has anyone else unwittingly picked a hobby of your fiance's that you never thought you were capable of doing? i used to like hanging out in the room, doing something else while the boy played games whose names i could never recall. soon, many games had nicknames, so i retained a strong hold of my girlyness. when i was younger, super nintendo was the coolest thing, and i'm sure we all had gameboys (heck most people our age, guys and girls alike, have the nintendo DS), and donkey kong country and all the sequels rocked my world. but then the videogame industry introduced the concept of 3D, which soon dominated, and i couldn't maneuver my little mario guy in a straight line, quickly became dizzy, and gave up. gone were the days of running across the screen, from left to right, jumping on bad guys. after dating my fiance, i came to learn these were called "platform games." when we first started dating he trained me to play a soccer game, Winning Eleven, and he was surprised at how good at it i became. somehow he managed to suck me into playing Resistance with him last year and with the recent releases of Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3, I can officially play "first person shooters." not well enough to play against any hard core guys online, but well enough to get a few kills in when him and i play together....although i can totally beat a pack of 16 guys online in Motorstorm.

when Rock Band first came out, my fiance and I happened to stumble upon it by fluke at costco and snatched it up. an old boss of mine had pre-ordered it on amazon, but then he was told it wasn't going to arrive in time for christmas! so i called around to try and find it as a surprise, then went to circuit city. as i was paying for it, the sales-guy was telling me how lucky i was to get it, to which i said, i already have it - this is for a friend. then he proceeded ask if i had guitar hero, yes. a ps3? yes. a wii? yes. an xbox 360? yes. and then he said "wow! so you're a gamer!" that left me totally speechless. somehow in the course of the last three years, my fiance had transformed me into a gamer?! but it's okay. my DS is light pink and i like chopping things in zelda. and it's also okay, because it's cute to see him happily pick up my new honking-big camera and take snapshots of me. and of course i always get to rub it in his face and say "how many guys have girlfriends that will help them shoot down people in world war 3?"

me and him

here's my newest post for weddingbee, because i realize that i'm going to have so many photos of my bridesmaids and so few photos of me since i'm always behind the camera, that most people are going to think i'm jenn. so i'll do some sort of pictoral-introductory post, because it's always nice to get to know the identity behind all the writing. i think i look goofy in this picture, but at least i look nice and approachable. *side note - i had gorgeously long hair for many many years...and last summer i decided to cut it pretty short so that's what i'm dealing with now...



so the mister and i went to pharmacy school together. here's a photo of us at our grad a couple years ago, which is almost like a high school prom, except everyone is in their twenties or thirties and there are no poofy dresses. he bought me a gorgeous little black dress, a la Diane vonFurstenberg, from a local consignment shop. i love all the consignment shops around vancouver - there's a handful in kits, and some really great ones on main street.

there's not a whole lot to say about pharmacy school. other than him and i lived about 2 blocks away from each other for 3 years and didn't know it! he stopped me on the bus one day, and was like - hey you live around here?

after we graduated, we took a trip with a couple friend from our class on a hawaiian cruise. ooh the sun did some nice natural light effects in this photo.

i'm involved in the indie craft scene, which seattle is great for! here, we're having lunch at The Croc in Seattle before hitting up i heart rummage - an edgy craft-fair type ordeal.




somehow i look super chinese in that photo on the right, but i'm not. i've had friends i've known for over 5 years that come up to me and ask me to translate something from chinese to english, and i'm like.....i'm not chinese! i can maybe do a bit of french, but that's it.


and these are what photos look like without the aid of natural light (ie sunlight):




i'd like to say that i've actually used my lomo supersampler, but i haven't and this is just cutting and pasting in photoshop. so that's me and him in a nutshell. he likes soccer and video games. i like sewing and making jewelry. and art.

