Island Gal Photography

I have GREAT news!! I've finally decided to make my hobbie, my job! I've always loved photograghy, I always have a camera on me and I've wanted to do it professionally for so long. I either had a full time job (back in the states), didn't have a "real" camera, or i've been enjoying my first 2 3/4 yrs of marriage. I've since have no job and i've exhausted all of my time to enjoying and doing whatever I could to grab the full experience of living on an island and being a newlywed. Sooooo....i've been getting a little bored lately and back in June for my anniversary Darin got me an awesome camera, a Nikon D7000, i've never had such an intense camera before and if you know me well enough, as soon as life gives me something to do I dive right in and annoy everyone around for days or weeks because that's all I talk about (ie: Europe, 25 days!). I started out in my manual for a few days, then moved on to youtube videos and site seeing for practice. I've always had a creative eye and i'm usually very chit-chatty so I knew i'd be great with my clients and placing them how I thought would look best, I was just nervous about my camera skills. I started this last week Friday, I made my logo, made a Facebook fan page, put an ad on a local page for  a **FREE** family photo session and immediately got 16 responses. I wrote back everyone and in less than a week of starting out, I had 3 people actually follow through and make appointments, I also had 2 appointments from the girls at work so 5 total! Yesterday (Thursday) I had 3 of those appointments in one day, but I didn't mind because I want to get great photos for my website so people can see what I do....more photos = more business!! I feel like I did pretty good for my first go around, i'm excited to see where this goes and what I can learn as I continue to take more photos! Check out my site and facebook page and of course "like" it too :)  As always...enjoy!

www.islandgalphoto.com

http://www.facebook.com/IslandGalPhotography

FaNTasY FoOTbALL

It's the time of year when all the fantasy football teams start to be organized and then drafting players becomes your #1 priority. I've never had my own fantasy team but when Darin had them in the past years it always made me more excited to actually watch football on Sundays. This year I got my own team in the CashWiz league!! I studied and looked up a bunch of things about all the top players and some of the teams, did a few pretend drafts to get the hang of it, read up on the professionals drafts and saw what they did. I had lots of notes and pages of ideas on how I was going to strategically draft my teams players. Here's my top players I picked up for the 2012 season. Can't wait till the season starts when I beat all the boys teams, or at least the top 5 at the end, that would be a successful year for a girl's first fantasy team.

GuiNeP sEasON

For only a few months out of the year (I think 2), the street vendors here not only sell the usual phone mins cards, boiled peanuts, news papers and snacks, they now sell Guineps! The peanuts are in brown baggies and the guineps are in clear bags so you'll always know what they have. This fruit simply grows on trees, people pick them and sell them on the street corners to people like me who love them and don't have the time or know what the tree even looks like to pick my own, but at .50 cents a bag, it's a bargin! I consume these any chance I can these days, I have my $1 ready to hand out the window at any moment. This little fruit, about the size of a large grape has a tight leather type skin that you pop when you bite into it with your teeth, it opens up and you eat the inside orange part which is the part that covers the seed, you can eat the seed to but I don't. Once you pop the little orange fruit in your mouth you basically just suck the tangy part off the seed. After so many my lips start to feel funny, but that doesn't stop me...they are too good!!

LobStEr SEaSoN

August 1st marked the start of lobster season. Here in the Bahamas we are allowed to spear them, there is a limit per boat or per person but i'm not sure what it is, all we know is if there is a Bahamian on the boat we can have as many as we want! Our friend Alex is a Bahamian, he invited us so we said yea! I don't spear but I snorkel around and take pictures, or drive the boat, I also take the lobster from the spears and make sure they go in the live well....just so the boys don't have to get out of the water to do that then get back in, makes it easier if someone is on the boat you can pass stuff to. We had extra spears so I decided to carry one with me, not sure if i'd use the darn thing and I had no clue how to use it properly, but there I was with spear in hand swimming around looking for lobster. I had a quick lesson from Darin in the water, "hold here, pull this back, aim and let go", easy enough I guess. I was swimming behind darin a little ways back and spotted a lobster with his head out of the hole. I did what Darin told me to and missed, tried my second shot and I hit him!!! He went back up into the hole a little but when I swam back down to grab the pole, he came out with it! I swam to the boat and handed my lobster to Alex. I was and still am pretty impressed with myself, I feel like one of the cool guys that spears stuff, so now I can actually say i'm a lobster hunter and successfully killed dinner. That may be to over the top but i'm just proud of myself. Here's a little peek of some photos from our morning out catching lobster!