Cedar House Photography Blog

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springtime, aka multiple personality disorder

About this time every year, I go a little bit crazy :) I have a bad case of SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder- self-diagnosed, okay), meaning that winters leave me mopey and lethargic and feeling hopeless about everything, and as soon as I get a little bit of sunshine, I’m a completely different person. When we were living in Buena Vista, that was especially hard – the winters there last forever! Sometimes I wouldn’t see green grass until the end of May. Imagine my delight when I realized that the trees were starting to grow leaves like THREE WEEKS AGO. I couldn’t believe it, and as soon as I realized this amazing weather wasn’t a fluke, my personality kind of did a 180. All my black clothes are now in the back of the closet, and I’m wearing neon everything, and I have SO MUCH ENERGY I don’t really know what to do with myself. Warmth and sunshine make me REALLY HYPER, as you may have noticed from my EXCESSIVE USE OF CAPS.

I love it. I love springtime, I love the sunshine, and I feel SO EXCITED about this upcoming year. This video is a pretty accurate representation of what’s going on inside of my happy little head right now (although the eggs, that’s a little weird):

Anyway, happy spring! Hope you guys are out there doing lots of fun things and playing in the sun :)

. comments .

zach April 9th, 2012

lol. yes yes. Love the pics, and the neon clothes.

Cedar House Photography Blog » Blog Archive » rainy springtime shoot May 10th, 2012

[...] get to work with some of the sweetest, most photogenic girls on the planet. You might remember my near-obsession with springtime, and ever since the weather started warming up and I started seeing little tips of green grass, [...]

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i’m going to africa!!

I’m so excited to let you guys know that this November, three lovely photographer friends and I are headed to Kenya! My friends Nicole, Meredith, Lindsay, and I will be working with Friends Vision, a great organization comprised of volunteers from Kenya and around the world, working to make life brighter for kids at their Children’s Home.

WHAT ARE WE DOING?

We’ll be bringing donated digital cameras & computer equipment with us, and teaching the kids basic photography lessons, hoping to open the door for them to our passion, and give them a potentially marketable skill. I really want to see these kids energized by the beauty of photography – I remember how exciting it was (and still is!) for me to take that first good shot, and to start to see the world in a new way. Wouldn’t it be awesome if some of these kids grew up to be renowned wedding photographers, or award-winning photojournalists?!?

We’ll also be documenting the work that Friends Vision has been doing, through both video and stills, giving them updated images for their website and hopefully a short documentary film as well. We also hope to shoot individual portraits of the kids for use in their child sponsorship program. Obviously, we’ll also be helping out however we can around the Children’s Home, too.

(some of the Friends Vision kiddos)

HOW CAN YOU HELP?

We would be so encouraged by your support! Here are some of the ways you can help:

- Donate your USED (or new!) DIGITAL CAMERAS for us to take with us to give to the kids. We’re looking for digital cameras in working order with all the necessary parts, if possible (batteries, chargers, cards, card readers, etc.). It doesn’t matter if they’re cheap point & shoots or big fancy SLRs – I’m sure the kids will love them! We’re also looking for a few small printers – there are some travel-sized mini-printers that can print straight off of a camera. We’d love to be able to hand out prints as we shoot. If we can get our hands on some USED LAPTOPS IN WORKING ORDER, we’ll bring those with us, too!

- Donate your FREQUENT FLYER MILES. If you have accumulated miles that you’re not going to use, we’d love to have them! It may help us get over there a bit more cheaply. Sign up for an account at points.com, or contact your airline / credit card company… here’s some more info about transferring your miles. If you need my frequent flyer numbers in order to transfer miles, just let me know which airline you’ll be transferring from!

- Donate FINANCIALLY. You can make donations towards my trip at my YouCaring account. We’re each trying to raise $2600 to cover airfare, travel costs, food, and lodging. Any money raised over our goal amounts will go straight to Friends Vision as a donation, or will be used to purchase any accessories necessary for our donated cameras to be useful to the kids.

- Plan to BUY A FRAMED OR MOUNTED PRINT from me when I get back. I’ll be taking LOTS ( and lots and lots and lots) of pictures, both of the kids and of the scenery, etc, and all proceeds from any Africa print sales will go towards this trip.

