Hello, my friends!

I have so many pretty pictures to share with you today – and I can finally post them because the internet is working at our house again, yay! Are you ready for a long compilation of pretty landscapes, cute pets, sand creations, indoor photography, and more? Then be my guest. Come on in. 🙂

FOG

First up I have some pictures I took one foggy morning when I got up early for once. The yard and garden looked beautiful in the soft light. (I love the colors and tones of this one. ❤ )

How can sunflowers bring you joy even when they’re not open and the background is all gloomy and foggy? This picture still makes me happy.

The mass of vines on the right here is a combination of lima beans (which didn’t produce 😦 ) and morning glories (which produced very heartily). Morning glories are such pretty weeds, but they sure are invasive.

The blooms have thin, translucent petals that glow when the sun shines through them. If these pictures look familiar, it might be because I added a few from this photoshoot to this post.

Honestly if it’s too hot here to grow lima beans anyway, at least we got a row of purple flowers instead of useless green leaves. *shrugs* Could be worse.

Asparagus plants are great for getting blur: since they’re so fluffy and delicate, it’s hard to focus on anything but a small spot at once. The adjective that keeps coming to mind for this photo is “elegant.” It’s just blurry asparagus, but…

Of course, all these photos were taken months ago, before the garden died and the leaves started changing. I’ll post a fall photoshoot soon! Meanwhile, enjoy the layers and layers of green.

PETS

I got to housesit for some friends again, so you know what that means… more cute pet pictures! (Click here to see more.) We’ll start with Hunter the cat looking noble.

Now he’s planning his transformation into batcat. Or Cinderella. Or something to do with that pumpkin, I don’t know.

Here’s Shadow, asking to please be let off the leash so she can go chase that scent and maybe that cat while she’s at it.

AHH. HAHA. Okay, on the left we have my friend’s ADORABLE GOLDEN RETRIEVER PUPPY HELP. His name is Bingley. Isn’t that perfect? 🙂 And on the right we have an elderly scholar cat… nope, just Tom with Mom’s reading glasses, looking very unimpressed and, well, not all that cute. Sorry, Tom. One of my siblings put the glasses on him and the rest of us just stood around laughing at him for a long time. He has a hard life.

This was during MacRae’s photoshoot when Megan was attempting to keep Maggie away from the pictures. (To clarify if you’re new around here – Megan is my sister and Maggie is our family’s dog. 😛 ) It mostly didn’t work. Maggie can sense who is the center of attention and she usually makes a beeline for that person. -_- So I took a lot of senior photos with a dog photobomber in the background, oh dear.

MOUNTAINSCAPES

Looking back though my pictures, I realized a lot of my recent photography features mountains. Huh. I guess I’ve been driving back to where we used to live a lot. These next two pictures are from the beautiful venue at my friend’s wedding reception which I got to photograph. I loooove the simplicity and serenity of the second photo.

This is the view from my grandparents’ back porch. I am trying not to explode into all caps because of the beauty but… it’s… difficult…

Doesn’t this picture look kinda like a scene from a movie to you? It’s chaotic but I like it.

Every time I go back to where we used to live, I remember how much I miss living by mountains.

We stopped at an overlook recently and oh my goodness, guys, this is one of my top favorite recent photos. Is this view not stunning? It looks like something from a postcard!

The fall colors made the view even prettier than normal. ❤ And I had fun playing around with the last picture until it turned out like something in an old National Geographic book or a painting.

I think the “slice of moon” phase is the most photogenic. When it’s full, it usually just ends up looking like a white dot, you know?

LANDSCAPES

Let’s continue the sunset theme a bit longer, shall we? The picture on the right was more how the sunset looked in real life, but I couldn’t resist playing around with one of them to kind of “paint my own sunset” on the left. Which is your favorite?

I didn’t have to change the colors here, though. This was one of the most striking, neon sunsets I’d seen in a long time. 

On the left, a glowy orange sunset at an old schoolhouse where our church planting group meets. On the right, a glowy orange fire from a bonfire we had at our house a while ago. We invited friends and neighbors and church family and had a good time… and music! A couple of my friends brought instruments and they played… well mostly they just talked about music, but they played some songs too. 😛

Hey look, it’s our old farm! I went back to visit a while ago with my boyfriend Sully. We had so much fun talking to my grandparents (and playing piano + accordion for them!), and then I got to show him around the farm. This is the view from the hill.

