Well my show is finally almost here. It is only a couple of days away. It is time for the mad rush of getting everything together. For once I am trying to go all out and spare no expense to get great prints and presentation materials. I am a little nervous since I have never really shown my work to the public. I have only shown friends and people who have learned about me from word of mouth. So far I have yet to run into an unimpressed critic, so hopefully my work will be well received. Wish me luck.
Join me at SummerMoon Coffee this Friday November 30 any time between 7am and 10pm
These were such great bridals. It was very frustrating to not be able to post them until after the wedding, since you know who might see them. Isn't Laura just the cutest!!
Took some great photos of our friends Collin and Andrea. They have a great flare of their own and work so well as a couple. I was so excited to shoot these. Enjoy!! One day these two are going to do great things in the world of design.
I finally set up shop to sell photos online. I'm using Shutterfly since I've always loved their photo quality and their great service. You can get there from my website or by clicking here http://www.shutterfly.com/pro/redskycreative/ArtPrints.
More photos will be added later, but I wanted to get something started. Enjoy!!
So I have made some great friends at a coffee shop named SummerMoon and Justin (the owner) wants me to do a gallery event. I'm so excited!! Other than the one photo I had hanging at a design studio a while back, this will be the first public showing of my photos. So I'm planning on going all out. It could be the show that puts me on the map! You'll start seeing a lot of updates on my site and a lot of prep will be going into this show on the back end.
I'll post more information when I have it. Stay tuned!!
Total photos taken with my camera on this trip = 3600 and here they are...
http://www.redskycreative.com/tmp/MUNICH/ 317 (includes Austria and Frankfurt)
http://www.redskycreative.com/tmp/PARIS/ 924
http://www.redskycreative.com/tmp/VENICE/ 420
http://www.redskycreative.com/tmp/FLORENCE/ 206
http://www.redskycreative.com/tmp/TUSCANY/ 377
http://www.redskycreative.com/tmp/ROME/ 527
http://www.redskycreative.com/tmp/CINQUETERRA/ 829
These are unedited and and have not been weeded out, so stay tuned for the final set of favorites.
We finally landed on US soil. We have been traveling for almost 2 days strait. Yesterday was the train to florence and then the overnight train to munich. Today was a train to Franffurt and then the long flight to chicago. Now we are waiting for the flight to houston and then the long drive home. We are quite exhasted!! See you all soon!
In Florence, we started our first morning there by hitting up the market place for breakfast and lunch. The market place was very amusing, with all the different venders wanting you to try there products and Italians talking really fast and loud even after you tell them you only speak a little Italian. We bought fruits, bread, pesto, cheeses, and two kinds of meats, for a very reasonable price. The shopping there was also fun. You could bargain with any of them and Amy ended up with a really nice leather jacket and I bought several bold ties. Also in Florence, I was taking a picture of a guy who I thought had great Italian style and he chased me down and made me delete the pictures. I think he must have been famous and thought I was a poperotsi. Any way, little does he know, I still have a couple of pictures of him :-) Our place to stay in Florence was a nice surprise. The place appeared to be an old apartment that was converted into a hotel. It had a little kitchen and a nice little outside garden. It was run by a nice old lady who did not speak English and her son who was studying Electrical Engineering and loved to fly fish. He spoke great English and he was always very happy and helpful. After walking around Florence for a while, I was starting to get a little nevous about driving from Florence to Rome. Speed limits and road markings seemed to only be sugestions and there were soo many moterized bikes zippng in and around traffic or sqeezing in any where they could. We are still crossing our fingers on the whole car rental thing since the guy who checked out the vehicle to us was a very dishonest person and tried to slip a whole bunch of stuff by us. But so far my bank account does not show the bogus charges.
So we hopped in our little Fiat and headed for the Tuscan hill country. Driving was quite different. All the signs where different and most of them we couldn't read. There were no stop lights, only round-abouts with cars zipping in and out. And out on the highway, the speed demons were fast and not kind to anyone following the speed limit signs. The speed limit was normally about 90KM per hour and cars would frequently blow past at 150, or 160! By the end of the drive I had masted the Italian way of driving, but was ready to be on the trains and busses again. Tuscany was very beautiful. We stopped in several little towns for a gelato or postcard and of course to take pictures. The towns were each very different and interesting. The first one had several very tall towers, the second had a large castle in the middle and was very high on a hill, and the third was on a rock platou or mesa that was just amazing. In the second town we had a small meal inside the castle walls. Daniel and Rachel ordered a Olive oil tasting and Amy and I ordered a Honey tasting to go with our meal. It was nice to try some of the locally grown and harvested foods. I think the waiters were a little confused by the fact that none of us would have any wine, but hey, I'm used to being the odd one by now. Dad and Mom (although, I'm sure Dad will be more excited), I brought you the left overs from the honey tasting, so you can try some honey from Tuscany.
