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the other day, my daughter asked if i would do a little photoshoot for her and her 7 friends. yep, you read correctly, SEVEN teenage girls and me!!
i guess that's what you do when your mom is a professional photographer right?
everyone had to wear white and blue, and they were ALL wearing high heels!! it was kinda funny watching some of them try to walk in such high heeled shoes, but since they were ALL better than me at doing it, then i'd better not say much.
these girls are good friends, and they wanted a photo to commemorate the ending of grade 11 and the beginning of summer.
here is a collage of these gorgeous young ladies and an extra one of my daughter (because i'm the mom and blogger, and i think she's pretty awesome).
aren't these girls all GORGEOUS!!! seriously people, these are some STUNNING YOUNG WOMEN!!!
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good friends
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before i took the trip to Mexico, i tossed around the idea of doing some scuba diving while i was going to be there.
you see, i am a scuba addict and i have a little adventurous side to me.
i'm not a rebel, i'm not some crazy party animal or drinker, and i'm afraid of heights, but i do have a little side to me that needs to get out once in a while.
that side of me craves the underwater world, and the wonders beneath the sea.
i decided to research the scuba diving opportunities in the area of Playa del Carmen, and i quickly realized that if i chose to dive a local reef, then i was going to be disappointed.
i have been spoiled by the spectacular reefs in Roatan, and i knew that the over-populated and strained coastline along the Mayan RIviera would not offer the experience or photo worthy reef i so longingly crave.
i knew that i had the option to travel to Cozumel for the day, but i actually didn't have the time to do an all day trip, and because of flying and diving restrictions, i couldn't leave such a trip until Friday.
i guess i could have chosen to do the bull shark dive with a local dive shop, but my sense of adventure doesn't include free swimming with some of the world's most aggressive sharks!!
(please don't get me wrong, i love diving with sharks and dive with them all the time, but bull sharks are just ANGRY sharks and i decided that i would be prudent)
on a side note..... i would like to do a cage dive with great white sharks one day. sharks are wonderful and misunderstood creatures.
anywhoooo...... i found out that the Maya Riviera has some cool diving spots called 'Cenotes' , which are actually underground, freshwater rivers that are accessed by sinkholes. they are rivers that the Mayan's used way back when, for freshwater.
there was one problem to my little plan.
i don't like caves and small places, and i don't like diving in the dark.
unfortunately, diving the cenotes requires being in the pitch black most of the time, as well as swimming through a few small spaces.
yep, i wasn't too sure about all of this!!
i'm not a big fan of Mexico, the way that big hotels & tourism has essentially destroyed everything beautiful and natural about such a wonderful coastline. i knew that i would probably not travel to Mexico on my own accord, ever again (unless it was for another rockin' wedding of course), so i just needed to suck it up and dive a crazy dark cave and get over myself!
go me, being all brave and everything.
i packed up all my dive gear, lugged it all the way to Mexico, and signed up for a cenote dive!!
it was an awesome adventure.
my dive guide was Tomas, he drove Yoaz (a student from Isreal) and i to the dive site on Wednesday morning, and i sucked it up and did my best to NOT have an anxiety attack underwater.
i took a nice bright light, had my underwater camera with me, and leapt into this little pool of water that soon opened up to caverns and underwater beauty.
full of stalagmites and rock formations, these underground, water filled caverns were something to behold.
even in the darkest dark, and through little spaces, i was calm and cool.
i am a pretty experienced diver now, and i know my limitations, i am confident in my abilities, and i felt that my dive guide (Tomas) was well-trained enough to keep me safe.
Chac-Mool (named for a Mayan god or something) was the location for our 2 dives, and everything about it was right up my alley. from the wild dogs to the little farm and shady snack hut, everything about my cenote adventure was 'me'.
i know this was a crazy long post about my little cavern diving adventure, but i just had to share my insanity with you all.
i am a firm believer that everything i am, and everything i'm passionate about, makes me the photographer and the person that i am.
so, here are a few photos from my little diving adventure...
the table where we get ready. i love getting ready for diving!!
the entry hole into the cenote. i wasn't too sure about this, and i almost backed out at one point!
not a great photo, but you can see that we weren't the only ones in the caverns
a dive group in another entrance to the cenote
a dive group just floating around at the surface
cool stalagmites
this is my favourite photo of the day. i love the way the light shines in from above, and the colours are just so beautiful!
we surfaced in an air pocket, which was totally dark except for our dive lights and camera flashes. this is a tree that i'm floating beside.
my view when i surfaced from my last dive. what a great ending to a great adventure!
one of the wild dogs. just a little puppy!!! too cute!
the shady hut where we ate our lunch! i was skeptical.
