Hello, my friends!

Get ready for a LOT of pictures today because I haven’t done one of these miscellaneous photography posts in five months! I still haven’t shared small adventures from way back in December, like making doughnuts and going on a rather spontaneous road-trip. Not to mention more recent events like a spring festival our friends put on with barn dancing and competitions and lots of fun memories. And, of course, plenty of pretty nature and landscape photos as usual. 🙂

Enjoy this mixed-up collections of moments from the past half year!

DOUGHNUT MAKING

We always have doughnuts for Christmas breakfast (I told you these are old pictures!), but since we don’t have our favorite Strites Doughnuts shop where we live now, we decided to make some ourselves!

This is grandma’s recipe which I believe I’ve posted about a long time ago… ah yes, here it is.

As you can see, we had a very fancy set up for letting the glaze dry: wooden dowels on boxes of pasta. 😛

Sometimes we make the glaze with a little orange or citrus flavor to it, but this time we stuck with the classic.

I don’t remember how many we made… maybe six dozen or something? Sadly they are long gone now… *sigh* We’ll have to make some more soon!

LANDSCAPES & Nature

Ah, I have so many golden hour photos for you guys, many of which are left over from my last post. Something about the lighting makes even this dead-looking field beautiful, you know?

On the other hand, we have some very NOT dead greens which also make for a gorgeous picture. There’s no real subject to this one, but I still think it’s pretty because of the lighting and the colors and just ahh, it makes me happy.

Can you feel the warm spring evening…? ❤ (The ripples are from Maggie. 😉 )

I like the way our house is tucked into the trees in our yard. Trees are nice. 🙂

This is a weird way to edit a sunset photo; I’m aware. But I like the softness of the greens and blues here.

More lovely soft light! This one seems like it’d fit the cottagecore aesthetic, don’t you think?

I looked out my studio window the other evening and couldn’t resist going outside to take photos of the hay field at sunset. Just in time, too! The field is all baled now.

Okay I may have had a little too much fun with this editing style… XD I think it looks so soft and aesthetic!

This photo is a little darker than I’d usually prefer, but I wanted to highlight the shadows (well that doesn’t sound right…) on the side of the house. It reminds me of this post! Remember?

While I was enjoying this sunset out the truck window, my brothers were enthusiastically identifying each car that drove past. Boys… :’D :’D

Here’s a sunset from the city, not the country! *gasp* I took this on our trip to Iowa which I’ll talk more about later.

Phew, back to the country. 🙂 These next two pictures didn’t fit in this sunflower post, but I still wanted to share them.

This little pocket of light caught my eye as I went past. You know me and golden hour light… I couldn’t resist. 😛

Now for a much more recent picture. Seeing this tree reminded me of some photos I took YEARS ago. Let me see if I can find the post… Hm, nope. Anyway, I have a similar picture somewhere in my blog archives. If anyone remembers where for some strange reason, let me know! XD

SPRING FLING

Ooh, now for a really fun category! Our friends hosted this festival thing recently and it was SO MUCH FUN. I would summarize what we did, but as they say, pictures are worth 1,000 words. Here:

I got to be one of the event photographers again and got hundreds of pictures, but since I didn’t ask permission from any of the 100-200 people there to post photos of their faces on my blog, I’ll only share a few random ones. Like these very official-looking tickets.

LOOK AT THIS ADORABLE PUPPY. I don’t know how her name is spelled but something like Simka? SHE WAS SO FLUFFY AND SWEET.

Ooh yes, the doughnut eating contests were most entertaining. Each participant tied a doughnut to these PVC poles and then tried to be the first to consume it without using their hands. They did three or four rounds for the different age groups, and Carmen and Logan both got prizes! Logan’s ribbon was hard won because part of his doughnut fell and HE ATE IT OFF THE GROUND. Along with a mouthful of grass and dirt. O.o AHAHAHA IT WAS HILARIOUS.

Logan and Jeff also competed in the crosscut sawing competition, but they didn’t win any prizes, sadly.

Oh yeah, we brought the saw for the competition – it’s a really old one. And one of the handles broke off when the first contestants were sawing! Oops. Everyone was like… well there goes the crosscut saw competition. But nope, my dad and brothers and several of the other guys gathered ’round and whipped up a new handle out of a piece of wood they found. No harm done – and an extra event added to the line-up. 🙂

Jeff and two of his friends have their own band called Archipelago, and this time Megan got to join as the vocalist. They played four (I think?) songs while people got their supper and it sounded amazing! Jeff looks very official with his backwards baseball cap here, don’t you think?

