Lz and EJ

this is so good....

2011-12-23T18:40:00.000-05:00

and i can not get enough of this one

4AD 2011

2011-12-23T18:24:00.000-05:00

our camera and lenses

2011-12-20T16:21:00.000-05:00

one certainly could spend a lot of money on photo equipment, but a far better investment would be spending time studying photography. a camera takes good pictures the same way a guitar plays good music or an oven bakes delicious cookies. there are lots of free photography tips around the internet - learn as much as you can about how other photographers made the images that hit you right in the heart and you will be well on your way to being a great photographer. don't fear, however, today's camera technology allows for a quick learning curve. chances are, you will be able to get some decent shots even if you never turn the dial off of 'auto'. shoot what you love, and shoot as much as you can!

in case you were wondering what we've been working with lately to build our smugmug galleries, here is a rundown of our current photo gear.

after doing our research, the nikon D5100 seemed to be the right fit for us.

it just felt 'right' in our hands as soon as we got a hold of it, and we have been very happy with it so far. decide on your budget and what you want to do, then find the most current information and read as much as you can about what's available in your price range. check for deals on gently used models, and remember that if your camera body requires a motor inside the lens to auto focus, the body will be cheaper but subsequent lens purchases will be more expensive.

we immediately went to etsy to find the perfect camera bag. your bag might as well reflect your artistic personality, right?

everyone needs a great portrait lens. we went with this one, a great lens at a pretty good price:

we kind of hate changing lenses though, so this is our usual lens, chosen for versatility:

yes, the lens cost more than the camera body. yes, we were nervous about spending that much. yes, there are many good reasons that it cost that much. no, we don't regret it at all. it is great to be able to go from a wide angle shot to a close up detail shot in seconds, and it helped a ton shooting z&m's new york city hall wedding - it was a pretty unpredictable day, and we were able to capture all of it as it unfolded in a real and beautiful way.

we hope to add this fancy flash to our camera bag soon:

please share a comment with a link to your favorite photos!

handmade jewelry and accessories - on sale!

2011-12-14T17:25:00.000-05:00

we made another coupon!

we were feeling extra generous this holiday season so we decided to offer a totally insane discount on the items in our etsy shop. for a very limited time, our dear facebook friends can use the coupon code FBXMAS2012 to save 50%

everything is one of a kind, so if you see something you like, snatch it up or risk losing out to a faster clicker ;)

we made a coupon!

2011-12-11T12:37:00.001-05:00

firstcoupon
save 10% on your purchase of $10 or more from any of our smugmug galleries
Code: couponsRnice

Valid 12/11/2011 → 12/15/2011
lzandej.smugmug.com

cute

2011-12-10T18:22:00.001-05:00

sigh

2011-12-03T20:30:00.001-05:00

i spent most of today recovering from the trip and working on photos. this one made me cry a little, so i thought i'd share...

ej and i keep talking about what a beautiful day it was :)

lucky

2011-12-03T10:25:00.001-05:00

we were lucky enough to get to travel to new york city this week to witness the lovely wedding of two people who were lucky enough to find each other. it was a beautiful day, and i am having a great time reliving it while going through the photos. the city hall ceremony was short and sweet, and ended with one very nice kiss :)

congratulations, zuiho and mitsuko!

more photos coming soon!

EJ @ NHF Chicago

2011-11-21T15:17:00.001-05:00

These pictures were taken when EJ did a presentation

at an event called The Spark Event sponsored by Affinity Biotech

at the National Hemophilia Foundation's 63rd Annual Meeting in Chicago.

sniffles

2011-11-15T20:47:00.001-05:00

i have pretty bad allergies, so i am pretty picky about my tissues.

puffs with lotion, rectangle box, please. or my nose will be sad.

sometimes on the road, i run out of puffs and come home with a sore nose from the rough hotel tissues. kleenex has a new fancy tissue that is just amazing.

puffs will still be my tissue of choice, but i will keep a box of these kleenex around. i'm touching one right now! so cool and velvety! how did they do it?