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when you're underwater, you see such a great variety of creatures and fish, that it's actually mind boggling sometimes! God has created so many weird and unusual life forms, and sometimes it's hard to even see their purpose at all. i love the diversity under the ocean, and i crave finding the weird, the cool and the rare.
Darryl and i have been to Roatan five times, and we always stay at the same resort ,every time. we love the people, we love the resort, and we just feel like we've arrived at home every time we step off the boat.
the first year that we went to Cocoview Resort, i learned the skill of underwater photography, but at the same time, it was my very first on a reef and in the caribbean!! i was enthralled by all the fish, and i thought every one of them were cool, awesome, and photo worthy!! i took pictures of EVERYTHING!!!! it was actually quite ridiculous. i think i averaged about 1000+ photos a day, and i couldn't get enough of it.
unfortunately, i don't get quite as excited about parrot fish as i used to, and i don't even take photos of damsel fish anymore. i know, it's so sad.
i crave the small, i crave the unique, i crave the rare.
now, i do have to say that it's pushing it so show me MICROSCOPIC!!! please Kirk, put away your magnifying glass and stop finding stuff that makes my eyes cross just trying to see what the crap you're showing me!!!
a nudibranch is like a slug, and they are not very common along the reef. well, they're probably more common than i think, but they're nearly impossible to see because they blend into the reef so well.
Kirk (our awesome dive master) kept telling me that he was going to find me a lettuce leaf sea slug ( and i told him that was his goal for the week), but every we went to a dive site, we came up empty handed!! i didn't even know what to look for to find one of these things!!!
after a few days, i was ready to give up on finding one.
one afternoon, i was diving along Cocoview Wall with the hubby, and we were going so slowly along the reef that we were almost going backwards! in my head, i was talking to myself about the sea slug problem, and i was just REALLY wanting to find one!!!
all of a sudden, out of the corner of my eye, i see something fall from a coral head.
it was white, about 2 inches long, and it caught my attention.
i stopped, swam over to see what fell, and saw a little white thing. i thought it might be a piece of coral that had just fallen from a reef head down to another piece of coral.
well, slowly this little white thing moved, started righting itself, and KAPOW, it was a LETTUCE LEAF SEA SLUG (or nudibranch)!!
can you believe it?
God gave me a lettuce leaf sea slug at the very same second that i asked for it! LOL!
i should have asked to see a million dollars, since i've never seen that either.
ahhhhhhh.... the little miracles that make me smile.
here it is (oh, and you'll see why they're hard to find. they look like the reef!!)
there are fish in the caribbean, called 'blennies' . they are usually very small, and i seem to have an incurable addiction to photographing them. most of them are 1 inch long, teeny tiny, and super fast and hard to photograph. you'd think i'd give up on trying to get photos of them, but nope. the challenge just makes me want to photograph them even more!!! LOL!
my old underwater camera, couldn't really take photos of blennies, since they were too small. i wanted to beat my camera up.
Darryl bought me a new underwater camera for Christmas, and it was the maiden voyage of my Canon G11 last week. i found out that it does a decent job on the macro stuff.
good times!!
ok, back to the blenny story.
Darryl and i were going along Cocoview Wall again, and i was photographing some little blenny on a sponge, and he summoned me over to photograph something else. i swam over, and found the weirdest looking fish staring back at me. it was about 3 inches long, brown, and it was butting it's head against the coral in front of it.
i took a bunch of photos of it, and then swam away.
up on land, we tried to figure out what the heck this fish was!
nobody knew.
NOBODY!!!!!
it wasn't until the next day, that we found a dive master that knew what the heck it was. Kirk told me that it was a 'Goatee Blenny', and that he's only ever seen ONE in his entire life! when a dive master says he's only seen something once, it's a big deal , since he does thousands of dives!!
when i say that i've only seen something once, it's not big deal, since we've only done just over 200 dives in the last few years, and some of those are fresh water dives when zebra mussels are the most exciting thing you ever see. i did dive in the Detroit River once , and that was just disgusting!!!
ok, so without further ado, here is the GOATEE BLENNY!
