4th Annual Punk Rock Picnic

For the first time I made it to one of Mike's band's shows.  They played back in August at the Fourth Annual Punk Rock Picnic.  The lighting wasn't great, they were in the dark end of a picnic pavilion, but I got a few shots. 

It was at a nice park with a playground and some cool old cement kilns



























I could have taken better photos, if I had been able to move around a bit more for different angles and using different lenses, but I will give you an idea of what the wider shots turned out like.

135L Love

Back in December I snatched up a used Canon 135L lens. It is a beautiful lens, but it doesn't get a lot of use with me since it is best as a portrait lens, which isn't really my favorite subject. We went up to NY for a visit this past weekend and I thought I would make myself take the 135L out for a workout. I mostly took photos of my nephews and niece but I can't post them here, so instead you get one of Mike.

Sometimes

Sometimes life gets away from you and you get so wrapped up in the day to day you forget about doing other things. And other times, like now, you have big stuff going on that you don't really want to put out there publicly until they are settled. Two big things have been going on the past couple of weeks.

1) Michael has been away, Abu Dhabi again, but he is finally on a flight home right now! He will be home tonight! The kitties and I are very excited. One of the few fun things he got to squeeze in while he was away, between all the work, was a trip to the camel races. He sent me this little video:


2) I got a new job! I am leaving my current company and position next week, and I start a new job April 4th. For once we aren't moving! I am just going to be commuting about the same distance, just in the opposite direction. I am really excited about this opportunity.

Hopefully now that things are settling down, I will have a bit more time, I am so behind on stuff I wanted to blog about!

5th Anniversary Gift

Friday Michael and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary. I gave him a headset thing for playing video games that his brother has and loves, and he gave me a gorgeous necklace.





He bought it from my favorite jewelry website Fay Cullen, it is an antique. I kind of want to wear it everyday.

MOMA

The week between Christmas and New Year’s Michael needed to go up to NYC one day for work. I tagged along with him so I could spend a day at the MoMA.

It was super crowded that day, I think all the snow drove everyone inside as much as possible. But I still loved the museum! It was so inspiring on so many levels.

It got more crowded later in the day than this even! (Yes the image is OOF, I did that on purpose to try and make it a bit more abstract and “modern”, did it work? The jury is still out).

I definitely prefer shooting sculpture to paintings

I loved the woman in the background taking a photo out the window.

There was so much thought put into how the art was displayed. I loved this really tall sculpture, and how the positioned him like he was enjoying the the other art in the room with him



Waterlilies! I had no idea how HUGE this painting actually was! I had my back to the wall with my 50 and I still couldn’t get it all in.


I loved this photographer's work (Alex Prager). It just jumped off the wall at me. I could have looked at it all day. I honestly just took this photo so that I would remember his name and be able to blog it and share his work with all of you. It was amazing! This one was my favorite




By the end of the morning I had run out of steam, but I am still so glad that I went. I think it is a great reminder of all the different kinds of art out there, how subjective art is and how beautiful, especially if you are like me and get so mired in the technicalities of photography.

The new lens is here

I mentioned back in August that I had ordered a new lens. I still haven't really played with it a ton, but I did take it for a quick spin this past Friday night. Michael was even nice enough to let me take some photos of him.





It's a pretty freaking cool lens! I can't wait to take it out for some landscapes or urban shooting!

Sad and Lonely

Michael is at JFK right now standing in line to catch a flight to Abu Dhabi, where he will be for the next month. I am beyond sad.

Sterling Hotel Gig

Mike's band played at the Sterling Hotel in Allentown on Friday. This is the first gig of his band here in PA that I have actually made it to see. It wasn't bad, not really my style of music. At least I had Dan and Tacha to hang out with, and my camera as backup entertainment.

All shot with 5dm2 and 50mm 1.2L




That is his serious face

Cooking Class

Last Thursday Michael and I had signed up for a cooking class at the local community college. We thought it would be fun to learn how to cook some new dishes, and as a bonus it would get us off the couch and out of the house.

