Category: friends

It has been over thirty years since these three college roommates have been together!

Susan and Carol were best friends in high school, and we all roomed together at U.C. Davis. After college, Carol and I shared an apartment in Santa Rosa- and she introduced me to my husband (long story. . .).  Susan married Chris and moved to Wisconsin after a few years.  I haven’t seen Susan since Carol’s wedding, but, when we got together today, it was like no time had passed.

We talked and laughed- and laughed and laughed.  I think this photo shows how much we enjoyed being together- what a fun day!

 

It was a busy day- my Heart Math group, friends over to knit, and then our book club. When Barbara and Kathryn showed up with bright blue polish on their toes, I was happy to take a quick shot of their matching toes for today’s theme (FOOT).

Today is my birthday, and we spent it at Joan and Rudy’s welcoming home their daughter, Liz, who is there for an all too short visit from New Zealand, where she has lived and worked for the last three years.  It was so great to see her- isn’t she beautiful?

I took lots of photos and have to say that, though they weren’t fabulous, they were an improvement over my usual party snapshots (yay- I learned some things from my class!).

And then there is the small problem of leaving my camera bag and all my lenses and camera accessories at their house.  Fortunately, Rudy is a Canon shooter so I know he won’t be messing with my stuff!

There is only 1 more week left in our photo class, so Carol and I got together to complete some of our last assignments.  She brought Mady, her brother’s golden retriever along for the day- which was a thrill for the whole family, golden lovers that we are.

Our lighting assignment took the most time (and, although instructive, was the least fun to do).  Finally we did some portraits of each other with Mady on our front porch, which I have decided is magic for getting good light.

Both of these were shot with Carol’s wonderful 50mm 1.4 lens.

My friend, Georgia was kind enough to offer her house for a photoshoot this afternoon, so that I could complete some of the parts of an upcoming photo class assignment.  I was fortunate to have three friends to practice on, and (272 photos later) I have one part of the three part assignment done plus one photo to submit for the photo critique this week- and lots of good photos of my friends, of course!

It is late (we all went out to dinner afterward with our husbands), so I am only posting one of the photos tonight- so here’s Georgia!  I hardly did a thing to this photo; she just looks this good straight out of camera!

What a fun day I am having! Not only am I getting to play with my friend Carol’s brand new Nikon D800, but I got to take my photos of the day with her fabulous 50mm 1.4 lens (on my camera)!!!

Look at the creamy bokeh in this image of my lavender (and visiting bee):

And here is Carol with her new baby:

My Rapunzel group (minus two) met today to say good-bye to Nevin, who is moving to Southern California to be closer her daughter and family.  We know she will be back to visit, but it was hard to say good-bye. Highlights of the day were delicious food, gifts, friendship, and tears and laughter.  We’ll miss you, Nevin!

Photography note: this was taken with my speedlight, bounced behind me at about a 45 degree angle..

I spent a wonderful day with some of the Rapunzels today. I stopped by Nevin’s first to give her a refresher course with her camera and also to teach her how to use her external flash (we both got them for Christmas).  I also used the opportunity to photograph her with her kitties, Desi and Lucy.

We met Marie and Darlene for a delicious lunch and had fun laughing and talking as always. Since the topic for my Flickr group yesterday was lyrics and today it is lean, here is our interpretation of Lean on Me, an apt theme song for our group.

 

 

What fun I had today pretending I was a real photographer with my friends, Carolyn and Vicki!  They had asked me to do some head shots for them, and it was great practice for me. We had so much fun figuring out the best light and poses!

I was meticulous about doing custom white balance today, because I really dislike doing skin by the numbers in post processing. I still had to adjust skin tones a bit, but, because the white balance was consistent in each setting, I was able to “lift and stamp” the settings in Aperture 3 (this is the same as “sync” in Lightroom)- and I’m happy with the results.

Here are two of my favorites of Carolyn. . .

 

. . . and two of my favorites of Vicki.

 

 

 

Here are some photos I took today of my good friend Joan, who has been one of my closest friends since we were brand new, single, twenty-three year old teachers at Kawana School.  Now we are both RETIRED teachers with empty nests- and we still have a lot of fun when we get together (which is not nearly often enough)!