day 205: Ben certainly knows what to get me for gift-giving occasions… what are the two things I’d most like to receive? Anything photography related and anything hand made. He went with both and made me this super awesome comic book out of our wedding photos (which is pretty much the coolest thing I’ve ever seen) and I photographed it with my fabulous new 85mm 1.8 lens (the other gift) I’m so excited about both of them!

day 204: On Saturday Ben and I decided to start out our vacation with a hike in the Indian Canyons. I had never seen a real palm oasis and these were amazing! The canyons have streams that run through them during the spring but they were sadly all dried up when we were there. We even hiked up to the very end of the canyon hoping to see some water in the pools near what should have been a waterfall… but there was none to be seen. Even without water it was still a pretty amazing sight. I’d definitely recommend it!

day 203: I’ve been working on this model for over 2 months. No… not two months in a row… but I built the first piece of this model on my first day in the office and then it went on hold. I’m so glad that it’s finally finished! On a side note, this weekend is our 1st wedding anniversary (yay!) and we’re going on a much needed weekend getaway trip. We’re not bringing along any means of blogging or emailing but don’t worry… I’ll have my camera and the photos will go up when we get back on Monday.

day 202: Last night I tried in vain to make this be the first time that I had a model deadline that I didn’t need to stay late to finish it. Sadly I am WAY too much of a perfectionist when it comes to my models and I don’t have a speedy way of working. It’s slow and careful all along and at 12:30am I through in the towel. Yes… I gave up. The model won. I decided I’d work better on a couple of hours of sleep (insert flashbacks to architecture school charrette here) so I went home and came back early this morning to finish. Maybe next time I’ll win.

day 201: Since the moon was still so bright and clear tonight and I was still in awe of Erika’s awesome moon photo (found here on her blog) I decided to go out and try to take a nice moon shot. Sadly I don’t have her 300 mm lens, but this is about as good as I could get out of my zoomiest lens 🙂 Thanks for the tips Erika!

day 200! I can’t believe it’s already been 200 days of photo-rific goodness! To celebrate Ben and I headed out to the grocery store to try to come up with as many ways as possible to spell out the number 200. Zeros were quite easy to find but the 2 was always the hard part. Here are three of my favorites… feel free to leave me a comment and let me know which one you like best.

day 199 : Lately between all of the projects I have going on it seems like it’s been hard to find enough time to get a decent night’s sleep. I think it finally caught up with me this afternoon and I immediately fell asleep for a couple of hours as soon as I got home from work. I’m glad that I have a nice relaxing work-free weekend coming up to recharge!

day 198: Yesterday evening we met up with my mom, sister, and grandma at my aunt and uncle’s house in Orange County. We wanted to do something earlier in the day as well and it seems that every time we’re looking for something to do around there we end up at Disneyland. We only had a couple of hours to spend so we only made it onto two rides, but it’s all about the company anyways 🙂

day 197: I sadly spent the majority of my Saturday at my computer desk. With work being so crazy busy during the week… the weekend is my only chance to catch up on my photo editing. This weekend I finished editing one of my recent weddings (yay!) and now will let my trusty computer chug away at FTPing all the images to my proofing website overnight. Yay for tasks that the computer can do on its own 🙂

day 196: It’s been months since our part of town got any rain but this evening we got a good old fashioned downpour, complete with lightning and thunder. It is so refreshing to smell the rain… if I could bottle the smell and broadcast it through my blog I would, but for now this photo will have to do. I hope the rain sticks around tomorrow.