***

and here is a great video about scarves.

happy face

2011-10-18T16:26:00.001-04:00

i got a facial before my wedding and really enjoyed the effect on my skin. i've been thinking about it lately and i have a spa gift card, but i haven't been feeling like scheduling an appointment and sitting there for what feels like forever - how can you relax when someone is poking at your face? so, i bought this and just tried it.

for the price, it seems to have worked very well. it tingled a little but did not burn and i definitely feel much smoother. also, it only took like 5 minutes to do, so i am pretty happy with it. i bet ej will want to try it once he gets a whiff of the bright orange scent. what a nice little pick-me-up.

baby brock's first photo session

2011-10-17T15:33:00.000-04:00

meeting little brock ryan was just about the coolest thing ever. here are some favorites from his newborn photo session:

you can see the rest at lzandej.smugmug.com you can even buy some prints from us if you want to :)

send us a note at lzandej@gmail.com for more information about scheduling a photo session with us in the pittsburgh, pa area or beyond!

Sage Hill Farms Alpacas

2011-10-09T12:12:00.000-04:00

on the way back from camp in the adirondacks, we got to visit the fuzzy and adorable sage hill farms alpacas. i was kind of nervous while taking photos, as i had never been around that many alpacas before and i just wasn't sure what they were going to do. turns out they were all pretty sweet and i hope we get to visit again soon!

they were so cute following jayme to the pasture for playtime

i was surprised at how fast they got moving when they were playing, especially the tiny ones.

they can even fly short distances!

besides the herd of alpacas, there are some other friendly animals at the farm. everyone is cute at sage hill farms.

farm life is kind of a dream for us, we could have moved in right then and there :)

new this week @ the artist market

2011-10-06T15:58:00.002-04:00

i finally remembered to take photos of some of the new pieces we finished this week. all handmade just north of pittsburgh by Lz and EJ.

a few fused glass pendants with handformed and hammered copper tree inclusions and our 'signature' copper swirl inclusion bail - no glue! some draped votive holders, including one pretty freaky one made from scraps. a bunch of slumped jars and bottles - lots of different shapes, good for spoonrests, snacks & dips, bedside jewelry holders, funky home decor, etc. yes, we do accept donations of nifty (and clean) bottles and we can slump any special bottle for you as long as it fits in our kiln.

the pendant on the left features some new glass colors - bright true lipstick red and palest blue that reacts with the turquoise frit, creating a red ring around each turquoise bit. also a bunch of one-of-a-kind wire wrapped pottery shards collected from beaches around new england. pottery factories along the coast used to dump their discards into the sea - these pieces could be as much as 100 years old!

i tried to prop this black iridescent draped piece to show off the amazing colors. it could be a short vase, candle holder, or fabulously artsy pencil holder.

this black iridescent tree looks tame in the shadows

then explodes into brilliant color in the sun.

all these and much more will be on our tables this saturday, october 8, 2011, at the 20th and penn artisan market in pittsburgh's vibrant strip district from 9am-4pm. email or send ej a facebook message if you'd like us to hold anything for you or if you have any ideas for a custom order. they say it will be bright and sunny and summery this weekend, it is sure to be a great day in the strip!

***

we now accept credit cards again! its never too early to start holiday gift shopping!

***

get your tickets now for pittsburgh maker faire! on sunday, october 23, 2011, from 12-6pm, join Lz and EJ and lots of other fabulous local makers for a day of "crafts, engineering, music, robots, workshop digital fabrication, energy, demonstrations, performances, projects and lots of surprises" at the pittsburgh children's museum. Buy tickets and learn more at www.pghmakerfaire.com.

How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds

2011-09-29T17:31:00.003-04:00

How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.

yum!

