Bald Eagles...

Matt has been enjoying his time off and has been looking to practice his photography skills (for our Alaska trip). He has been going for hikes out at Barr Lake State Park near us in Denver.

He took this wonderful photo of a Bald Eagle two days ago and I just wanted to share it with you. This park is known for its bald eagles so click the link above for more information on their nesting. Its amazing to have these wonderful birds so close to us.

Chain Bridge in Budapest Hungary

I wanted to share a couple more paper layouts that I did over the past week or so. These are from our time in Budapest, Hungary, while we were on our Honeymoon in 2006.

These photos were taken from our first day in the city as we were exploring and trying to get our directions down. This first photo is of the Chain Bridge. This fantastic suspension bridge was built in 1849 to connect the towns of Buda & Pest on opposite sides of the Danube River. This bridge was the first permanent bridge between the two towns.
The photo featured in this layout also hangs on the wall of our living room.

This second page is taken from the Chain Bridge overlooking the Danube River. We are looking towards the beautiful Parliament building on the Pest side of the river.
Of course, there I am doing what I always do... Navigating with the map & guidebook.

Watch out bears... here we come!!!

As many of you know, we anxiously applied for Bear viewing permit in McNeil River State Game Sanctuary and Refuge last year. While we read horror stories of people waiting 10 years for a permit in the lottery system, we were so lucky to get one approved this year.

We are heading to Alaska for bear viewing and lots of photos in August. Our actual permit is for August 14 - 17 but we are planning on spending a couple extra days in Homer, Alaska. We are so excited about this chance to view the bears up close and personal. We'll have 4 days of primitive camping in the Alaskan wilderness so we're going through all our camping gear and trying to figure out how we pack all our clothing, camping equipment & food within the 75 pound limit of the float planes. Yeah... we'll be paying extra!!

We've purchased a new 7 person tent to be able to spread out a bit (instead of our normal little 2 person backpacking tent) and we're going through all the camera gear to make sure we have all that we need.

Here are a couple other sites to check out for more info...

http://www9.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/wildcamgrizzlies//about_project.html

http://ozarkimages.squarespace.com/photo-gallery/mcneil-river-2006/

Waiting for the sun to rise...

Just a quick post to catch up & share a few photos that we took last weekend up in Rocky Mountain National Park during our Photography class.

We left Friday night and headed up to Estes Park to begin our Photography class with Glenn Randall. Glenn is a fantastic landscape photographer here in Colorado, check out his site here. A couple of years ago, we took a summer class from Glenn and really enjoyed it so we decided to try his winter class.

We started out in the classroom on Friday night and enjoyed Glenn's lecture and his slideshows. On Saturday morning, we woke before 5am to get ready for the first morning's sunrise shoot. Nothing like walking up a snow covered trail in the dark to make you a bit cold & chilly. Of course when we got to the top to enjoy the view of the the sunrise on the peak over Bear Lake, it was so windy that it felt like we were being sandblasted with ice. Hallett Peak was obscured by the windy conditions so we scrambled around to look for something else to photograph at first light (didn't want to waste that 45 minute hike uphill in the dark!!).

We spent Saturday afternoon in a combination of resting and back in the classroom and planned our sunset shoot back in the park. We elected to have a very nice stroll to our sunset location and it was a good thing because the clouds rolled in and there really wasn't too much to shoot but we had a great time visiting with Glenn and our fellow classmates.

We woke early again on Sunday morning for our sunrise shoot. The class had elected to make a drive up Trail Ridge Road to Many Parks Curve for our morning location. It was great to hop out of the car and set up the camera and not have to hike in the dark. The sky was clear and we were able to get some good shots. Needless to say, by the time it was time to head back to Denver, we were pretty tired. We definitely prefer the sunset shoots to the sunrise ones.

Matt is all bundled up waiting for the sun to rise on Sunday morning...

This is a photo that I took of Mt. Ipsilon on Sunday morning. Nothing great, but I do love the warm glow of sunrise...

TJ & Jamie's wedding layouts

Just wanted to share a couple more pages that I managed to finish (Yeah, I'm in April of 2006 - See, I'm really not that far behind!!!)

These are some photos that we snapped during TJ & Jamie's wedding. While I had done a 20 page digital book for them as a present, I had never really done any of the pictures for myself, so here they are. Of course, these are all paper and are based on sketches by pagemaps.com.

A few new pages to share...

Wow, two posts in one day!!!

I just wanted to share a few more "paper" pages that I've done since I've been home. These are all from one day on our Honeymoon in 2006 in Prague, Czech Republic. We were visiting the "Little Quarter" where we saw the beautiful Church of St. Nicholas & the beautiful & odd gardens of Wallenstein Palace.

Catching up...

Boy have I been a terrible blogger since getting home. I promise to get better!!!

As I'm sure you've guessed, we are settling back into "normal life" (whatever that may be). I'm working like crazy and Matt has been busy working on the house. We decided that we are so tired of carpet in our bathrooms (yes, I know YUCK!!), so he is working on installing slate tiles in them. He has our guest bathroom all ready for the tiles to be installed, just waiting on picking up the tile and the saw. It will look wonderful when he is all done. I'll share before & after pictures when we are done with it. Then its on to the master bathroom where we plan a bit more extensive remodeling. We want to take out this huge garden tub and install a jetted tub and of course the new slate flooring. Needless to say, that one will take a bit longer.

I'm so enjoying being back home to my "paper" scrapbooking and I haven't done a digital layout since I got home. I forgot how much I enjoyed working with all the paper & embellishments. Of course, Matt loved not hearing me "bang" and scare him to death so we still have the rule that I have to warn him before "banging".

This is a layout that I did of one of my favorite pictures from the wedding. For those of you there, you will remember a very WET misty night. We had just finished having some pictures taken outside and were walking back in. It took both of us to hold up my dress out of the wet mucky ground. Needless to say, Jason did a great job of capturing this moment of us giggling like crazy as we attempted to keep the white dress out of the mud.



Credits:
Jason Smith Photography
DCWV Papers
Misc Embellishments (ribbon, flowers, ribbon slide, brads)