The best part of the day was, of course, the barn dancing. We helped put up this huge tent beforehand with MUCH labor, let me tell you. *shakes head* But it was worth it! And guess what? I got to meet a few of my blog followers! If you’re reading this… hey guys! It was so fun meeting you! That was a really neat experience.

INDOOR PHOTOGRAPHY

I bought this baby’s breath bouquet at Costco and thought it looked so beautiful and airy with the white candle and giraffe and window trim. And yes, there are a lot of bugs on my window. -_- Stinkbugs keep flying on me while I’m trying to work and I DO NOT APPROVE. Bleh. Oh well.

Baby’s breath may have an odd name but it sure looks lovely and classy, don’t you think?

Okay, last one of these. I had to capture the tiny blooms up close.

While we’re on the subject of my studio window, here’s another version of it. I’m in this room a lot, so I enjoy watching the changing views and lighting and colors over the course of the day. I had to capture the cozy oranges and blues one evening.

Now for another random window photo! This one is… well I guess it’s still technically indoor photography, but I took it in the RV we rented for our southern road trip. I’m not sure why I like this picture because it doesn’t really have a subject, but I do. I guess because it reminds me of the peace of resting on the bottom bunk and watching the golden-hour landscape glide by out the window.

I think the point of this photo was to capture the way the light changed the stripes on my shirt from brown to mustard yellow. Can you tell I like taking pictures of sunlight? 😉

OOH, MORE LIGHT. Look at all those little rainbows cast from a necklace a friend made me! I stood there for a while, moving the beads back and forth and watching the colors dance on the counter. I am very easily pleased, hehe. But that makes life more enjoyable, right?

I’ll finish up this category with a random phone photo. I took this at my great grandma’s house a long time ago because the old wallpaper and light fixtures just struck my fancy. Another pointless photo I still quite like. 🙂

ETCETERA

Here’s another slightly creepy B&W phone photo. Mom bought literally 75+ different kinds of seeds this year. O.o We’re growing a HUGE garden. It’s going pretty well so far overall! Here we were planting the seeds in milk jugs in the basement, all the way back in January. Now everything is transplanted into the garden and getting big and green. Well, most things are. 😛

I present to you… a mystery object. I found this little round thing at the edge of the woods a while ago. I’m not sure if it was a metal head of a nail or something? It was rather soft and old if so. But it seems too perfect to be natural… Hmmm. Perhaps I’ll never know.

Another photo I didn’t fit into the last post. A farmer surveying his crops. 🙂

Oh yeah, now for the Iowa trip! Way back in the end of December, all of us but Carmen packed into Dad’s red truck and drove… what was it, fourteen hours? Anyway, a long distance to a farm in Iowa to pick up this tractor Dad bought. The trip was, heh, more fun in retrospect. It’s not very comfortable to ride in a cramped truck with six tall people for hours and hours on end. Frankly it’s quite uncomfortable. But we got to listen to some comedy shows and stop at interesting restaurants like Culver’s and sleep at two hotels (which is rare for us).

After we loaded up the tractor, we found a hotel to stop at for the night. Only… we ran out of gas before we could get there. O.o We were literally about ONE MINUTE away from the hotel when the truck died! Dad, Megan, and Jeff had to walk a mile or two in the freezing darkness to get gas from the closest station while the rest of us waited in the truck by the side of the road. HAHA.

When we finally made it to the hotel, even though we were freezing and it was super late, we celebrated by eating a ton of delicious ice cream we’d bought from Culver’s that afternoon. 🙂 The rooms were old and dingy and I was so, so tired. But we’d made it. I saw Megan at this desk and knew it would make a great photo. But the lighting was awful and the picture is dark and just… I didn’t do a good job. But it’s okay; keep scrolling. 😉

When I took the picture I knew it would look bad on camera, but I also knew I could make it prettier if I edited it right. Wonder of wonders, it turned out just like I was hoping! Sure, maybe the moment wasn’t quite as soft and peaceful in real life… but maybe it was more lovely than I realized at the time – I just needed to slow down and look at it to understand that. You can find beautiful moments everywhere if you really look. I promise. Sometimes it just takes a camera and a little time to find them. 🙂

Well, that’s all I have for you today, guys! I hope you enjoyed this veeeeery long post. It feels good to be caught up on all my orphaned photos again, hehe. I should proably do these posts more often…

Favorite photo(s) or category? Have you ever made doughnuts? Would you eat one off the ground? 😛 Do you like staying at hotels?

Thanks so much for reading, my friends, and have a lovely day!

***Allison***

P. S. Photos taken with my Nikon D3400 and a 35mm lens. (And sometimes my very-much-not-an-iPhone phone.) Edited in Lightroom.