Cincinnati Zoo

2011-09-29T16:49:00.000-04:00

here are some straight-out-of-camera shots from our stop at the cinci zoo on the way to strange folk. it was probably the best zoo we have ever been to, with lots of really nice habitats. we didn't even cover the whole thing, and there was some construction going on, so we will go back again as soon as we can.

the zoo is also botanical gardens, with lots of cool plants everywhere. we saw a bunch of squirrels, butterflies, and lizards roaming around which really added to the atmosphere.

the zoo had lots of meandering paths (and somewhat inadequate signage) and every so often we'd turn a corner to see a smiling young zookeeper with a small animal, like this sweet blue tongue skink.

such a cute bear

when we got near this lion, he woke up and let out a series of very impressive roars.

they had a fabulous nocturnal house. it was super dark so the animals were pretty active and i got to test the higher ISOs on my camera. we played peekaboo with this owl:
i forget what this cute pup is:

this was a GIANT fruit bat.

binturong! (in cincinnati they call them bearcats.)

oh, the huge manatee!

the interactive/educational bits around the zoo were excellent, including this one in the insect house.

can't wait to visit again!

nice, natural nails - no nailpolish necessary

2011-09-07T18:29:00.003-04:00

growing up i always wanted girly long fingernails, but i could never get them to grow past my fingertips without breaking. in high school i went through a phase of gluing on fake plastic nails occasionally. they never looked good and fell off too easily. i've tried all kinds of products and polishes and i even got an OPI AXXIUM gel french manicure for my wedding. it was pretty nice and lasted through most of the honeymoon, but it was kind of expensive and hard to remove. i have tons of nail polish, but i rarely use it anymore. its too stinky and i'm too lazy to fix it when it immediately smears and chips.

happily, i seem to have found a solution that works for me. right now my nails are longer and healthier than ever, so i thought i'd share my nailcare secrets with the internet.

first, nourish from within with a delicious gummy multivitamin. these are so tasty you won't forget to take them each day.

i love this thing. it has a soft rubber tip with a cuticle pusher and little massaging nubs. you twist the bottom a few clicks to squirt the gel up into the massaging applicator, then rub around your nails for a while. this helps a lot with those annoying little snaggy skin things, and the massaging increases blood flow to your fingertips, stimulating nail growth. i think. i use this maybe twice a week.

still have ragged cuticles? this is what you need. brutal but effective. use as needed.

now that your nails are growing, keep them shaped and shiny with a file/buffer. a file with fine grit is necessary for a good shape, cheap emery boards take too much away with each swipe to get nice, even nails.

this pencil is one of my longtime beauty secrets. whitens the nail tips for a healthy look without the need for polish or a fake-looking french manicure. super easy to use, keep it sharpened for best results.

moisturize at least twice daily. i love this lavender-y lush moisturizer, but i use random tiny bottles from hotels mostly, or a giant pump container of whatever was on sale. look for something that contains cocoa butter or shea butter.

life happens and nails break. don't be afraid to work with your hands. have cute bandaids and move on. these are my all time favorites.

bellefonte, pa maternity photography

2011-09-06T18:58:00.007-04:00

here are a few photos from a recent maternity photo session with our gorgeous friends erin and bert. we had a great time shooting around their lovely home, lush backyard, and nearby talleyrand park.

some are cropped a bit off (optimized to print 8x10, shown 4x6) and i really should fix that before posting but i am going to go ahead and post them now anyway because i am too excited to share and move on to my next awesome little project.

we are available in the pittsburgh area and beyond for photography of weddings, engagements, maternity, babies, pets, families, friends, or just about any other ideas or events you might have. email LZandEJ@gmail.com if you'd like to schedule a photo session with us!

ketchup

2011-08-18T08:18:00.004-04:00

i've decided to skip posting crappy cameraphone pix of a million trips back to holmes county, smuckers and shearers, maplefest, rockwood, and the highest point in PA, couples weekend at the downtown renaissance hotel (including watching the pedicab driver that looked like jes racing the other guys and getting a push from a friendly ticket scalper so she won), asian small clawed otters, newport aquarium and sweet pea the shark ray, vevey, ogle haus, belterra, donkeys galore, louisville and the thunder over it, henry's ark (he's crushing it! he's crushing the whole carrot!), baby emus, the purple daisy, hoggle at unclaimed baggage center, kevin sorbo fan club tshirts, cleveland/ryan's, gburg twin islands and cheesesteak on the street, ej's bubble dress, mountain lodge, 2nd largest manmade illuminated star, binturong, Lz turning 30, skrillex!, the gorge where my camera battery died, beef n' buns n' paradise, and the delicious and refreshing water at berkeley springs.

most of these things we will probably do again in the near future and eventually post about, so don't feel like you missed out too much.

i'll be busy for a minute firing camp projects and editing the last of E!'s maternity shoot photos.

speaking of camp, it was great. everyone was so nice, the setting was lovely, and the projects have been turning out wonderfully. it was fun to see the girls wearing their pretty jewelry at the end of the week. hope we get to go back next year!

busy summer...

