Hello twenty nineteen

Welcome new friend, you brand new year you. You feel like a promising new slate, like a fresh layer of snow… 

hang in there

natural close-up

i’m a big lover of nature.
there is so much beauty in this world.
plant life never ceases to amazing me.
the variety and vibrance feels infinite.

the color red

On Tuesday night when I saw the majority of the US map turn red, I said, “this is making me dislike the color red.” “It’s like the country is hemorrhaging.”

we drink wine on sundays

I can’t think of a better way to spend Sunday than going wine tasting with my dad and stepmom in wine country. We tried almost a dozen wines and had lots of laughs and delicious food along the way. It was a beautiful day.

Cheers!

1105

Autumn is my muse. I’m enthralled with it every single day. I can’t help but capture it. It’s a film of transition, a lesson in life. Constantly inconsistent. Just when you get comfortable, everything changes. Nature says, don’t stand still… keep going… aging… evolving, like the tide of a river.

november one

It’s interesting how we circle around the same places and patterns throughout our lives. We are constantly seeking comfort even when it’s only temporary and sometimes even detrimental.

The push to get out of my comfort zone is always a challenge. It’s usually worth it in the long run but I still seek out the comforting beauty of these routines. And I can’t escape them ever. Because we are all connected, by place and people.

Home is a more complex word than you’d expect. And it’s often not just one place. The pieces are all around. I cling to each little bit.

tiny beautiful things

People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.
―Iris Murdoch

photographs made during a wander around Astoria in earlier this month | canon 30d | 28mm

keep it loose, keep it tight

My plan for life is loose. To take care of myself, to love the people in my life, to experience as much as I can of things that feel good and to learn from the ones that don’t. To follow my gut, it’s yet to be wrong. Touch heals. To thrive at life. Accept death and change. Feel my feelings and move on. The answer is always love, the question is…

#tobendandback

Hey friends,

If you know me on instagram, then you know that every other friday night I post a lot of #tobendandback photos.

You see, every other friday during the school year, my boyfriend and I make a pilgrimage from Portland to Bend, Oregon then turnaround and come back. We go there for the explicit reason of picking up his son, who lives there, and bringing him home with us for the weekend. This is about 3.5 hours each way, which makes for seven straight hours in the car! It’s like going on a road trip and ending up in the same place you started at the end of the ride. Not my favorite way to spend a friday night but it is beautiful and I sure do love that kid we pick up, always a treat to have him back with us again. Here’s the routes we take, to give you a feel for the kind of terrain we cover.

So, just over a year ago, I decided that I should make a bit of a project out of this trip and take photos along the way and post them on instagram. I have to say making these photos have made the trips more fun and my iPhone photography skills have improved greatly along the way. If you go back to the beginning of that tag (#tobendandback), you can see how much I have improved. I am starting to find it more of a challenge as I don’t want to post the same image over and over again. I use the vscocam app for a lot of my shots, I really love the filters they have and the ability to adjust exposure, highlights, etc to help make the photos more accurate to what I saw (I do wish the app was a bit faster though, sigh).

Here is just a sampling of my photos in this series (in no particular order).

Sometimes we stop along the way and see the sights a bit, but most of the time (and the majority of all the shots in this series) we just stay in the car and get through the trip. All I can say is, at least, it’s a pretty ride.

Follow along again this friday on instagram (I’m @nessavay) for more of this series.

it’s tulip time!

hey there.

let’s get back to film shots, shall we? i just realized my last two posts were digital photography, which don’t get me wrong, is totally awesome. but film has my heart. i prefer to shoot it, but i can shoot any camera really {I mean that in the least conceded way possible}.

a couple weeks ago i spent an evening at the wooden shoe tulip festival with a couple of my very talented photo friends (katie and danielle). it was a gorgeous night, but also very chilly. i am so glad i went. the light was ah-mazing! it was so cold it took most of the ride home for me to warm up again.

today i am sharing my instant photos from that evening. i took some 35mm and some hassy shots too but we will save those for another time. it’s good to stretch out the tulip bounty a bit, it’s just so much pretty. and it’s good to save a bit of color for the dreary days. {in Oregon, there are always dreary days ahead}

*before you go on, may I ask one favor? Each photo, please pause and give them a second. Give them your full attention for that second. Don’t just scroll through. Really look at them. Think of it like a museum exhibit. Thank you for visiting. And for giving each images it’s due.*

the wood bordered shots above are the impossible project PX680 american woods edition made with my polaroid 600 // the shots in-between them are fujifilm peel apart film FP-100c made with my hasselblad 500c/m.

these last four were made with the impossible project PX70 and my sx-70. this was with the film dial set to the middle. i was a bit disappointed at first cause they are so washed out but i’ve learned to love them. 

they are more like paintings of what the tulip fields would look like in a dream.

this last shot here… definitely a fave. 

thanks for visiting. see you again next week.

thinking ahead

Hi y’all. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about my future, vocationally.

I’ve decided that the thing that makes me the most happy to do is photography. Lately I have been challenging myself to shoot more people because I know that if I am going to be serious about getting into photography as a business that I need to strengthen my portrait photography. However, I have always been drawn to candids. Documentary style photography is much more my forte, no matter the subject–people/landscape/whatever. I would much rather photograph what is happening around me than contrive a story for the camera. Nothing wrong with that, it’s just not my thang.

So who better to practice on than family, right? We had a impromptu BBQ last weekend, due to some also very impromptu gorgeous 75 degree weather. Surprisingly with little notice, my closest family members were all able to make it! Quite a treat. Here’s what I documented that evening:

Thanks for stopping by and seeing what I’m up to. I’ve decided that this place doesn’t get enough love so starting today I will post weekly… every Wednesday!

See you next week!
xo, Vanessa