For those who know me, you’ll know that Rachel and I go way, way back. I’ve known this girl for about half of my life. We’ve known each other since our Geocities/Digimon shrine days and became online BFFs. We actually lived across the country from one another. (I was in California and she was in North Carolina!)
We’ve kept in close contact after all these years and, at one point, she moved to California. Because I was doing my undergraduate degree in SoCal (and she lived in Los Angeles), we were finally able to bring our online friendship into reality.
She’s been my guinea pig through all of my photography endeavors, which I really appreciate. She was there when I was taking photos with a regular point and shoot, gave great feedback when I was starting to edit photos in Photoshop, and so forth.
Going through all my old photos with her was actually really nostalgic. I forgot how much I’ve progressed over the past 8+ years that we’ve been doing photoshoots together. Maybe one of these days I’ll post a progress blog post, where you can see all of my heinous attempts at photography.
Anyway, when I was preparing to move to Boston, I tried to schedule as many hangouts with friends as possible. I wasn’t sure when I would be coming back (or how often I’d be able to visit), so I wanted to make sure that I got to see everyone before I left. Rachel and I knew that we wanted to do one last photoshoot before I flew off to Massachusetts.
A few years ago we had done a beach shoot and wanted to revisit it. After some research, we settled on Windansea Beach, which is located in La Jolla, CA. We had never been there before and, based off of the pictures we looked at, it seemed like a great option, so we set up a date, time, and were off to the races.
For this shoot I mostly relied on my 50mm and 75-300mm lenses. I hadn’t really practiced or played around with the telephoto lens, so imagine my surprise at the great images we produced!
These photos turned out much more better than I had originally anticipated. A lot of it has to do with having a fantastic model (thanks, Rachel!), but I was mostly shocked by the 75-300mm lens! For our last shoot (Elfin Forest Recreational Reserve, which you can read here) I had solely used my 50mm and loved how those photos turned out, so to see the results of the 75-300mm (and be much happier with them) was surprising.
I eventually just put the 50mm away altogether.
The only downside to this shoot were the other people who were there. For the most part everyone left us alone, but there was a tween boy who kept trying to photo bomb us and just get in the way. I know it’s to be expected, especially when you’re in a public space, but his mom saw him bugging two women and did nothing to stop him.
He eventually left us alone after I got kind of nasty and vocal (lol).
Rachel and I have discussed taking engagement photos for her and Rich (her partner) and I hope that I’ll be able to do that sometime in the next year. Of course, I won’t complain if she and Rich come out to the east coast for some cute fall foliage photos too. 🙂