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a rare find and falling from the sky
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yesterday, my good friend and fellow wedding photographer, Jayme Morrison and I, took to the streets of Windsor to scout some cool new shooting locations for our upcoming wedding season.
ummmm......
it didn't go very well.
you see, we got off to a rocky start when we got sidetracked by talking too much, and then we realized that we were driving aimlessly around! we quickly got back on track, tried to focus, and then decided that we needed to eat.
we have our priorities ya know.
after a yummy lunch and some good conversation at Chanoso's , right in downtown Windsor, we set off on foot to discover some treasures. actually, we thought we might get lucky and come across some REALLY great shooting locations, but we soon realized that it wasn't going to be our lucky day.
well, what do you do when you can't find any awesome locations?
you photograph OTHER COOL STUFF!
some of our finds of the day include an alley with cool shadows, a fair trade store that smelled like incense and had a Matryoshka doll with the face of Vladmir Putin, a night club called the Boom Boom Room (i like the name), a Windsor Symphony schedule so that Jayme can take her son to the Peanut Butter n' Jam concerts, and some mud.
all in all, it wasn't a total loss.
you see, i had a great time getting to know Jayme better, it was beautiful and sunny outside and we got to walk around AND it was a day away from work at the computer, which doesn't happen very often.
here are a few photos from our adventures in Windsor...
since wedding photographers in WIndsor aren't very busy during the winter months, we resort to shooting murals! LOL!
ITDR:
Testing 123
(03.10.10)
Jayme:
You know, it's so funny how we were both at the same place and different images came about ;) Well, I guess we know this about photography though - there can never be a duplication in how one sees the world ;)
(03.27.10)
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March 4th, 1983
the beginning of the life as i know it.
you see, March 4th 1983 is the day that Darryl asked me to be his girlfriend.
it was 2 weeks after my 14th birthday, and it was a friday.
i wish that i still had the original note, but after all of our moving around and the age of the paper, i guess it got lost or thrown out. i still remember the gist though.
Darryl was too shy to ask me out in person, so on that fateful friday morning, before classes started, i was handed a little piece of paper. i was also told not to read it until after he left the room. talk about shy!
it went something like this
"Michele, I like you a lot, and I'd like to ask you to be my girlfriend. I had to ask you today, because I couldn't live through the weekend. Love always, Darryl"
Yep.
Short and to the point.
Darryl and i met in Jr.High in Toronto. I was in grade 8 and he was in grade 9.
for me, it was love at first sight, but it took Darryl a little bit longer to realize that i was the girl for him. i was willing to wait.
Darryl played violin and i played viola, and it was actually the music that brought us together. he happened to be the best violinist in the school, and i was the best violist. it was a match made in heaven.
two music nerds, staring at each other from across the orchestra.
man, i had such a crush on that guy! it was crazy!!!
so, 27 years later, we are still together and we are celebrating our 21 anniversary this coming August.
we have 3 teenagers and a lifetime of memories.
through all the trials and all the journeys, i can still say that i'm crazy about this guy.
we still play in an orchestra, and we still stare across the room at each other and i still get that loving wink from the man of my dreams.
of course, we're older, we have a few gray hairs (well, him more than me of course) and we're far from those being those kids with a crush.
we are two 41 year olds with a crush!
even after all these years we adore each other, lust after each other, and can't get enough of each other.
not much has changed in the last 27 years.
when i talk to my clients about love and marriage, i know what i'm talking about!
here are a few embarrassing photos of us together, from ages 14 to 19.
this was taken on a school music trip, about 2 months after we started dating. it was a LONG bus ride to Washington DC, and we fell asleep. i'm so thankful that i have great friends to take embarrassing photos of me at my best!
yep, i had a puppet muppet! i still love Animal!
i think i am in grade 10 in this photo. as you can see, we had some issues with using Sun In during the summer, and we were still sporting the awesome YELLOW hair! LOL!
this was taken a few months after we got engaged. i was 19 yrs old here.
man, i LOVED that sweatshirt and wore it until it was in tatters!
this was the Christmas, after we were engaged. i was still 19 years old here. Darryl was 20.
it was the December before we got married.
these are our kids!
it's hard to believe that 27 years later, we would have these awesome kids!
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27 years ago....
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Michele, you are the coolest mom ever! And it says a lot when your daughter isn't just willing to LET you take her friend's photos - she trusts you and your non-dorkiness enough to ASK you to do it! Beautiful shots, and what a great idea! Wish I'd thought to do this with my friends when I was Emily's age. xoxoxox
(07.16.10)