No Rest For The Weary

My allergies have been kickin my butt all weekend, making it near impossible to sleep. Coupled with a busy weekend of photoshoots, and I'm tired...

Had a good shoot Saturday with some new parents and their 3 month old baby girl. The baby fell asleep half way through the shoot, and let me tell you, the easiest time to shoot three month olds is when they are asleep.

Went to a kids groupshoot today and had a good time. The kids all did a great job!

Started out the day capturing Jeven in motion on the tire swing...


I survived the swing and the boiling lava, only losing three lives. Thankfully, Jeven told me I had a few more to go.



The day involved lot's of spinning:


A lil bit o' fishin...


Some hoops...


Lot's of smiles...


And a little bit of.... well I'm not quite sure..



But the star of the day had to be our friend the frog...


Autumn wasn't convinced that it would turn into a prince if she kissed it.


But Alyssa was willing to give it a try


No luck.. so we brought in the big guns... pretty teens!


I think we got a defective frog!



Oh and did I mention... lot's of very cute kids!

Hidden Lake Hike

Finally got my first hike of the year in during my week vacation! I went up to a little place called Hidden Lake, which is on the western side of Mount Hood. The hike starts off pretty steep, and I was sucking wind at the top, but eventually it levels out and goes down to a little stream and a small lake. There were wild rhodies all along the trail, tons and tons of them, not quite yet in bloom. It will be a really pretty hike once they all bloom. There wasn't much to the lake itself, but it was very peacefull. I was the only one there, and I sat on a tree stump over looking the lake as I ate my lunch and listened to the birds and watched the tadpoles swimming below.

I enjoy hiking with friends, but it's also nice to sometimes get out there and be alone with nature. It allows me to really relax and focus on the energy within and around me. This was a great hike to start off the season.

Is This How You Get An Enema?

I went on vacation last weekend to Gold Beach, OR. We stayed in a little crappy hotel called the Beachcomber Inn, or something like that. Besides the rock hard bed, and the condom wrapper left over from some guest who probably had more fun than I did... the hotel suffered from my biggest hotel pet peeve. Low shower heads!

Why oh why is the shower head so low in hotels? This makes no sense to me. It's not as if you will conserve water by having it travel less distance to get into the drain. It's not as if the ceiling is lower and there is not enough room. There is no good explanation for this.

This particular hotel was worse than most. At 6'2", most hotel showers are right about my eye level. Which means I have to duck my head a bit to wash my hair. This shower head was down below my sholdures. When you combine that with crappy hotel water pressure, it means that the water hit me pretty much in the butt.

Why is it so hard for them to move the shower heads up to a normal level. I've never ever been to someone's house and seen the shower head that low. Who designs these hotels anyway?

With a few clicks...

Instead of throwing yesterday's pictures into the recycle bin, I decided to see if I could rescue them at all with Photoshop. I figured if I blew out the highlights, I might as well make everything blurry so it doesn't matter as much. Here's what I've come up with so far...