Cool Photos and a 4th of July Recap

Hey you guys! I hope you had a wonderful 4th of July celebration! It was a great weekend here, particularly in photos, so I felt the need to share some weekend scenes.

I found this really cool tutorial on light painting with sparklers from A Beautiful Mess and a great fireworks photography tutorial on Living In Another Language and I was completely intrigued. I decided to give it a shot and it was so much fun! We watched the fireworks from my parent's lake house and it turned out to be the best spot. Although I had my camera and tripod on a floating dock I still think the photos turned out really cool. I even like the ones where we captured the fireworks at the very top or bottom of the photo.

The basic concept is to put your camera (that has manual settings) on a tripod, set your ISO to 100, raise your aperature (f-stop) for a wide depth of field and lower the shutter speed to between 15-30 seconds. Try to manually focus on something by pointing a flashlight at a subject or try autofocusing on the fireworks if there is a series of one right after another. Just play around with these settings and you'll be sure to turn out some awesome images.

Here are our light painting attempts. It was already completely dark when we started so I would like to try again around dusk and see how they turn out.

Here is the example from A Beautiful Mess. So cool, right???

And here are a few other shots from the weekend. We kept tossing around the idea to find a place to escape for the weekend but reminded ourselves that we have the greatest little celebration in our own neighborhood and we don't even have to get in our car!

Here is my favorite new dress I shared on Instagram this weekend! I don't think the link worked for some of you so I'm adding it in here. It is so light and summery and it fits great. I'm wearing a medium and I'm 5'7" and 135 lbs if that helps :)

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Port City Club was our dinner spot and we escaped most of the rain which was nice.

And we had to end the weekend with a little grill action and a yummy desert. This super easy strawberry tart was inspired by my friend Julie of JulieBlanner.com but I adapted it slightly to utilize what I had in the house.

RECIPE (makes one) :

Crescent Roles (two triangles, they sell these at Publix in a mini can which has 4 triangles, who knew?!?!)

½ c. thinly slices strawberries

Powdered sugar

Spread your crescent roles in the bottom of a small quiche or tart dish (ours are from Ikea), sprinkle some powdered sugar on the rolls, layer with strawberries and sprinkle more powdered sugar on top. Bake on 350 degrees for approximately 15 minutes or until the rolls are golden brown and the strawberries are bubbly.

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Stay tuned this week for some up coming posts, particularly a little styled entertaining shoot that Beth Barden and I have been working on!

Cheers no let's go kick Monday in the behind!