Wedding Wednesday: Flowers

A couple months ago Andrew and I attended a local Bridal Expo to get our last few elusive vendors (you know the little things like a florist, a photographer...). There wasn't much advertising leading up to the expo and we live in a small town, so we weren't expecting much. How wrong we were. We arrived 2 hours before the expo was due to end and only made it to one room out of three!

Regardless, we were able to score some of our favorite vendors, like a florist and a photographer! We literally stumbled onto our florist in the most perfect way. Andrew and I had already made our way around the outside of the room and were on the inside leg when we both stopped for the same reason - we had spotted a bouquet almost exactly what we were looking for.

It was this beautiful bouquet...succulents and roses. I kid you not, it stopped us in our tracks! Donna from Prescott Personal Touch Flowers was amazing and answered all our questions! Andrew was so excited he actually set up a meeting for us right there! Ha! And who says the groom is never involved in the wedding?

We've now met with Donna and her partner a couple times and we are very excited to see our wedding flowers. They are going to be very cool.

Spending the Day with Grandma

My Grandma is a special woman.  Spending time with her is always one of my favorite things to do whenever I come home.  She has lived such an incredibly full life and continues to do amazing things everyday!  For example, a few years ago she decided to compete in the Angel Island swim (a 1 nautical mile swim from Angel Island to Tiburon in the freezing waters of San Francisco Bay) and was the oldest person ever to have competed!  She's pretty awesome!

Grandma cutting flowers for her church

So naturally I was excited to hang out with her during this trip.  Luckily she caught me on my cell phone as I was driving to her house.  It turned out she was helping with the floral arrangements at her church.  So I made a quick stop to meet up with her.

Church courtyard

Alter floral arrangement

Close up

I love this color

I've always loved stained glass windows!

Left over flowers - they are donated to the church from a local florist.

I was only at the church for 30 minutes or so before we went back to her house.  Since I caught her a little earlier than she expected she needed to get ready for the day.  I was happy waiting and ended up taking more photos of her flowers!  I think I need a new subject!

These are off her deck in her backyard - yes that's right, she lives in San Francisco and has a backyard!  

Purple my second favorite color!

These were the biggest succulents I had ever seen!

Her dining room floral arrangement

 Grandma quickly changed and we were off again.  We headed over to the Legion of Honor to check out their new exhibit, 'Impressionists On The Water'.

Entering the museum

Entrance to the exhibit

Unfortunately cameras were not allowed in the exhibit, so no pics of the impressionists; but, if you're really interested and you live in the Bay Area you should check it out!  It's pretty impressive.

Next off the Rodin room where they have a permanent collection of his work.  It's incredible what he was able to create out of stone!  These photos don't do his work justice.

Love it.  On our way through the parking lot Grandma pointed out the old street lamps.  Apparently the bases are adorned with images of 'old San Francisco life'.  Pretty cool.

Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue...

My parents have a beautiful garden (one that I'm entirely jealous of since our blooming season in Arizona is so short), so I thought I would take advantage of the flowers and test out the macro part of my lens on my dslr.  

A short backstory: I was given this amazing dslr for my birthday 3 years ago, but had absolutely no idea how to use it.  Not only was it too far above my photography skill level, but it had more buttons than I knew what to do with!  Skip to the present, after I finished my 35mm Film Photography course at school I fell in love with photography again and decided to whip out my camera.  Well...it just so happens to be a Nikon D2x, which (when it came out) was Nikon's top of the line professional camera. I just so happened to inherit a gem of a lens as well!  So now that I kind of / sort of know how to use my camera I've been trying to take it everywhere with me so I can practice using it.  The only problem...it weighs 2.5lbs, which really seems like 10lbs when you're lugging the camera everywhere!

So there you have it, my short story on my giant camera and lack of adequate skills.  Now enjoy some photos of flowers!