For my birthday this year, Danny gave me something that I’ve been dying for!  His idea was to take me to the airport on the Friday after my birthday (Dec 2) and let me choose any place to go for the weekend. Not bad, eh? We both love to travel and we were due for a weekend outside of Boston. It sounds much more exiting to choose a place right at the airport, but I did want to plan a little so we got our plane tickets on Thursday evening to fly out to Asheville, NC on Friday night.

I wanted to go somewhere in the southeast because I’ve never been and I am fascinated by southern culture. I wanted to eat boiled peanuts, hear people say “y’all” and experience the “southern hospitality” I’ve heard so much about.  Here is a teaser image from our weekend!

Us:

Here are some of the highlights from downtown Asheville.  I’ll try to explain most of them, as Asheville is so very unique!

First, there was a cute soap shop that sold fortune cookie shaped soaps in about 10 different scents.  The cat is to symbolize the catwalk where delivery trucks needed to go to bring goods to the shops in the old days.  The purple wall and monk was by a new Belgian beer place (yum!).  There was a spice shop that sold maybe 40 different kinds of salt, and in the photo you see 4 or so different kinds of smoked paprika.  Of course I had to snap a picture of Boston Way in Biltmore Village and a sign of the Biltmore Estate.  We didn’t go here because they charge $60 a person just to drive up to it.  No thanks!

This place was my favorite in all of Asheville!  It was a double decker buss/coffee shop!  It is called “Double D’s” and I highly recommend a visit to anyone passing through.  They even had a live musician playing on the top floor!  How awesome are the tables?

After we had seen the sights of Asheville, we wanted to go see some of the nature around town.  We headed to Chimney Rock to climb to the top and work off some of those calories consumed in town.   All of these photos were taken in Chimney Rock, NC.

All in all we loved Asheville. The town was about 10 years in the future as far as being environmentally friendly. Everything seemed to run off solar panels and there were recycle bins of all types all over downtown. Tons of coffee shops to just hang out and not a Starbucks in sight! All of the shops had signs on them saying “locally made here in Asheville” and all of the restaurants had the same. There was live music happening in every pub on Saturday night which is something we’re not used to here in Boston, or they charge you $20 to get in.  We just roamed the streets and found ourselves in and out of places at night. “DW” from Tupelo Honey Cafe helped us find things to do because we went to Asheville with zero plans and no knowledge of the city. He was great!  Also, Tupelo Honey Cafe’s food was so good, I highly recommend it. Even the police officers were friendly, asking how we were doing as we walked on by.  In Boston most of the time I am scared to look a police officer in the eye for fear they will start yelling at me for no reason like they typically do.

I leave you with one last photo. As we drove back to Charlotte to catch our flight back to Boston Danny saw this house on a hill and immediately pulled over because he knew that I would love it. What do you think?

As always, thank you for reading!

xo

This weekend I had the opportunity to meet, shoot, and be shot by two lovely ladies and their dogs. I technically met them online, on Twitter! They are Meredith of &Unlimited Photography and Stacey of Cold Nose Photo.

My brother sent me a link to some of Meredith’s photographs a few months ago because she is a pet photographer and gets great shots of dogs and their owners. Who doesn’t want to spend all day looking at photos of cute dogs? I loved her style and so we started talking through tweets. I know, I know. Meredith and Stacey had already met in person and also initially met online.

It was so so so fun to hang out with other photographers. We met up at the Fells Reservation in Medford, MA. We bring Emma here quite a bit, and it was awesome for her to have some friends to play with this time!

Here is Meredith and Orvis!

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

And Stacey, Brewer, and Bromley!

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

I have a whole new respect for pet photographers.  It’s SO hard!  The pups are never looking where you want them to be looking and are usually distracted by whatever bird or squirrel is passing by.  Both Stacey and Meredith have some great techniques for keeping the dog’s attention that seem to work really well!  Meredith cracked me up so much because me and Emma were posing and I hear her make this sound I can only describe as a “chirp”.  It definitely kept both Emma and my attention.

When you have such beautiful women in front of you, it makes the job easy!  Here are a couple portraits of each of them.

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

And here is a shot of the girls hard at work!

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

I hope we do this again and often! For more images from our adventure, head over here.

I used to get very into the flickr explore page.  I will never understand how those photos are chosen and I came to terms with that a few months ago.  I always wanted to be on the explore page and would do everything I could think of to make that possible! I just logged into flickr to see a comment on my most recent photo saying “congrats on being on explore!” So, I ran over to the flickr scout and sure enough there I was.   Apparently ignoring your flickr account for a few weeks is how to get on it! So what if it’s page 22, that’s not the point!

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

They don’t always have to be boring!  I took this photo of my friends/co-workers yesterday outside our office.  They often model for me when I want to try out some new shots, and yesterday I wanted to do a jumping shot!

I also took a photo of Jack laying over a rock but I am going to turn that one into a photomanip that will take some time.  I will for sure post it here!

Thanks for being good sports, guys!

Click the photo to see a larger version.

This is my first blog post.  I plan on displaying some of my photography on this website and hope you enjoy it.  My goal is to take at least one photograph every day and post it here to get myself to focus more on the thing I love so much.

Thank you for visiting.