Sometimes I’ll be walking around the house and stop short when I pass a window because AHH, THE LIGHT! AHH, THE TREES! AHH, THE BEAUTY! I had to take a golden hour picture because… see?

Here’s another phone-picture-out-the-window from back when the leaves were just barely starting to turn. We’ve had a really late, long fall this year. I mean, I took this on October 25th. That’s usually peak season, but look how green!

Here’s a summery set of photos for you. Sully and I took a trip to the beach back in September which was SO MUCH FUN. I absolutely love the beach, but don’t go there as much as I wish I could because some family members aren’t a fan. So it was great fun to go with Sully who also loves it!

Ooh yeah, and guess what? We saw dolphins! You can just barely make out a fin in the water in this picture, but once we waded out into the waves (and I didn’t have my camera), some started swimming really close to us. It was so so neat.

We also built a little sandcastle, just with our hands since we didn’t bring buckets for making square towers or anything. I used a plastic bottle cap to make round windows. 🙂 We also drew in the sand; I made a mandala, as usual. Ahh, that was such a good day. 

Oops, those last two weren’t really landscape photos, were they? Oh well… it didn’t make sense to separate them. But I’ll end this section with a picture-perfect rainbow and we can move on to the really miscellaneous photos. (This also looks like a movie scene, doesn’t it?)

ETCETERA

Here’s another unshared shot from MacRae’s senior photoshoot. It’s blurry and its black and white and I love it. 🙂

My family and I all went to get free hot dogs at the local coffee shop and also to buy smoothies and coffee and stuff on a customer appreciation day. (Carmen was there somewhere, hm. Maybe Jeff’s blocking her in this picture. Also HAHA Jeff’s expression. Actually everyone’s expression.) My sister Megan works there so she keeps us up-to-date on all the news and special deals like… well, free hot dogs!

I’ve been really into capturing light around the house lately. Photos like these make me feel quiet and peaceful. You know what I mean?

And here’s a DSLR shot of sun on the Great Room wall. I think light and shadow patterns will captivate me for the rest of my life. They make me so happy.

Flowers! Sully brought me the bouquet on the left when I was sick. ❤ And the one on the right was the table centerpiece for the bonfire night. Can you believe Mom grew those sunflowers in her garden? They’re so perfect! I believe they’re the open versions of that foggy sunflower way back at the beginning of this post.

Mom and Carmen brought in buckets of flowers and TONS of peppers just before the first frost. We still have that bushel basket of peppers in the mudroom, but it’s filled with different peppers which Mom found cleaning up the garden after frost. We have a lot of peppers, guys. :’D Thankfully they’re delicious.

OH WAIT, OKAY. You know that “very strange antique” from the post title? Well, here it is! Megan and I went to a little antique store with a friend a while back and found this absolutely horrifying miniature pitcher. WHAT… JUST… WHY…?

*shudders* Let’s get back to pretty things, how about it? I made this bookmark at our church’s women’s retreat which we got to host at our house in October. One of the ladies put together this craft for us; everyone had a blast doing it! She actually got the flowers from Amazon. Here’s a listing similar to the ones we used. (That’s an affiliate link, by the way.)

We’ll end with a peaceful picture I took when we visited my grandparents. Grandma quickly put together a delicious spread of doughnuts, biscuits, nuts, hot mint tea, and other goodies before we left. I want to leave you with that cozy, comfortable feeling too. ❤

I hope you’re all staying warm and well! The wind is blowing in the cracks of my studio right now which gives me an excuse to wear this cozy blanket-coat-thingy I bought from Walmart a few weeks ago. 😛 Anyway, I should stop talking and let you guys get back to your lives. Thanks for taking the time to scroll through my pictures! I hope you enjoyed them. And don’t forget that life is beautiful, okay? God created a world where sunlight makes patterns on the floor and a tiny moon hangs in the sky, and… we get to live in it. How marvelous. ❤

So what have you been up to recently? What do you think about that antique? :O Also mountains or beaches?

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

***Allison***

P. S. Photos taken with my Nikon D3400, Nikon D7200, and some with my phone, too. Edited with Lightroom.