We dropped off the car in Rome and headed for the center of town to find a Hotel. No Hotel that we called had two nights, so we had to stay at two different places. Both were a little more than we wanted to spend, but they were very nice and ralaxing. We went to see the Colosseo, Arco di Costantino, and walked around all the Roman ruins. At the Colosseo Rachel stopped us from doing what we later thought must be a tourist scam, although we are still not completely conviced either way, it looked very fishy. There was a group of guys who were claiming that if you paid them an extra 11 Euro, they would get you to the front of the line and provide a guided tour. What was really odd is that the exact same guys were at the Vatican museum the next day and came to talk to us, but as soon as they recognized us they stopped mid sentence and walked the other way. Hmmm. The second day was Sunday, so we treked our way to Via Sannio near San Giovanni to a small church of Christ for Sunday service. Unfortunantly for us the sermon was in Itallian, so we struggled to understand what was being said. The good thing was all the songs that were sung were familiar, so we just thought the English words in our head. It was nice to see that people in other countries are trying to follow what the Bible teaches instead of following traditions and ideas created by men. After services, Amy and I walked to the Basilica and did a little shopping and exploring along the way. I bought some really cool clothes at a store called OBJ (I love Italian clothes, I just wish I had more money to blow). We went into the Pantheon, walked through some really non touristy neighborhoods, across the Ponte Sant' Angelo, and through the courtyard of the Basilica. Along the way I found a little cozy resturant that had a hand written menu, and seemed to be out of the normal touristy areas. We decided to give it a try that night and were very happy we did. I had Risotto with salmon and it was amazing. We also saw the Monumento a Vittorio Emanuele, Fontana di Trevi, and the Trinita del Monti(which is where I had some awesome banana and coconut gelato). The last day we toured the Vatican Museum which was neat to see, but also somewhat sickening to imagine how much money was wasted on such an ornate building while all day we had seen poor and crippled people sitting outside the walls with nothing. How could anyone feel good about that?
Next stop was Cinque Terre. These five coast cities are amazing. They are built right into the cliff sides and the farmers have terraced the steep hillsides in places that don't seem possible. Our original plan was to go to Zurich Switzerland before flying out of Francfurt, but Amy and I decided to stay in Cinque Terre for the remainder of the trip. We stayed in Vernazza which is our favorite city by far. It has the most charcter and is a little less touristy than some of the others. We bought a hiking pass and hiked to each of the five towns. The hikes to Corniglia and to Monterosso were very difficult and steep, but they provide the best views of the cities.
I used up all the space on our laptop, my ipod, my memory cards, so you will have to wait until we get home to see pictures of Cinque Terre. I think I took a total of about 22GB of pictures. Yipes! I'm going to have to buy some new file storage when I get home!! Ohhh yeh, and my camera bit the dust on the second day in Cinque Terre, but luckily Rachel was very kind and left me her 20D since they were leaving before us. Thank you Rachel !!!!!!!!!
Musee d'Orsay was originally a train station with very high cielings and massive ornate clocks. Now it houses some amazing artist such as Monet, Van Gogh, and many more. The Louvre was origianally the palace of the king of France and was repurposed as a museum some time after the revolution. Over a million pieces of art are now housed there, so it takes forever to see everything. The architecture of the building is just as fascinating as the actual artwork.
Our last day in Paris was my favorite. Our first stop was the Fat Tire bike tour. The tour guide was from ATM and was very entertaining as well as informative. We saw Napoleans tomb, the armory, the military academy (that was a site of a nazi stand off and eventual surrender), and of course the Eiffel Tower. We did make a pit stop in the gardens to have a lunch of Crepes and coffee. I had some iced coffee which was a nice change from the esspressos that I had been getting. The bike tour was so relaxing and the weather turned out to be perfect. If you go to Paris, do the bike tour!!! After the bike tour we took a sroll to the Notre Dame. We then found a fantastic little resurant in the Latin Quarter that had the best Esspresso I have ever had. Even Italy has not matched that coffee yet.
Next was a night train back to Munich so we could ride the train through the Alps on the way to Venice. The Alps were very beautiful and scatered with little communities and the ocational castle.
We arrived in Venice that evening and grabbed a bus boat for our hotel, which turn out to be a wonderful surprise. It was a loft and had very comfortable beds and a really nice bathroom. The ride to the hotel was very relaxing with the evening breeze accross the water. Despite what we were told it did not smell bad at all. That night we headed to San Marco square were we had a great Itallian meal and then we had a romantic time in the square listening to the dualing orchestras. We all enjoyed the lights and sounds in the cool night air. Our next day in Venice was filled with wondering the streets and shopping. We were excited that the prices in Italy were way cheaper than anywhere else we had been. I bought a really beautiful tie that has blue and yellow on it :-)
We are now in Florence and our next stop is Tuscany by car on our way to Rome. I tell more about Florence later...
Don't feel like you have to comment here on VOX. I didn't know that you had to be a member to comment. I'm kind of annoyed by that. For those of you on Pleo, feel free to comment there. I love this VOX thing, but that is points off for them!
So Sunday in Paris quickly became museum day after we steped out of our Hotel and were greeted by cold and rain. We found a church in Paris that had an English service at 6pm, so our plan was to hit Musee d'Oorsay and the Louve and then head to service. We ended up not being able to figure out the directions to the church and were forced to have our own service, but it turned out great since Daniel gave a great lesson.
