Recycleable toothbrush & Colin's B-day party

This past weekend was great for Lee & I because we did alot of relaxing. Actually I did alot of relaxing while he was working on a big project, but me being relaxed is relaxing for him :) Friday night we went to dinner with some friends at Lily's in Venice Beach. They have a great outdoor patio with hanging lanterns and yummy French food. On Saturday I got my hair done and then Lee and I spent the day working on his big "project" which was pretty cool. More to come on that later. Saturday night we ate left over lasagna that Lee had made during the week (Maybe he has a little Italian in him....it was SO good) and then went out and got gelato at the 3rd street promenade. Then on Sunday I went to the market and found something that I've been researching for a while now and finally found....a Recyclable Toothbrush!!! Recycline has come up with a toothbrush that is 100% recyclable (including all of the packaging) and made from recycled products (yogurt containers). The only hard part is that you have to send the toothbrush back to Recycline, but they pay for the mailing, just download the label from their website http://www.recycline.com/toothbrush.html These toothbrushes are now sold at Trader Joes and Target, along with a variety of other stores so you really have no excuse NOT to start using one. Think about how much plastic we could save if each of us used a recycled toothbrush every month!

The rest of Sunday was spent playing tennis with Lee, taking the dogs to this incredible dog park in Kester Canyon, and doing laundry - it was fun.
I also did work for my photoshop class and edited some of my pictures. Remember the sneak peak I posted of Colin's b-day party a few weeks ago? Well here are more pictures from the party. I will post the rest tomorrow.....

Operation Welcome Home Brunch - Part 2

I had a personal growth experience on Wednesday that I thought I'd share. As I wrote in Monday's post, I took a bunch of random pictures over last weekend at my friends' wedding which I was SO excited about. This is the first wedding that I've taken pictures of with the intention of wanting to shoot a wedding "for real" some day (get paid). When I uploaded the pictures to my computer, a TON of them were out of focus. Not extremely out of focus, but enough that you wouldn't really want to look at them for long :)

I was really bummed and felt awful mainly because I am really hard on myself and strive too much for perfection which leads me to be extremely disappointed when, well.......I'm not perfect (which is most of the time). So I wallowed in my sorrows that night, even after Lee reassured me that this was all part of the learning process, and then went to bed. On Thursday morning, remembering what he said and determined not to wallow, but learn and move on, I logged into the Digital Wedding Forum and created a new thread asking other photographers why my pics were so out of focus. I also emailed Lindsey from Sweet Monday, hoping she would have pity on me ;) After a few rounds on my thread and a few emails with Lindsey, I realized what mistake I had made - manually focusing my lens. At an event like a wedding, I should NOT manually focus - nope, never, nada. Makes it WAY too hard since it's an event and an uncontrolled environment.

Although I felt a bit like "DUH!!", I realized that I really DID learn something. Although I may only have about 15 pictures to show for Freddy & Laura's wedding, the other 200 are a great tool to learn from! So that was my instance of personal growth; embracing my mistakes instead of expecting perfection. HUGE!

So, on to some pictures. Here are a few more from the ND Brunch.


Toni Reinis, Executive Director/co-Founder


John Keaveney, Founder of New Directions
Rudy Grimaldo, Board Member and a veteran who fought in Operation Enduring Freedom

Cindy Young, Director of Development for New Directions

Operation Welcome Home Brunch - Part One

Here is Part One of pictures from the New Directions, Operation Welcome Home brunch on Saturday. I had such a good time taking pictures of this event and meeting some new people who have a commen interest and beliefe in helping our Veterans.

The Family Room at ND was set up so nicely:

The tables were labeled with very meaningful words that are the foundation of New Directions' mission. I wasn't going to add all of them to this post, but I think it's very inspiring.







Each person was given information about New Directions Inc., Chris's Place, and ND dog tags.

Nice Spread!
The wonderful LaShanda and the registration table...

Lee speaking with former Board Member, Troy Evans


Toni Reinis speaking with guests


More tomorrow!

My weekend & my boys

Wow - my weekend was so busy!! First, on Friday night I bought a new lens (Canon 50mm 1.8) and couldn't wait to get home and try it. Much to my delight, it turned out some amazing pictures. On Saturday, I took pictures at a brunch for New Directions to support their new program Operation Welcome Home which provides housing and rehabilitation services for vets returning from Iraq & Afghanistan specifically. They just purchased a new house for the returning vets and they've named it Chris's Place in memory of a former board member who passed away earlier this year. The brunch was so heart-felt and I felt lucky to be part of such a great organization. I will post the pictures later this week.

On Saturday night, our friends Freddy and Laura got married! Much to my luck, they used the same photographers that Lee & I used for our wedding - Sweet Monday. Over the past year since our wedding, I have kept in touch with the ladies from Sweet Monday and I feel lucky to call them my friends. They have given me so much support and advice about the photography business and I owe them many thanks for being so great. They even encouraged me to bring my camera to the wedding on Saturday night to take as many pictures as I wanted. It was slightly close quarters, but I managed to get some cool pics....can't wait to show everyone!! So Freddy and Laura got married at this rad place in downtown LA called the Marvimon. If you or anyone you know is looking for an intimate space for a wedding or party that has a New York loft feel, definitely check this place out.

After the wedding, me, Lee, our friend Mike checked out the Edision Lounge on 2nd street in downtown LA. It's the old CA Edison generator building and it's extremely hip and cool. The whole night I felt sort of like I was back in NYC which was nice. Check out the pics of the Edison on their website, and again - great place for a party.

So essentially, that was my weekend. I was too tired to do anything on Sunday except eat, laundry, and sleep ;)

Here is a picture of my boys taken with the new lens. For anyone who knows them, being that close to each other is not something that happens often. I'm SO HAPPY that I got this shot.

Happy week!!

It's just not right......

That it takes $49.87 to fill up my tiny little Honda Civic gas tank...*sigh* Gas at the CHEAP station near my house was $4.49 a gallon this morning!?! What's happening? When I moved to LA almost exactly 4 years ago, it was $21.00 for me to fill up. I will not write about my political views on this blog, but I'll just say this....we need CHANGE ;0)

**If you want to save $ and free yourself from gasoline dependence....crack into your natural gas line and buy a Honda Civic GX NGV. It's one of the coolest cars on the market and it's actually afforable (the same price as a Toyota Prius). A gas pump is installed in your garage that directly connects to your natural gas line. Reviews claim that the price to fill the tank comes out to roughly $2/gallon - wooohooo! That's SO 2004.....