The Brand-Spankin New Website/Blog!

Oy, peeps, I am giddy to tell you that my new website and blog are officially UP! Yahooo! Man oh man I have been waiting for this day in gleeful anticipation for a long time.
This means there won't be any more Brooke Schultz right here, so hop on over and check out the new loveliness!

New website: brookeschultzphotography.com
New blog: brookeschultzphotography.com/blog-main

There's already a sneak peak of my latest anniversary session over there,
and more of my little me-sesh with the husband coming soon! (It was quite hilarious. I'll have to tell you all about the crazy control freak I was, posing myself, obsessing about the lighting, and telling him what angles to use. HAH.)

Pop on by and say hello!

Happy Wednesday!

Candles In An Ice Cream Pie

   
Birthdays in my family are like your own personal Saint day. You’re banned from lifting a finger around the house, Mom makes your favorite foods for you all day long, you get to bring treats to school to share and let everyone know it’s your birthday…not to mention presents. I. LOVE. Surprises.

Every September 6th I have woken up to find balloons and homemade streamers decorating the kitchen with a scrumptious breakfast waiting, no matter how early I had to go to school. (See that cinnamon roll up above? That puppy ain’t Pillsbury.) This year I ordered up those cinnamon rolls, salmon sandwiches, and that incredible mint Oreo pie creation you see from Café Momma—holy mackerel, my stomach was in a whole other world.

Every birthday for probably ten years I requested high heels, dress ups, clip-on earrings, and anything else the girly mind could dream up. How I adore the home videos of me with my pre-braces mouth, grinning from ear to ear with a gap in between my two front teeth, drenched in a pile of Barbies and gaudy costume jewelry. I loved it all.

Only a little has changed: I exchanged my wish for dress ups to a dreamy bedspread, and Barbies for a show at the Hale Center Theater. Funny how everything changes, but nothing changes, right?

Thank you to those angelic brothers, parents, husband, and friends of mine who make my day special year in and year out.

A Rhubarb Love Story

We drove what felt like a hundred miles, and my butt was a little bit asleep. My eyes ached from looking at lame stuff like homework all day. But finally, me and my man; even on a road trip so unglamorous, it felt good to be in the same vicinity as the resident favorite human being in my life.

Stopped off at my parents' house and emerged with tomatoes vivid red, squash, and stalks of rhubarb from Momma's garden. The rhubarb was long and skinny and stuck out of  the lil plastic bag it was carried in.

And on the way back to our apartment, we blasted this song and let our vocal chords belt it out as loud as they felt like. And there, riding down I15 with my love and the rhubarb stalks growing up from the plastic bag like gargantuan celery stalks, I felt the same rush I did when I was nineteen and first fell in love with this boy.

It felt so, so good.
I made the most delicious crisp with that rhubarb.

Southern CA+LA—and How to Take Better Vacation Photos

I’m totes not a take-pictures-of-nature kind of person. Hence I’m not a landscape photographer. So usually, on vacation and touristy excursions, I take about a hundred pictures of nothingness, hate them all, never edit them, and they never see the light of day (aka the internet). BUT. I decided during a few days of our time in California to go out on a limb and take some vaca shots with seriousness, and hey. Here we are.

The firsts are of the San Juan Capistrano Mission, which is a super cool place that’s like a million years old and is overflowing with awesome things to experience and learn about.       
Our next adventure was a day trip to LA to REALLY celebrate our anniversary. We started with Little Tokyo because it was Japan that brought us together in the first place (Jared served a mission for our church there, and was my brother’s favorite companion.) Someday I’ll tell you the whole story.
They have a festival there for every new year, and everyone writes their wishes for the upcoming year—they were displayed on every tree through the whole of Little Tokyo—made me want to grow a tree inside my house and recreate the coolness of it all.
 
Then the Hard Rock Café, Walk of Fame, Wax Museum, Santa Monica Pier and Venice Beach! 
I have to be honest, I liked that flag almost more than the burger.
 
Oh, and Marilyn was there. Wassup. Jared and I each chose a couple stars to take photos with. Of course, I chose Ella and Aretha. Only the best. Jared: MJ.
    
Poor Jared was so tired of posing for me. I had to beg him for the last shot.
Which leads me to….my tips for better vacation photos!

1. Find the balance. You don’t want to be lugging your camera everywhere, especially if it’s an SLR. Plan out the days and times you know you want to have your camera with you, and other than that, sit back and enjoy the ride. Being a photographer, sometimes I get a little whiny about picture-perfect moments that pass me by on vacation, but I’m slowly learning to soak it up and live instead of being in photographer mode all the time.

2. Be selective. Like I said, I can’t even bear to think of all the times I took seventeen pictures of flowers on a trip and never did anything with a single one. Especially digital photographers seem to fall into the trigger-happy trap, and it makes the post-process pretty excruciating. I mean, how can you choose between seventeen pictures that are practically the same? It’s positively beastly.

