I found some old pictures…because I am a hoarder.

Back in 2009 my hard drive on my laptop crashed. On it was every picture I had ever taken of Sass (my first born). She was a year old at the time and when I realized every picture I had of her, except the small low res copies on Myspace (remember that site??) was gone, I was devastated. Totally traumatized, I left like I got kicked in the gut as hard as anyone could.  I had nothing. I literally felt like someone died.

What about my back up you ask? Oh…well, back then I was a new mother of a one year old and honestly must have figured hard drives were indestructible and I’d never lose one single picture. *sigh*

I know, I know….I should have backed up on an external hard drive, but I had no idea those things even existed back then. LUCKILY with the grace of God and some awesome computer programs, I was able to recover about 96% of the pictures lost. I was lucky. But as my history shows, that doesn’t happen real often. So now I have several external hard drives and have backups of backups of backups. I am a bit obsessed now.

I also now hoard my memory cards. I seriously can not bring myself to delete pictures from them. Even though they are on my current laptop AND two external drives, I just can’t do it. I suppose I still have trauma from that day. If I need more space, I buy another card.

So last night I went looking through some of my old memory cards and I came across a couple of old pics that made me smile. And a ton more to edit later when life isn’t too busy. So if you know me, those may never get edited. But I was very happy to see them and look back a couple years. Here are three of them that I just love. And to think they were just there, hiding in my hoard.

Thanks for stopping by!

~Melissa

Letters to My Daughters | A Photography Project

As I was looking through some photography pages last night I came across something on a photographer’s website called Letters to our Daughters. This photographer (and I do not believe she was the originator, but a participant) took pictures of her daughters for that month then wrote them a letter for when they are older to look back upon. I have been wanting to do a low key photography project that I can keep up with since I am still attending school full time and my free time is limited at best. And this looked like just the thing that can keep me picking up my camera, doing something very special for the girls and not too challenging to where I can’t fit it into my schedule.

I am aiming to write them one letter a month at the end of the month, but I might also throw in more here and there. Like this month, since I started this today, I decided to write to them and I will again at the end of the month as well. I think it would be a real sweet gift to them and I can have it made into a book. It is amazing how cheaply that can be done these days. So, this will be my first post. I will try to keep my blog updated with my entries (easier said than done with my class schedule), and if any of you do this, or know people who do, link me to them! Always fun to see. Enough of my rambling already, here we are…

These are some pictures I took today while on our little walk. And the start of this project.

-Photos were taken with my Nikon D7000, Manual Mode, 35mm 1.8 lens, edited/sized and resharpened for FB. The quality may be a bit off on wordpress because of the over sharpen I do for FB (and the quality still looks horrid on there:) ).

~Melissa