I picked up a nikon 105mm 2.8 for macro shots a couple of weeks ago. I decided to take it out this weekend to the fells reservation, where we take Emma on the weekends for some rompin around. I have to say, I like it a lot even for bringing to the park.

I’m sure every photographer who has a dog says this but, I think Emma is the most photographed dog on the planet!

I am so excited to have my very first giveaway on my blog! I met Heather through my friend Emily when I was looking for a local jeweler to set some of my mother’s stones into something that I would wear. They have just been sitting in a plastic bag for the last 3 years and I made it my New Year’s resolution (along with many other things) to get them set so that I can wear them and have a great memory of my mother with me every day.

I took the stones to Heather and she came up with the most awesome design! It’s not finished yet, so you won’t see any photos until it’s done. hehe

Heather holds an MFA in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork and Jewelry and gets commissioned to make many wedding bands, engagement rings and other wedding related accessories. If you want something unique and not the plain diamond solitaire, you must go to her. She also teaches jewelry making classes during the week! Can you see why I love her?!

I ask a lot of questions whenever I meet crafty people like, “what’s this for? what do you do with these? How do you cast things? you use these cool colored powders for what now?” and Heather is happily ready to feed my curiosity, I love that!

I went to her studio this weekend to check on my piece and I had to have a pair of her earrings, so I got one pair for me and one for you! Here are some photos of Heather in her studio and I have a pair of her Bright white enameled copper Cherry Blossom earrings swing from fine sterling silver hoops to give away! (I got that description from her Etsy shop)

All you have to do is leave a comment and I’ll use a random number generator to choose a winner on Sunday, March 7th. Please limit to one comment per day.

Heather Wang Jewelry: Website
122 Western Avenue, Studio # 319
Lowell, MA 01851 USA

UPDATE: Jess is our winner! Here is the random number generator screen shot to prove it:

Thank you everyone for participating. Jess, congrats girl! You deserve it because you commented every day, too xoxo

It’s been a while since I’ve had a free weekend with no photo shoots and decided to take it easy, it is *freezing* here after all! We have dog walkers who take Emma to “the fells” every mon/weds/fri and when we asked where it is that they go, the directions seemed so simple yet we would always get lost. The place we would end up stopping was beautiful for sure, but we never saw other dogs around. After reading the boston dog blog Fidoloves.com that had a specific map with directions to the spot where people take their dogs, we headed out! There were so many dogs and Emma had a freakin’ blast! Isn’t she the cutest?!

I wanted to do an end of year post that is more about the year to come rather than the year that has just passed. As far as my photography business goes, 2009 was about getting it started. I have wanted to be a photographer since I can remember holding my mother’s minolta as she showed me how to use it at 6 years old. Now, at 27, I have decided to try even harder than ever to pursue my love of the art form and I started my own photography business in October of this year. So, you could say I am fairly new to this world. All I know is that I love photography and love taking photographs of people and getting to know their story. It sounds cliche to say “everyone has a story to tell”, but it’s true.

I’ve met so many great people in this short time and I am so excited to see what 2010 brings. For me, I want 2010 to be a year of me trying new things, busting out into a whole new world of photography that is currently unfamiliar to me. I kicked off the new year early by getting some friends together and doing just that.

I am typically more of a “natural light” kinda girl but I really wanted to take advantage of the season’s outdoor lights and try a portrait session with some off camera flash. I don’t learn very well from going to workshops and having someone show me how to use my gear or watching video tutorials. I need to go out in the field with some patient friends and just tinker with my camera until I get something I like. I have enough of a photography background where I know my equipment well, but when it comes to new ideas, nobody can teach me how to create what is in my head. That’s up to me!

Thankfully, I do have some really great friends who were willing to stand in the 20 degree weather here in Boston and let me shoot them and a kick-ass boyfriend to hold my light stand. This is Christina and Rob. Rob was one of the first friends I met when I moved to Boston 3 years ago and Christina is his lovely wife. They are from Texas!

Thank you to everyone who has helped me get to where I am today and it goes without saying, but I wouldn’t be here without your help.

xoxo

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 thought I would write a personal post today for you, my kick-ass readers!  This weekend was a particularly special weekend for me.  I met a woman who I had never met before, but have become very close to over the last year via email and who I consider to be one of my best friends.  Her name is Jessica and she lives in Atlanta, Georgia which is 1000 miles away from where I live in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Jess taught a class called “environmental sustainability” at Oregon State where my boyfriend, Danny, attended college and eventually had Jess as a teacher.  They weren’t friends at school, but Jess had a couple of questions about Hillel that Danny ran and contacted him.

Last fall, Jess emailed Danny to see how he was doing and catch up.  They talked and Danny found out that Jess’ father had stage IV colorectal cancer that radiation and chemotherapy had done nothing to fix.  As some of you may or may not know, I lost my mother to brain cancer just 3 years ago.  Danny knows that I am always willing to help people and so gave Jess my email just in case she had any questions or wanted someone to scream at who would understand.  I got an email from Jess and we’ve never stopped talking.  We shared our experiences, helped each other through tough memories, laughed, cried, you name it!

It’s been nice to know someone who I can call and gush over a cute bride/mother interaction that I see during a wedding. Jess can listen and not say anything at all and that means the world to me.  She doesn’t feel bad for me, she just gets it. Almost anyone who has been forced to have their mother or father (or both) ripped away from them 4o+ years before they were supposed to knows what I mean.

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

On August 28th of this year Jess’ father, Tom, passed away.  Last Thursday was her birthday, so we thought we should meet in person on her birthday weekend.  I had a photo shoot on Saturday and so Jess and her boyfriend, Travis, flew up here to see us.  It was so great meeting you in person, Jess!  I only wish we lived closer together.  Both of them had never been to Boston before so we took them on a whirlwind tour!

We hit up Faneuil Hall of course where Jess tried an authentic cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and Boston Creme donut.

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

On Sunday (today) we went for a nice walk in the Harvard Arboretum and showed off our ever-lingering fall leaves.

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

It was so great to finally meet Jess (and Trav!) in person.  She has made a difference in my life and I am so happy to have been able to connect with her.  I can only hope that I’ve helped her in the same way that she has helped me.  It is nice to think that if my mother and Jess’ father are looking down on us, they are proud of this connection that without their encounter with the big C, would never have happened.

© Alexandra Roberts Photography

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