The Amazing True Story of Leah and Brian’s Wedding

We had the privilege of going to a wedding this past weekend in Asheville. Now sometimes, I hate to say this, but at this stage in life sometimes you get a bit wedding’ed out, but we were super excited for this joyous event. For one thing, it was in Asheville, which is an awesome city, but most importantly, it was Leah and Brian’s wedding.
Now I have been a fan of Leah’s since we were in the same sorority at UVA. We lived together in a house with 15 other girls… and somehow we survived that and stayed friends! Leah and Nicole and I were The Hellionz in college and we had many a wild night.
Aaron and I have been fans of Brian since we got to meet him for the first time. Leah and Brian visited us in Boone. Brian walked a mile in the snow to go get us groceries and make us breakfast. We were totally won over.

So clearly Brian and Leah are awesome and they are an awesome couple.

That’s the happy couple at the rehearsal. They asked Aaron to take some pictures and he definitely did! He had a blast capturing some awesome moments, like this one of Leah looking demure and pensive…

You can see she’s really excited to be getting married.
I was also honored to be part of the wedding. So I kept busy rehearsing…

And eating…

The rehearsal was at this amazing restaurant called Posana in downtown Asheville. We all had a blast.

Here are Nicole and Ramey making a toast. And Leah and Brian enjoying themselves…

The nicest part was getting to hang out with friends. But, I particularly enjoyed the slide show Brian had made for the wedding with multiple awkward photos. After that we went back to the hotel and partied with some of the out of town guests.
Then, oh so quickly, it was the big day. We started with a bridal breakfast, then hair, then to the venue, which was Claxton Farm, was so beautiful.

Now I’m going to leave you in suspense for a while about the wedding. More photos to come!

Back at it….

Yeah.. it’s been a while once again… but.. let’s catch up…

The weather has turned around… and instead of crappy cold weather all of the time, we now get…

… crappy, rainy, wet nasty weather all of the time…

… and fog….

and tornados.

But… on some decent days, we’ve managed to get to the farmer’s market….

 

It was a good showing for the first farmer’s market.. not a lot of veggies quite yet… but we were glad to have our farmer’s market bread and meats again…

I really love this time of year in Boone… if the weather I decent. It’s that magical time of year where the student population has significantly decreased, but the Florida people haven’t gotten here yet…

Also… graduation was at the beginning of May!

 

So… our parents came down from Lexington.. and my sis came from Richmond… we had some good times… ate some good food…

There’s another update coming soon… the updates should be more regular in the coming months…

A Blog mostly about Josh fighting ninjas

So this weekend we did something pretty cool. Our friend, Josh asked us to come take pictures of his Aikido Workshop (and by “us” I mean Aaron).

Josh has been doing this Aikido stuff for a while now, and I knew that it vaguely had something to do with martial arts. However, I must say, I was unprepared for the awesomeness of this sport.

I discovered this weekend, that all this time Josh was actually learning how to save us from Ninja Attack.

Evidence Number 1: We all know ninjas are sneaky, and thus more likely to attack at night. Josh wears training uniforms that are very pajama-like, so as to be prepared for a night-time attack.

Evidence Number 2: Ninjas are known to attack using hand-to-hand combat, swords, knives and poles, but never guns. Aikido involves fighting hand-to-hand, and with swords, knives, and poles… but isn’t so good defending against guns.

Evidence Number 3: Ninjas are badass. You would need an army of ninja fighters to conquer them. Well, Josh has an army of Aikido people. They actually came from all over the east coast to train.

Evidence Number 4: Ninjas have sweet moves. If you were fighting ninjas you would need sweet moves as well.

Need, I say more?!? I even got to learn some beginning ninja fighting tricks.

So, I want to send a big thank-you to Josh, for keeping us safe from the ninjas. I can tell that it takes a lot of work and practice.

In other news, I have been working on my comprehensive exam for my Education Specialist degree for the past couple weeks and I am finally finished! So keep your fingers crossed for me. I should get the results back in a few weeks.