Hatley Castle

Hatley Castle

Wedding photo courtesy of blue olive photography, based out of Vancouver, BC. I found this castle long after I had already booked my venue. Hatley Castle is about 25 minutes from Victoria, BC (which is on Vancouver Island). Apparently it was Lex Luthor's home on Smallville, and Jean Luc Bacard's school in one of the Xmen movies (I realize that's not his name in real life or in the movie, but I'm just glad I didn't call him Spock.) The ivy looks gloriously green and lush, and I even saw a photo where all the foliage was a rich red color, but I can imagine that this place would look pretty cold and unwelcoming in the winter months (unless of course it was snowing, which, as most people in the northwest will know is pretty rare...people in Seattle seem to think that Vancouver gets a lot of snow, but it's entirely untrue! And, people in Canada don't live in igloos. I was asked that once as a child.).



photos via flickr.

tim willoughby

tim willoughby is a handsome photographer hailing from south carolina. i used to say that i really didn't care for photoshop, and with the exception of a few inappropriate light flares and other random effects, i think tim's post-processing is the best i've seen, especially when applied to unexpected images like prep shots. i say a warm hello to "noise" and to the speckling of images to make them look like they're out of a 1970's self-adhesive/magnetic(?)/cellophane-paged photo albums. his use of wide angles and fish eyes is sometimes awkward in the people shots from entire galleries i've seen, but his blog is droolworthy, and he shoots some really great landscapes. i would actually recommend him as the best guy i've seen for a day after shoot. because he is so skilled at editing, he can deliver any sort of images you like - i've selected a handful of photos that show his versatility in the photoshop department, including several with a really vintage feel, as tiara had said of another photographer.

here's mini montage of our spying adventures this summer at brock house that is prefacing my newest post at weddingbee! yay, i'm a bee! so, jenn, i guess this is the closest thing you get to a "preview."

save my date!!

i spent the weekend at a craft fair next to a lovely gal selling beautiful letterpressed calendars. i came home with two and andrew was so impressed with them that the two thousand some odd dollars i had estimated for letterpressed invitations was totally okay with him.
so back to planning for a wedding. i couldn't believe it was the end of november a few days ago....it literally felt like august was last month! so save the dates are going to get combined with christmas cards if i can finally get my act together. if i had more time, i'd go ahead and design an entire calendar set with beautiful images for each month, but here we are in december already and i'd still have to spend money on weddings favors for the day of. after finding nothing by way of blackberry illustrations, i drew made my own. pick your favorites, or mix and match.


so here's a look at what flickr has for save the date ideas. see also some beautiful letter press images. so what ideas for save the dates? there's always simple cards, or a simple piece of paper. a sh*tty fridge magnet that doesn't hold up anything but itself, random moo cards that'll probably get tossed, post cards, a card with a photobooth strip, a faux polaroid magnet with the date scribbled on the bottom white part......there must be more options than this?

sean flanigan

here is another one of my favorite photographers, sean flanigan, based out of a nearby city to seattle, wa. he uses textures in a minimal kind of way, and his photos have a sort of stark, vintage kind of feel with a lot of the buzzword, photojournalism.

leigh miller

here's the work of leigh miller, based out of
southern california. this image in the car isn't particularly striking, but i like the concept. something about this wedding stood out to me; perhaps it was the fact that the bride wasn't blonde and a size 2, perhaps it was because things, perhaps the people themselves seemed different....it was set in england, perhaps it was just the shoes in the first image.

i realize that all but two of the images i have picked are black and white! oh color, how i miss thee. but the point here is composition i guess. photos that my parents might disapprove of because "their heads and feet have been chopped off."




but i love the energy in these candids. i couldn't put my finger on how to describe it until tonight. perhaps that's why i like candids so much.

anna kuperberg

it's easy to see why the work of anna kuperberg has been featured in martha stewart.


