New Year New Challenge ~ Capture Your 365 Photo Challenge

So I have decided that in the year 2015  I will be participating in a year long photo challenge called, Capture Your 365. The purpose is to focus on capturing one photo each day that sums up what that day is all about in that photo. There are of course prompts that I can follow or I can find my inspiration from within. Many of the things that I read about the challenge suggested having a purpose for the project a general theme that will help keep it going throughout the year.

Normally I would want to come up with a word but instead I have settled on a concept the heart of my life. Since I will be on the go most days and like most have a hectic schedule both personally and professionally I will be taking my photos primarily on phone and then sharing them using the Instagram application. If you are familiar with the application you already know that in order to post your photo it is cropped to 1 inch by 1 inch scale this for me at least makes it so that the hear of the photo is in that block of the photo. Those parameters help narrow your focus and showcase what you really want to highlight and express in your photo. So I took a cue from this function in the popular application and have decided to use their cropping/size restriction as a method for examining and capturing what is at the heart of my life. 

I am very much looking forward to this and hope that you will follow along as I capture 2015 into a collection of 365 photos. Perhaps this will inspire you to capture your own 365. If not perhaps you will take on a different photo challenge such as the 52 project where you capture and share a photo from your week that highlights your life that week.  or 15 in 15 in which you capture 15 photos each month during 2015 to help tell the story of your year. These are smaller projects  that may fit an even more demanding schedule than my own. Good Luck in your endeavors in the coming year.

Day 5 of the 12 Days of Holidays Photo Challenge

 

Treasures of Love Photography's photo challenge Day 5 theme is Naughty or Nice. I created this photo collage with my favorite photos. I choose the one on the left is my mom acting Naughty as a toddler and one on the right is me with her the same age acting Nice. (After running around acting naughty)

 #ToLPholiday #day5 #NaughtyorNice

 http://ift.tt/1uXtJXiTreasures of Love Photography http://ift.tt/138ixji

Venue Preview

This week my wonderful husband, the maid of honor and the best man are going to be going with me to to preview our venue. We are going to go take  a tour of the building and get TONS of photos. (I will share some of the photos we get after we go check everything out.) This will help us keep that detailed image of what it will all look like out there inside and out so we can use them to help with the decorating.

My husband and I are very fortunate with our Maid of Honor and Best Man choices because they are our best friends and are like family to us. They each have some very unique things to bring to the table that will help with taking our tour of the venue. For starters the best man has a talent at figuring out what will fit and work in rooms just by getting to look at them and walk around them in person. The maid of honor has a talent for creating stylish well everything from wardrobe to decor so she will be wonderful at helping me in vision my vision in the spaces we are allowed to use. They also have already done the whole "real ceremony reception thing" and will probably be able to help with negotiating the contract and making sure we have all our bases covered. Besides all of this they are two extra special people in our life and we are thrilled that they are going to be able to go check it out in person with us this week.

With all of this going on I can't help but be excited even though the handfasting is still a year away I am loving each moment of the planning.

Location, Location, Location....

Everyone says that besides the date the location of the ceremony and reception are the most important parts of the planning when doing a handfasting/vow renewal/wedding and so since we already have a date selected that was our next project.  Since we both enjoy being out in nature I had an idea to pick a local state park. I checked out their site and discovered that they had a building that would hold 100 people which helped us decide how many people could be invited giving us a much more intimate event. However when I called to check the availability of our date I was informed that the building I had found which was SUPER affordable (the building for all day use, plus tables and chairs for up to a hundred people with tax is $220) is a building that they only use seasonally....and our date was out of season.


PANIC PANIC PANIC ( I loved that deal and I knew nobody would be able to beat it)

So I started calling around to check other places just to confirm that we had the best deal going...and it turns out we did. Everywhere that I called wanted $1,000 or more for just the space not counting everything else that we would need to make it to where we could have the ceremony and reception. That KILLED our budget that we had which is really conservative considering what we are doing.

What is a girl to do.....well change the date of her vow renewal of course...You see for us the date is not the most important part we just wanted to have a chance to celebrate our marriage, with family and friends, and create some special pre-children memories because they will be on their way shortly after I graduate school in 2015. So we decided that we would plan the handfasting for April  2015 instead of January 2015. When we were married we decided to be impulsive after dealing with the stresses of planning a ceremony and reception and all the family drama that goes into it and chose to elope right then but had been planning a wedding for April which was when we first started dating. So thanks to the seasonal availability of our preferred venue we changed the date and are now going to have an opportunity to see what our handfasting would have looked like if we had done it as planned. We selected the anniversary of us being together as our date for the handfasting/vow renewal date and are both really excited about it.

Location is SO important and as you can see played a BIG part in when our special day is going to happen. I am so thankful that we were still able to get the location that we wanted, saving all that money, and pick a date that has very significant meaning to us as well. That day we will have been a couple for 11 years, and will be celebrating our 10 years of marriage surrounded by family and friends. What more could a happy couple ask for?

Happy IMBOLC

Wishing all of you a very happy Imbolc and all of the brightest blessings for this wonderful time of year.

Save the Date

So many people have told me that the most important thing to pick is the date for the ceremony. For us we thought that would be simple since we are already married. )should be a no brainer right?( Our date fell in the middle of the week, so we moved it to the following Saturday. Since we got married a few days into the new year we didn't want to put it so close to people's holiday plans that they had to pick and choose so doing it the week after seemed like a good solid choice. Plus it worked out really well because my father-in-law will be off that day. We were able to figure it out well in advance since he is a firefighter and their schedules are a nice predictable pattern. At least that is one thing out of the way YAY!

VOW Renewal Announcement!!!

My wonderful husband and I are planning to renew our vows in 2015. We will have been married for 10 years and let me just tell you it has flown by so fast I can hardly believe it. We decided that since we kept it simple back then to have a ceremony and reception to celebrate our vow renewal.

Now as pagans we call a wedding ceremony a handfasting ...at least we do and since my husband and I are both openly pagan our families will be there. Now don't get me wrong our families still don't fully understand or embrace our path holding tightly to their faiths, which are either Christian or Muslim, but they all still love us so that is what matters. I will probably be referring to our vow renewal as a handfasting more often than a vow renewal but they are one and the same.

Anyway many of the upcoming posts are probably going to be pretty heavily biased towards our upcoming ceremony and all the details that go into it(except the dress those will come after it is all done...no peeking Adeimar)

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Just wanted to 

stopping 

by to wish

 all of you 

a 

very 

very

happy

healthy

wonderful

prosperous

laughter packed

 memory filled new year.