Virginia goes to Denver!

So last weekend while Aaron was taking artsy pictures, I got to fly to Denver and visit with Nat and Erin. This visit was prompted by an excellent suggestion from Martha that we try to meet up while she was at a conference in Denver. Luckily Nat and Erin had a few days off for President’s Weekend, so it worked out perfectly.

When I flew in on Friday I got to see the Rockies. They are pretty impressive.

Nat picked me up at the airport with the faithful Oliver dog, Jethro. Then we got to pick-up M from her hotel in downtown Denver. Nat and Erin live in an ‘up-in-coming’ neighborhood not far from the downtown. It has some amazing Mexican restaurants. One of the best treats of Denver was Nat’s breakfast burritos made with green chili and insanely good flour tortillas. The tortillas were so good that I had to bring some back for Aaron.

As for green chili, if you are a east-coaster like me, you may think of chili as something made in a Crockpot with meat, beans, and tomatoes. But green chili is more of a sauce that goes on anything and everything from eggs to french fries. Here’s a website I found with more info. for the curious foodies out there: http://denvergreenchili.com/default.aspx

After lunch with Nat and M we got a quick tour of Nat and Erin’s house before going to pick up the lady of the house from work.

The entrance

The kitchen

Awesome polka dot room.

Fairy princess guest room.

TV room.

Nat is a woodworker, so they have converted the garage into a shop for him.

  They also have an awesome backyard and patio where we soaked up the Denver sun.

Besides being awesome friends and green chili eaters. Nat and Erin have the whole outdoorsy, gardening, composing, good life going for them. Erin made sure that we at least went on a walk every day, so we balanced the delicious Denver food and beer.

On Saturday, sadly Erin had to go to class, but Nat took us to Red Rock for a little hike.

 

It’s a beautiful place and we were lucky enough to have beautiful weather too.

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On Saturday night, Mom and Dad Page treated us all to a belated birthday dinner for M. We went to Jonesy’s Eat Bar in downtown Denver. They have amazing fries and sliders. We got thai chili fries, mac and chese fries, buffalo fries, and truffle parmesean fries. As for the sliders: shrimp po boys, falafel, lamby joes, and traditional blue cheese and bacon. DELICIOUS!

After dinner we played pool. Because every classy restaurant should have a pool table.

 

That night a giant snow storm hit Minneapolis, so lucky for us, Martha got stuck in Denver for an extra day. We spent Sunday lounging around and since Nat and Erin didn’t have school on Monday, we got to play a bar quiz game, Geeks who Drink. I definitely recommend.

So those are some of the highlights of the trip. We also watched a lot of Buffy and gave Jethro lots of love and attention. I have to say, Denver was a pretty fabulous place and I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing Martha, Nat, and Erin again sometime soon.

Mid February quick update…

Well, the month is still going on strong…. between the newspaper, classes, the internship, and various other commitments, time really doesn’t exist… so, I really haven’t gotten to do any fun shooting for a long while.. so, this past weekend, while Virginia was in Denver (She’ll do a blog update later) I finally got to go out and do some shooting… well… first I had to go shoot a local “Tough Man Competition”

So… the above is about what I was thinking… I was thinking that a Tough-Man competition would be a mouth-piece and some tape on the hands / wrists…. then, they’d get out there and beat each other senseless…. I was picturing sweat and blood flying.. broken noses… good old American fun. However, I was mistaken.

Now… yeah.. that guy is getting punched in the face… but they’re wearing 16oz gloves and headgear…. not to mention the groin protector… I’m not saying that boxing isn’t tough… boxing is hard-core, and it takes someone who’s in great physical condition to last more than a few seconds in the ring.. but… I wouldn’t call boxing a tough-man competition… Also, you may notice that the above pictures are.. horrible… well, the “Arena” was the local National Guard Armory… which was horribly lit… and, we “press” members had to sit at tables that were pushed up against the ring…  meaning that we had to attempt to shoot through the ropes, and that’s never fun.