The class we took was called Pearl of the Orient and according to our "instructor" it was food from the Philippines. I say "instructor" because she did very little instructing, more here is a recipe, and some ingredients, the pots and stuff are over that way, get cooking. Which we found very disappointing considering the cost ($40+ per person). We should have just gone out for a nice dinner! It would have been less work, and tastier.

I still took my camera though, because that is what I do. All shots with 5DM2, 50mm 1.2L.


Our chicken coconut curry (front) and pork adobo (back) boiling way.


Mike looking a little crazy carrying around a frying pan.


Frying the pork spring rolls, the best part.

Third

Today is our third wedding anniversary. It feels like our wedding was both a lifetime away and just a couple of months ago. This past year has brought so much change for us. We left the jobs we had since before we were married, moved back to the east coast, but to a place neither of us has lived before, started new jobs, and started looking for a house. Hopefully this next year will be full of small things other than actually buying a house, I think we need a quiet year to settle into our new lives here. I will save the really sappy stuff for Mike's anniversary card. :)

Watch later this week for pages from the blurb book I am about to order for our third year. I just need to make a page for today (we are going out for a nice dinner), and then I can pull it all together and share.

Dice

Michael loves dice, mostly when playing craps but this past weekend his brother Dan and his wife Tacha came down for a visit (we were supposed to go snow tubing but it was freaking COLD outside!) and brought a little dice game. I don't know the name of it but you had ten dice and you had to roll them to make different combinations, each turn the combination changed. Mike of course won.



Too bad the dice at the casinos don't always like him that much

Happy Birthday Baby!

Okay so Mike's birthday was Sunday but I just got around to editing the pictures last night. We didn't celebrate much, he was feeling kind of sick after his sleepless night of gambling in AC so I just made cupcakes.

Saturday Nights All Right

On Saturday night Mike played publicly for the first time with the band he has been practicing with for the past month or so. I was not impressed with either Fat's Grill or Stockton in general (or the hour + drive to get there). But the important thing is Mike had a good time, I had the worst soda of my life (imagine diet pepsi spiked with raspberry iced tea when you are a die-hard regular coke drinker), I got hit on by a WEIRD random guy, and I learned the most popular hairstyle in stockton is blonde highlights on a black underlayer? and not in a punk-rock way in a white-trash way.

At least I got to play with my camera, but it reminded me what limits the XT has in low light (ISO only to 1600) and that sometimes I do need the 50mm 1.8 though it pales so much in comparison to my 24-70L.


Mike warming up (the light was better then)


Dean (one of the guitar players)


Dave (the other guitar player and backup vocals)


Dean and Mike


Mike being very serious while he plays.


Mark the drummer, with a long shutter speed to make him blurry (and look like he is moving)

(I stole my post title from Mike's email announcing this gig he in turn had stolen it from a song)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Michael and I had a very quiet Thanksgiving at home alone yesterday. It involved pumpkin bread


turkey with stuffing


and chocolate fondue for dessert.





I hope your day was as nice as ours.

Muscle Biopsy

Michael had his muscle biopsy yesterday. It took all day, and it looked like it hurt a lot. They gave him local anesthetic and cut a 1" piece of skin, then removed a chunk of muscle the size of the tip of a pinky finger from his right bicep. So in a week to a month we should know hopefully what he has. I might not have gone over this before but they think his eyelid problem is chronic progressive external ophthalmoplegia and that he really has an underlying mitochondrial myopathy. So we will see what they come back with.

Mini Golf

Mike and I went to play mini golf on Saturday. Mainly just to get out of the house and try to not spend the whole weekend watching football. I kicked his butt for once!! I even got a hole-in-one! It was really bright and I should have used a wider aperture to get a shallower DOF, these look too snapshot-y to me, but hey they are right?















Oh and Fairfield can be really dirty!