But I’m not just talking about being selective with the number of times you press the shutter button—I’m also talking about being selective with the number of times you round people up for pics. Kids, pets, and husbands have a very certain breaking point here, (have you noticed?!) and the last thing you want is a photo of Wife grinning gleefully and Husband ripping his hair out because he can’t take one more picture. It goes a long way if parties involved are made aware that there will be x number of posed photos in x spot for x number of minutes. This is the most important tip, by far. I could say it a thousand times, peeps. Be selective.

3. Tell the story. Document the details and get as much variety as you can. This one is key for me, because after the seventh palm tree I’m taking pictures of my feet. I love to include the food we eat, the funny things we see and the souvenirs we buy, even more so than the traditional touristy spots. Everyone has a picture in front of Cinderella’s castle, right? Focusing on the details that made your trip unique and memorable will make your photos that much more valuable when you dig them out again five years from now.

4. Care about composition. Even if you’re working with a point-and-shoot, the most wonderful thing you can do for your photos is to care about composition and lighting. If you snap snap snap away with either the haphazard get-everything-in-the-picture mentality or shoot with the I’ll-photoshop-it-later mentality, you’ll wind up with less than fab photos and a lot of frustration. Find angles, light, and details that interest you, just like in any type of photography, and capture those first and the to-do list photos second (if at all.) More candid; less posed. More authentic emotion to document your trip; less saying “cheese.”

These tips are all about capturing the essence of a trip—emotions, people, and places. In that order. Is that how you feel about your vacations, or am I totally up in the night?

Hope these help! :)

Billions of Celebrations

I've had about a billion things to celebrate in the past bit:

1. Jared's graduation! He's officially a college grad with a degree in Public Health from BYU. What a stud. His parents came into town and we had a blast eating delicious food at Los Hermanos, trying to devour a way-too-big cake, playing Marco Polo in our pool, and getting out of a speeding ticket driving around in Springville. This is a skill I really wish I had. If anyone offers police....er, management services, sign me up! Jared's dad said five words and POOF. Not even a chance of a ticket. How do those people do that?? Maybe I just have a guilty face.

2. Thing number two we celebrated was our anniversary! AGHH I love this man I married.

3. Thing number three was my mom's birthday--the picture is her face when she saw her new patio furniture! Which, can I just say, there are few things more wonderful than eating a gourmet breakfast outside on a perfect summer morning with the people you love? That's the life. Get yourself some of that.

4. Thing number four is being done with school for a few weeks/our anniversary again: we journeyed to California to be with Jared's family and got to see our nieces, Daylynn and Addison, for a little while yesterday. They are two of the most gorgeous children ever created, so of course I had to take some photos. SO we've been here for a bit, eating and relaxing and beaching and playing.
My life is too wonderful for me to handle sometimes. HOW did I get this lucky?

Stay tuned for more from our loverly California trip, LA and love included.

That Day I Fed You Cake

This is the cake we fed to each other that day.
I loved you a lot while I fed you that cake. After we ate that cake, we danced our first dance together as marrieds,
and I thought about all the times we'd danced before that, in the living rooms of various apartments by low light when our roommates had gone to sleep.

I thought about all the times we'd dance after that, in our newly shared bedroom, in our freshly painted kitchen--anytime the beauty of our relationship needed to just be SAID in a different way.

I thought I loved you a lot when we danced and kissed and whispered into each others ears on August 14th, 2010.

And on August 14th, 2011 I was wrong.

They always like to tell you about how you'll grow together. But it's hard to have that make sense to your mind and soul that are already busting with love you already never thought possible. It's hard to imagine more feelings, more depth, and more joy coming into your heart without it exploding. And someone might have to explain the physics to me, because it happened. I love this man a billion times more 368 days later. Literally a billion, I tell you.
.............................................
I would sit up late writing about this, thinking of possible ways to show this incredible man how much I adore him. I wanted to say it with my words and my thoughts and my fingernails and big toes and all I had were puny words? I love you? Anyone can say that. Anyone at all.

But I'm slowly realizing that the beauty of love is precisely this: you can't describe it very well. You can't depict the height and depth and width of all the feelings and experiences with words or flowers or cake. You can't describe what is shared and mutually known or bottle it up to save and put under your pillow every night--it's just floating in the air all around the two of you, encased in the drawers with your canned goods, intertwined into your placemats and folded in with your laundry. That's the real wonder: it is bigger than all of these things, bigger than words themselves--and at the same time, it is as simple as rolling over and smelling the smell of sleep on his skin, smiling because he is just so darn hot, and that feeling of contentment knowing that he loves you so completely, so wholly and so perfectly, despite that time you broke up with him because you weren't sure.

I'm amazed at my luck in getting to spend eternity with this incredible man.
I love you, baby. Happy anniversary.

*photo above by the talented Ashlee Raubach