Just Getting Started

I took my first picture on the new DSLR camera my husband bought us almost two years ago. It was a very uninspiring picture of my then 14 month old daughter and a shoe she just happened to be trying to eat. It was in the kitchen of my then dingy and ugly rental house (we're talking bright green walls, fluorescent lighting, blue formica bad.)  I fell in love with the first click. It wasn't so much the picture itself because, let's be honest, that was pretty bad, or even the fact that I had a new and awfully expensive (at least to my inexperienced self) camera. Instead, I understood the power I held in my hands, from that very first picture. The power to capture a moment, any moment, in the small of my hand and hold it forever.


As I started taking more pictures I began to realize that I had the beginnings of an "artistic eye." I started viewing the world as if through a lens, noticing all of the little and often unnoticed things for all of their simplistic beauty. I set out to learn how to capture those little things and make them something beautiful, make them something worth remembering. Because isn't that, after all, how many of us view ourselves? As sometimes small and insignificant yet having a story all our own to tell. I hope to never stop telling the beautiful stories. The epic novels and the short stories all have an equally precious place in my soul. May I never lose the courage to tell them.


Just to start off, a few of my favorite stories over the past few months...

I've known for many years now that I married a good man. I mean, I wouldn't have married him if it hadn't been so, right? They say you fall in love with your spouse in a whole new way after having children together and for me that is the absolute truth. Almost every night we put our daughter to bed together. Most nights that includes reading her a story. There is just something about a little girl cuddled up on her Daddy's lap, enjoying the techno age by reading a bedtime story via the Kindle Fire. Absolutely scrumptious. 

My little love has a big personality. Like really big, as I'm sure you'll quickly discover from the one million pictures I'll end up posting of her. She's both the perfect model (look at that little face!) and the worst model, probably due to the fact that she's a toddler. I love her the most when she's at her freest, enjoying a childhood that will inevitably slip away before we can fully appreciate and savor it. 

Speaking of freedom and the innocence of childhood. Can anything really capture that more than a romp in the leaves? I think not.