i was warming up to the idea of textures, but upon revisiting a few photography greats, like jesh de rox, it was a little too much for me. but anna does it the best for me, i think because it's so subtle. here's some more work on her blog

american friends

i had started watching this episode the other day. lately i've been pretty rage against the company i work for, because i'm being sent to timbuktu and have 80% closing shifts while people at a temp organization make double what i make and get to pick and choose the stores they work at. but i've gotten a lot of love from the place lately from unexpected people. sure the people at 59 are always happy to see me. sure i've got pui. but one gal sent me an amish friendship bread recipe we had casually talked about - she hunted me down and faxed it to me. even dennis is getting in on the faxing action with inventive stories about his sidekick guido and the new game, rock band. one tech even hunted me down because i left a necklace at her store. when andrew first proposed, a lot of people were suprised that we weren't having our wedding in the states. and at the time, i was like, why? we don't have any friends here (besides laurie). it might've been viktoryia (holy cow i can't spell) who said, but in a year's time, you will. so i'm hoping a few random people from work can stay within the 100-120 guest list.

a girl from work called me up out of the blue this weekend to tell me she just got engaged. i had no idea she was even seeing anyone. and turns out, she hadn't been. she has an arranged marriage and she's totally okay with it, using mary's words. like really okay with it! i asked her where she was having the wedding, and she said the ceremony in abbottsford, and the reception in surrey. and then i realized that my very americanized seattle friend is going to have to move to canada! holy cow. so i came home tonight and watched the rest of that simpson's episode and thought of her.

my photos

i struggle with embracing the concept of photoshop. while i may have used pink filters in the darkroom to enhance contrast, and i certainly have always made use of that in photoshop (the sole effect on the first three photos), i have too much of an appreciation for the image straight out of the camera. hence my love for fuji's reds and greens, my longing for a lab that can fathom cross processing, and my love affair with the lomo l-ca and its naturally created vignette. so i spent some time in photoshop today with some of my hawaii photos taken on the credit card sized camera to warm up to the medium and to remind me that i don't need a $2000 camera to take good photos, and i can certainly tote around a concealable camera on my wedding day. keep in mind that i had this inexplicable obsession with surreal colored skies today, and i am editing on a laptop - i'm always slightly appaled at how my st*tchpixie photos look when viewed on my 19" lcd because the laptop screen lies!








a polarizing filter makes the skies bluer on film, and takes away any glare off shiny objects and windows. doing nothing but bumping up the contrast umpteen times on this photo below makes for some neat effects on the window glare at the bottom of the image.

jeremy lawson

i stumbled across don't box us in dot com today and came across some fantastically ethereal images from this photographer, Jeremy Lawson, from Ozark, Missouri.

photography

so here is the work of michele m waite, based out of bellingham, wa (?) i could be wrong but that's what her phone number looks like. i love her composition and attention to color. while you could certainly nitpick and say her whites are often washed out, and the horizon is sometimes 2 degrees off from being parallel with the edge of the frame, i do love her work!



as a side note, i added a statcounter to my blog, and i'm slightly terrified to say that i get almost as many hits on my blog as i do on st*tchpixie (and i pay for advertising for st*tchpixie!!!). i can see what people are googling to find me - and quite a few of the search strings are for that bridal shop in north van run by the terribly snooty woman. hah!

d300!

i've always believed everything happens for a reason. losing my photographer, no big deal, it's meant to be i'll find something better. missing out on my nikon d200 twice at costco.com, that's fine...maybe it will come back by christmas. or....maybe they'll make a D300!!!! okay i'm now stoked. liz and chaia have both asked me to take some photos of them and their families, so here's what i can do with the equipment i already own:

in addition to what's below, here's a few on flickr, and a few more that are fisheye shots via my trusty minolta maxuum 7000 and lomo fisheye2.











so on my wedding day, like i said in one of my very first posts, i guess i don't necessarily want to pack heat. andrew owns a camera just like this pink one, although it's not pink and it's probably a millipixel or two smaller, but it's the size of a stitchpixie coin purse, and toteably concealable.

i mentioned to a couple people already, but the folks from sex and the city found my cityscape purses at a local boutique and wanted 1000 manhattan cityscape pouches for the premier of the new movie this spring! but they wanted it in like 8 days' time, so there was no hope for me.