Lately, my new interest has become action shots.  I started out just taking them for my friends during their games, but then I realized that I should probably give them to the yearbook to put in the book if they wanted.  Well... they did. And now I have been hired to take all of the sports pictures for all three seasons.  I get a free yearbook out of it though, so it must be a good deal.  My dad has been trying to convince me to make a business out of it and start selling the actions shots to the kids and/or their parents.  It seems like a good idea, I just need to figure out how I will get people to know that I do this and how I have to break the news that their pictures won't just be a generous gift anymore... they'll have to pay me for them.  Anyways, here are some of the best shots I've gotten so far.

P.S.  Volleyball is by far the hardest to take pictures of.

These last few days in class have been filled with time using the scanner.  Some of us took a more elegant approach to make the photos look beautiful and majestic, but others (like myself) shows to make a creepy and scary composition.  My goal, whether accomplished or not, was to make it look as if I was trapped inside of the scanner or whatever surface the viewer thinks it is.  Personally, I think I accomplished both a creepy look and a trapped look.  This probably has been one of my favorite projects that I've done in any photography class. 

This summer, I had the vacation of a lifetime.  My family went to Europe for 3 long weeks.  This, obviously, was a perfect time to take pictures.  This post will be long and full of pictures just to make up for all of this time.

To start our vacation off, we went to Northern England and stayed at our friends' house in the Yorkshire Dales.  We visited old grounds which I loved.  Architecture over sea's is absolutely breathtaking.  

Symmetry is one of the most beautiful things in the world to me. 

The next leg of our trip was to London, England where we saw Big Ben, Parliament, and The London Eye.  Although Big Ben was smaller than I would have expected, it was still a beautiful building that I am so grateful to have been able to witness with my own two eyes.

From London, we made our way to Barcelona for one evening so we could catch our cruise the following day.  We walked past a man made beach that was built for the Olympics in previous years and we took a bus tour which gave us plenty of opportunities to see the city.

While on the cruise, we stopped all over Italy.  I was lucky enough to wake up to see us pull into the first port- Napoli, Italy.

The next main photo opportunity was in Rome.  We saw the Colosseum and the Trevi Fountain.

 Our last stop during this vacation was in Paris, France.  We stayed for 6 nights which was plenty enough time to get some beautiful pictures of the Eiffel Tour.  The French are just as obsessed with symmetry as I, so of course I was in heaven.

I had one last amazing, but unexpected photo opportunity on the plane ride home. I just happened to be awake when the pilot made note that we were flying over Greenland and could see glaciers out of the windows on both sides of the plane.  On my side, the view was beautiful and on the other side (where my brother was sitting) the view was even better.  I was so blessed to be able to have these last few opportunities to take pictures over seas.

And this marks the end of my summer vacation.  

Ahhhhh.  The struggle of being a slacker with a blog.  This is typical Ashlyn to be doing blog posts the day before school starts to make up for the lack there of from the summer.  I know, not an excuse.  That, though, is my reason.  Now that school is starting up, I'm determined to not be the slacker that I one was.  This is a new start for a new me. 

Getting paid for my pictures is always a good time.  My dad's new company needs a photo for each day of the year, minus weekends, that captures Las Vegas.  Thirty photos are due at a time, so here are some from my first deadline.

Today was a photo shoot day!  Portraits are not my favorite pictures to shoot, but if you have a fun person, a nice day, and a nice setting, they can come out really well.  My model, Cassidy Motis, is beautiful and perfect for this shoot.  She played a "flower child" as we teenagers would call it.  For the life of me, I could not think of a good place to shoot something like this.  I wanted grass and fields and flowers and just something green... we live in a desert.  The whole "desert" concept posed a problem.  Thank goodness for Google.  I found a website that gave a number of different places that you could shoot in Las Vegas.  I did not know a few of the places so I looked them up and finally found the perfect one.  Floyd Lamb State Park, 45 minutes away from our houses, is where we found ourselves.  When we got out of the car and looked around we saw peacocks just walking around freely in the grass (Don't worry, they didn't chase us).  Cass and I walked around for a little bit to see what was around and found a ton of old buildings.  They were perfect for this photo shoot.  There were also a ton of huge trees that you would never expect to see in Las Vegas.  It was a sight for sore eyes actually and it was not crowded at all.  We were two of maybe 10 people in the whole area and it was not small so the only creatures that snuck into the pictures were the beautiful peacocks and that was perfectly fine with us.  The lighting ended up being really good even though we went mid afternoon; this is probably because there was plenty of shade.  I definitely would recommend doing more nature type photo shoots at this park.  Admission is $6 per car, but it is completely worth it. It was a great day for photography.

Cityscapes are by far my favorite type of photography.  This past weekend my family and I traveled to San Diego and stayed in the gas lamp district.  From our hotel room balcony, a beautiful view of the city was seen.  At the first chance I got, I retrieved my camera and took a stroll to the balcony for a perfect mid-afternoon photo opportunity.  All of the hotels had American flags on the top, which I loved.  I took a panorama shot on my iPhone and also a few shots on my Canon 60D.  I love San Diego.

There are a few passions of mine and photography happens to be one of them.  This blog will be used to track my photography and travel not only through the summer, but hopefully for a long while.  I'll include travel plans, photo shoot plans, and photo examples- maybe even other things too, if I think about them.  I hope that whoever is reading (or seeing) this blog can not only use it as help in their own photography, but also as a source of inspiration.