- Consider SPONSORING A CHILD through Friends Vision! If we know who your sponsored child is, we can bring extra letters, etc with us, and make sure to take plenty of portraits of your sponsored child, with you in mind :)

- Join us at a FUNDRAISER EVENT. We have some fun fundraiser ideas planned … we’ll keep you updated on the details as we figure them out!

Thanks so much for your consideration – we’re all so excited about this trip, and can’t wait to share more details with you soon!

. comments .

Katie B April 3rd, 2012

How amazing! That is going to be a trip of a lifetime. I’m so excited for you!

Tracy Woodger-Broz April 4th, 2012

So awesome! Keep me posted on the fundraising events. :)

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key west

This post is LONG overdue! Zach and I cashed in our frequent flyer miles and headed to Key West for Christmas & New Year’s. We hadn’t been before, and this place was even more amazing than I had prepared myself for. It’s a pretty small island (roughly 2 miles by 4 miles), so we did lots of walking, and got to see a large portion of the island as we wandered around town. I know it has a reputation as being a crazy party town, and while you can definitely find that if you’re looking for it, that’s not the majority of the town – most of the drunken “spring break woohoo!!” types of places are limited to few touristy blocks on the far side of town.

Key West has so much Caribbean charm and fun, brightly-colored, sun-faded architecture. It felt like another country (in a good way). Everyone we encountered was SO pleasant, and went way out of their way to be friendly to us. The small town side of things made us feel right at home. Everyone seemed to know each other around town, and by the end of the trip, we were running into our waitresses and hotel-mates at the grocery store :)

We saw this boat speeding in as we were eating lunch on the dock. I’m so curious about the name :)

At sunset, Mallory Square fills up with street performers:

We took a schooner ride!

Christmas morning mimosas on the beach!

Thanks to Zach for this awesome shot of me while we were stand up paddling:

If you make it down to Key West, you HAVE to check out Dry Tortugas / Fort Jefferson. It’s an old Civil War – era fort that takes up an entire small island a few hours off of Key West. You can snorkel around the moat, and it’s one of the coolest places I’ve ever been. The colors of the water are UNREAL.

I kind of want to live on this boat.

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awesomnia

It’s almost 4am as I write this. I haven’t slept yet tonight, despite my best efforts, and as dawn approaches, it’s looking less likely that I will. I’ve had insomnia for years, and a few times a week, I get to watch the sun rise through the wheat fields to the east. I’m not worried about anything, I’m not trying to keep track of mental to-do lists, and I haven’t had nightmares. I’m just…awake. Like, really, fully awake.

To say I’m a night owl is a serious understatement. I can’t remember the last time I fell asleep before 1:30 or so, and many nights, it’s more like 2:30 or 3. At least once a week, I’m awake to see the sunrise. Well-meaning friends have given me all sorts of remedies over the years: “Take some Tylenol PM!” (that will knock me out, but I’ll feel groggy for days) “Drink some tea!” (Yep) “Read a book!” (Yep) “Take some melatonin!” (Doesn’t work) “Eye mask / earplugs / yoga / cigarettes / white noise machine!”. Still awake.

Here’s the thing, though. I’ll let you in on a little secret: I kind of like it. I’m not sure my insomnia needs curing. Strangely, I am my most alert, energetic, and productive between about 9 pm -3 am. I focus better, bust out album designs and blog posts in half the time, and have intense spurts of creativity. I like the rich, deep colors, the quiet. To make things weirder, whenever I have a long streak of not sleeping, I’ll find out later that my little sister has been awake those same nights, too – even when she’s thousands of miles away. We joke that it’s the full moon keeping us up.

To me, some music just sounds like it belongs to the night. Here are a few of my late-night favorites:

When I’m Small by Phantogram

Stars by The Xx

Bloodstream by Stateless

So now if you’re awake for no reason, you have some excellent music to listen to.

Sidenote: At 4am, I got really excited, thinking I had invented the word “awesomnia”. Turns out I didn’t, but it’s still a sweet word.

. comments .

zach March 8th, 2012

your awesome. I definitely dont have awesomnia.

jan o March 10th, 2012

so, having not slept myself for the last 2 nights, i am so very impressed by your ability and loveliness to pound out such poetry at 4am and include awesomniac ish comments for the rest of us to ponder. you are really something to behold and have elevated sleeplessness to a whole new level.