US Virgin Islands

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So this ends the week long look back at my adventures with my friend, Sue. If you haven’t been following along, she has been one of my best friends for forever and is moving to Austin, Texas this week. I’m grateful she asked me to take the long drive down to Texas with her so we can spend a little more time together but also I get to check out Austin since I’ve never really been to Texas before.

It’s crazy because looking back at our first cross country road trip, Spain, Maine, and now this image from St John, I’ve realized we’ve done so much together. And this doesn’t even scratch the surface. We’ve been on plenty of girls trips and have spent so much time just adventuring around the Washington DC metro area. I’ll miss her lots but I also know it won’t be for too long before I see her again.

This image is of St John Virgin Island. It’s funny because this was our first ever vacation together and probably one of my favorites. I mean how can it not be? I’m all about that island life. LOL. I remember the exact moment I took this too. We were actually staying on St Thomas, took a ferry to St John and then a bus took us to the local beaches from there. Fortunately the bus stopped at some beautiful places along the way for us to take pictures. I leaned over Sue to take this image but I’m pretty sure that she’s used to me doing stuff like that by now. Not much longer after I took this pic, we were down on that beach laying out 🙂 Sounds perfect right about now.

My camera settings for this image is F4 at 1/640th sec at ISO 80 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

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Since I blog every weekday and haven’t skipped a day since March 2010… or 2011? I don’t remember. But people are always asking me how I keep up with it. How do I have so many images to blog about? And I always have to laugh when people ask me about that.

  1. because I have soooo many pictures. Sometimes I think it’s too many. Sometimes I feel like I run out of time because I don’t get a chance to edit them all and I’ll forget about some images.
  2. I try my best to make the most out of each photo trip. Even if I’m going to the Lincoln Memorial, I’m constantly moving around and keeping my feet busy. I can’t think of anything worse than coming home with a memory card full of the same exact images. I’m always trying to find new angles and light on each trip. That way I have a lot of different options to consider when I get home. I’m lucky if I get one image I like, but for the most part I’ll come home with several.
  3. I keep a folder on my desktop that’s called “Haven’t blogged yet”. These are the images that I may have already edited for fun, edited to upload to my instagram, or for whatever reason just have completed but haven’t blogged about them yet. This makes it super easy for me to just sit down and pic an image to write about. Once they’ve been blogged, they are archived.

So for those of you wondering how I maintain my blog, I try to keep it as easy as possible. On a good week I like to keep 1 day just for blogging. That can be difficult sometimes when I have a busy schedule but my blog is definietly high on my priority list. I preschedule them so I don’t have to worry about it for the rest of the week and then the cycle continues the following week.

If you have any other questions about blogging or anything like that, please let me know. I’ll definietly try my best to help.

My camera settings for this image is F6.3 at 1/400th of a second at ISO 80 with my Sony A7II and 16-35mm wide angle lens.

PS more views like this this summer!!

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One of my new years goals this year was to take a photo trip at least once I quarter. I’m telling you all this so you can help keep me accountable. So winter photo trip- check. Iceland was amazing. I don’t know how much more wintery photo experience you could get.

I have a few more places where I’d like to go this year. Nothing is booked or anything yet, so they’re all just ideas right now but I’ve noticed a common theme. They’re all cold weather places!! If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’ll know that the beach is one of my favorite places to be. As soon as I figured out all the layers I’ll be needing this year, I started questioning all the places that I was excited for. My mind immediately went to Caribbean islands, piña coladas, and flamingos. I had to go back and look at some of my sunny beach photos to make myself feel better.

So this was taken at Cinnamon Bay in St John, USVI. The water is particularly calm in this bay so I felt comfortable going into the water with my camera. I was probably in chest high water when photographing this inflatable raft when I decided it was time to hide the camera in a spare towel I brought. Then this bird flew onto the boat and was posing, waiting for me to take his picture. So back out of the water I went to get my camera and into chest high water for this shot. I think my favorite part of this image is the clarity of the water. You can see all the little lines in the sand on the very bottom. It just looks so peaceful and WARM! Now I gotta make sure that there is some kind of beach trip in 2017.