Hodgepodge

Hey all!

I'm back! And I'm excited to be blogging again!

Unfortunately I have a TON to catch you all up on!

First off, right before Thanksgiving we hit up a magical little place called

DISNEYLAND!

on the airplane there...

Clay was a Disneyland virgin (gasp!), and of course our first day in California it is POURING rain

So we decided to save the real magic for sunnier days and went to California Adventure the first day

It was a little bit chilly unfortunately

But we went on fun, indoor rides like the Tower of Terror

and not so warm indoor rides like California Screaming

always fun getting pelted in the face by lil droplets of water

Thank heavens it warmed up the next day!

Clay and Devin, excited to sample the sweet happiness that is Disneyland

Splash mountain! Poor Clay (who had just got his feet dry) was a little upset by this ride. :)

No worries! He had fun anyway!

One of my most favorite pictures of all time

The only bad news we had during this fabulous trip was a TON of people!

The stroller parking lot was particularly stressful...

Hey. Wanna see a creepy picture of Clay?

There yah go.

The sucker really adds to it doesn't it?

One of our favorite parts of Disneyland was the new and improved Starwars ride. O my goodness it was AWESOME! Even if the line took an hour and a half to get through.

Thank heavens for fast passes.

Space mountain is always a favorite of ours.

And the castle was all lit up for Christmas!

Waiting in line for Peter Pan

We were given an assignment by our neice, Sierra to send her a picture of a real princess.

Let me tell you princesses are elusive!

We were hanging out waiting for a bathroom break to wrap up and all of a sudden, there is Cinderella! She was MOVING and this is the only picture we got...

And of course, what would a trip to Disneyland be without chocolate covered bananas?

This is for you Rach.

Well after Disneyland and Thanksgiving (which Clay and I unfortunately had to spend apart. Stupid work) It was onto the Christmas season!

One of my favorite parts of being married and having our little home is decorating for holidays.

Yes we had to move some furniture around to get our tree in

My mom is awesome. Can I say that anymore? She hooked us up with lots and lots of Christmas decorations. Including a very tall Santa. Something Clay is very confused about. :)

The tree getting all nice and decorated.

Partially through the decorating process. Please admire my fabulous tree skirt. Thank you TJmaxx.

Also our cute stockings and Clay's nativity. Made in the Philippines!

My mom started a tradition with us last year to get us snowflake ornaments. Here's our cute, engaged ornament from last year.

And our nice tall santa.

The leaves from Thanksgiving are replaced with snowflakes

We listened to the new Michael Buble CD, decorated the house, and of course, wrapped up the evening with hot chocolate

In our giant hot chocolate mugs!

It is so fun to be starting our own Christmas traditions as a family

Alright, onto what has kept me busy for the past month...

FINALS

duh duh duuuuunnnnn.

Yes, I complain about this pretty much every month but this semester nearly killed me.

Literally almost killed me.

Don't believe me?

Well, here's a little story for you.

So being in a studio class, you have to take photos with artificial lighting (obviously)

Unfortunately, our photo program is just starting to gather studio equipment so the pickings are slim

Meaning I scheduled 3 photo shoots in one day

The stress was thick in the air and after 2 photo shoots in the course of 2 hours my creativity was wearing thin by the time my 3rd model showed up.

My first idea was not working out but then I had a stroke of inspiration hit me

I remembered seeing some textured glass down in the studio

Perfect

So I grabbed my model and the 2ft by 6ft sheet of glass

It needed to sit up straight so that I could shoot through it so I grabbed one of the stands,

just to hold the glass upright.

I slipped the glass into the head of the stand while my model held the glass upright.

It seemed to be holding steady so, knowing that my model was holding the other side of the glass I let go to see how it was holding up

The glass EXPLODED

It sounded like a gun had gone off

little shards of glass shot all over the studio

Some of it hit the brim of my hat

This all happened in a split second. I jumped back and looked at the pile of glass dust on the floor

(after it was cleaned up)

and then I looked over at my model...

Which is when I saw the blood

I had been lucky enough to be wearing pants

My model... not so much

We were both barefoot (trying to keep the studio sweep clean) so another girl that was in the studio with us came and carried my model out of the carnage so we could examine the wounds more closely

The hand that she had been holding the glass in was cut

But it was her legs we were most worried about

It looked like she had really bad razor burn with tiny little cuts all over her legs

And one rather larger one that was causing most of the blood that now spotted the studio

And it was pretty wide.

I left the glass mess and loaded my model into the car and headed to Instacare

Where we were rewarded with 5 stitches...

(photo taken from my model's facebook)

Don't worry. She is healing nicely but she did tell me she is never modeling for me again if it involves glass.

Calling my photo professor was probably one of the most terrifying things I've ever done.

He informed me that that glass was NOT supposed to be in the studio and that it was tempered glass.

Which apparently is designed to explode into a million tiny pieces if there is any kind of awkward stress put on the glass.

Oops

But we all made it through with minimal injuries!

In my 19th Century Photographic Processes class we got to try this really cool process called the Wet Plate Collodion Process

It basically involves taking a polished piece of glass (lots of glass around the studio apparently) taking collodion (a chemical that hardens when it is exposed to oxygen) and coating the plate of glass and then dipping it into silver salts, then running it over to the camera before the mixture dries.

It was very difficult to coat the plates and you had about 5 minutes to get the plate to the camera and shoot the photograph but the results were awesome!

My fellow classmates and myself found out something interesting about what happens when I model for collodion wet plates...

Yep. My blue eyes glow like a demon's.

But I thought it was awesome.

Well, besides the incident with the glass the other threat to life and limb was my lack of sleep.

From Monday night to Wednesday night I got a total of 10 hours of sleep.

I stayed up until 5:30 in the morning 2 of those nights.

Ugh

But heaven smiled upon me and I finished my studio final!

Here are the results...

These first ones are our technical shots.

Below is my conceptual stuff...

The cool thing about these next photos is I MADE the locations! These maquettes are about 2 feet tall and made out of poster board! The people were composited in after the fact

Yah... I might have slept for 13 hours Friday. It's fine.

On Saturday after Clay and I had basically sat around in a stupor for the past 24 hours, we realized that there were only 8 days left until Christmas and that we had done no Christmas shopping. We headed out for a few hours and happened to run into this guy on our travels...

O husband. You make me laugh.

Well readers, you really are dedicated if you've made it this far! I'm impressed.

I promise to have more posts soon! Hopefully we'll have some exciting adventures to share over the break!

Hope you all are having an awesome December!

XOXO