There were a few opportunities for some tighter shots…  but not very many… and while there’s a little blood on this guy, I wouldn’t exactly say that there was a lot of blood flowing outside of the bodies…

There were a few decent hits though… some that were enough to make people take a little nap on the mat for a while…

So, after the boxing, Zack and I hopped in the car to go take a few pictures… of course, at the time, it was dark.. so, that made for some interesting pictures….

It was a full moon… so I couldn’t pull crazy long exposures.. for most, it seemed that the magic number was somewhere between 4-10 minutes….

The moon made some pretty cool shadows… and the clouds made some cool streaks in the sky…

We ended Saturday night by spending some time shooting this awesome old bus.. I think that the bus has been converted to a home.. or, it may possibly be the start of a hippie commune… note the stove-pipe coming out of the front window, and the plywood replacing the front windshield… So… another short note on the bus.. this bus is off the Parkway a little bit… over a few fences and a hike up a hill…. now… this was a decently steep hill…. you can stand on top of the hill, look around 360 degrees, and it’s like you’re above everything… you can see for miles and miles… but, the hill is steep.. on all sides. There’s no way this thing was driven up the hill under its own power. So, I have no other logical explanation other than to say that the bus was dropped on top of that hill by aliens. So… after a few shots of the bus, I ended up back at home at about 3AM.

Saturday, I woke up at 7… got a shower… and drove in to pick up Zack. We then headed up to Shady Valley, where I was helping out Zack with some motorcycle photography… It was supposed to be in the 70’s on Saturday… but that didn’t happen. What did happen is that I got sunburned.  It got up to about 50. So, we only saw half a dozen motorcycles in about 4 hours… so, I drove Zack back to his dorm, and went out to do a little Recon for the shoot we wanted to do Saturday night… This found me up on the Parkway again… but after a short time, I found what I was looking for (More on that below) So, I gave Josh a call, and he agreed to come meet me at the intersection of 221 and 421… so, since I happened to be driving past the Park and Ride at the time, I pulled in, put the car in park, and absolutely passed out. Josh says he had to beat on the window about 3-4 times to get me to wake up and unlock the door for him… it was only a 10 minute nap… but man… it felt amazing.

So, then Josh and I grabbed a quick meal… picked Zack up again… and by about 6:30 we were on our way out to the Dark Sky Observatory, which is an observatory owned by the University. We have been planning on doing this for a long time… and finally got around to it, even though the conditions weren’t the best… Sure, it was decently warm and the sky was clear, but this past weekend was a full moon. So, we knew that the moon was going to rise at about 9:30.. so we got there around 7 and figured we could beat the moonrise…

So, pointing at Polaris gives those nice tight circles over about a 30 minute exposure…. however, we realized that perhaps we weren’t at “the” observatory… so, we went for a quick walk… we discovered a much larger building up the road just a bit, and I came back down to the above shot and cut the exposure short….

I had this awesome shot lined up… right through the center of the dome… and the dang thing moved in the middle of the shot…

And the same thing happened here…. but… I think the effect on this one isn’t as bad, since it’s not such a tight shot on the dome itself…

Here’s another challenge of shooting during a full moon… in the foreground, you can see the shadow of my tripod…. once again, it doesn’t bother me too much… but I’d prefer if it wasn’t there….

There were all sorts of interesting photo opportunities at the observatory…. but we really wanted to be there for the star trails… so once the moon made that no longer an option, we headed out towards other places….

Is there any better place to be at 10pm than a graveyard during a full moon? I think not… here you see the headstones directly ahead… the shadows created by the full moon… and behind the fence, a bit of evening traffic coming through….

The church really had all sorts of interesting shots… and it was a neat looking church in general…

So.. all in all, the weekend was great for some non-required photography…. I had a blast out shooting… and a I learned some great techniques…  Until next time…. ….