lengthy description and put up pictures from our Girls' Camp Hike, but I didn't get around to it until now. Thankfully, I was just organizing my pictures and remembered that I need to post these, so here they are:

The beautiful, green terrain we passed as we were driving.

The rocky terrain of the hike

I forgot my water bottle out in the car so I was absolutely parched and dying until one of the leaders said that the water was safe to drink from, so I braced myself for disaster and drank it. It was surprisingly good, much better than the water at the campground.

Sometimes we were forced to move off the paths because they were flooded with waterfall water

There's something about the setup of the rocks and dead branches in this picture that makes me think of the elephant graveyard from The Lion King

Several of the waterfalls were covered in snow and there were several times that we had to choose whether to wade through the waterfall or hike over the snow. (Although it wasn't really a choice for me, I tried hiking over the snow but it was not meant to be and I slipped back down.)

Here was one of the most interesting parts of the hike, where we had to hike the last section over four foot deep snow.

Okay, so maybe that wasn't a lengthy description, but I didn't want to put you through that so that is all that I will post on this hike.

Vacationing (Part 2)

After the family reunion, Grandma and Grandpa took three kids with them back to Langley because there wasn't enough room in our car for everyone to go back in that. Those three people were: Lizzie, Sam, and (you guessed it) Me!

The ride was about sixteen hours. I listened to music almost the whole time so it didn't seem too long. We arrived at about midnight on Saturday or Sunday, depending on which side of midnight we arrived on.

The next day (or same day if you decided we arrived on Sunday) we went to church and settled in and came up with some things we wanted to do that week.

Monday, we continued to settle in and make plans. Lizzie and I went to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part 2) which was great. Some things were a little jarring or surprising but the overall movie was great. I loved that they skimmed over some stuff I didn't like in the book, they came up with some stuff I did like. Unfortunately, they had some characters say things out of character for comic relief.

Tuesday we went on a 'hike'. It could more easily be called a walk. I think Grandpa was amused by our slow pace, (we were taking pictures!) but we had a good time.

Wednesday was the beach! We had a wonderful time there. Sammy and Lizzie went around with other kids, hunting for crabs. (Blugh.) I took a bunch of pictures. Here they are:

I always imagined the ocean as being rather wild but it was beautifully serene

Sammy, wishing his crabs would fight

Lizzie, looking for seashells

This is how our family looks when we're thinking. We're commonly asked, "What's wrong?"

I had a really cheesy description for this one character a while ago that went something like, "His eyes sparkled like diamonds in the golden sands of his face." I saw this shell half buried in the sand and thought of that line, so I just had to take a picture.

Thursday, we went to Vancouver Island to visit the Petersons who we haven't seen for years. It was great to see them.

Friday we traveled to Vernon, where we stayed with the Kilistoffs. We went swimming a lot, which was a real novelty because we don't have many good swimming lakes here. Aunt Boo introduced us to cliff jumping, which is both awesome and scary. Unfortunately, I got swimmers' itch. It's fading now, but it really puts a damper on the whole experience.

The rest of the family arrived in the middle of church on Sunday. We went camping in our boat - which was less than great because I hate camping - on Wednesday and came back to the Kilistoffs' on Friday. We left for home on Saturday morning.

So there is the summary of our trip. After three weeks away, my own home seemed strange. Which just shows how much of a homebody I am.