2011-08-01T22:38:00.003-04:00

we are recovering from a wonderfully fun weekend and preparing for a week in the woods. probably won't have much time for blogging anytime soon, so i'll leave you with this photo that has been my desktop background for the past couple of weeks. it's from one of our summer day trips - eventually i'll post more about it here. it was a very nice day and this picture makes me feel happy and peaceful.

hope you all are having a great summer!

happy 90th birthday aunt olga!

2011-07-16T12:40:00.009-04:00

the next big event for us after amish country xmas was our great aunt olga's 90th birthday party.
mom's cousin eileen did a fantastic job planning the party. we loved the grownup treat bags, especially the custom wrapper on the hershey bars. also handy but not pictured: kleenex pocket pak, nice hand lotion. here are my parents, waiting to order. i'm pretty sure mom will be ok with me posting this one.hofbrauhaus on pittsburgh's south side was a great choice for a party. the room was a good size and the servers were very friendly and effecient. this is what 90 candles on a birthday cake looks like. wow.
everyone loved the accordion stylings of joe grkman of grkmania!

now i want spaetzle.

learning photoshop

2011-07-15T16:30:00.006-04:00

DSLR photography has been lots of fun so far, but more of a challenge than i expected. remembering my time in high school with 35mm film has helped. (thanks mr. brown!) i know about f-stops and apertures and ISOs, and i am making progress with learning where everything is on my camera and trying to get better about thinking while shooting. however, i just had the rather obvious epiphany that photoshop now replaces the darkroom. a SOOC (straight out of camera) shot may be nice, but the wow factor i am trying to achieve is pretty much always going to require some extra work. for example, this photo of the cutest little girl on the planet enjoying some chocolate ice cream is very nice
but after just a few minutes of photoshop work it looks much better to me - notice the golden highlights in her hair, warmer skin tone, and her sticky little fingers look stickier.

most importantly, it looks more like what i remember from that day.
all that beautiful color information is hidden in the pixels and needs some coaxing to come out and shine. the trick is learning when to stop, i guess...if i was going to spend more time on it i'd probably blur the background more. what do you think? leave a comment...

i really love the flexibility i have shooting digital - i can take countless shots of the same thing without worrying about film cost and make 50 versions of a single photo in an hour if i wanted to. the problem comes in self-evaluation...what is a good photo? is this one good enough yet? which all comes back to (as it always does for pretty much everyone about everything) am i good enough?

the downside of digital slr photography is the way it opens doors to an incredible array of spending opportunities. i just ordered two new lenses in hopes of getting some great shots during a maternity shoot and some traveling we have planned.

now to finish getting through this backlog of cameraphone pix...

amish country xmas

2011-07-14T13:42:00.001-04:00

as soon as thanksgiving was over, i started worrying about xmas. every year since 2003, ej and i end up fighting. overlapping family demands leave no one satisfied. it suddenly hit me that this year, we were married. we are our own family now, and we can start our own traditions. so we talked about what our ideal holiday would be like. peaceful was a word that came up a lot. so i got online and tried to find a nice, peaceful place we could spend a few days around the holiday. i'm not sure exactly how, but we settled on ohio's amish country, holmes county.
on december 23rd, we packed the car and headed to ohio. we stopped at lehman's

lehmans a truly amazing store full of "old-fashioned high-quality merchandise" and i feel like we spent hours there looking at everything. by the time we checked in at holmes with a view it was dark. we made a run to wal-mart where we saw the best drawing in dirt on a car we have ever seen.

the next morning we opened the window shades and knew we'd picked the right place

it was xmas eve, and we weren't sure how much would be open, but we set off for a drive to coshocton country where we stopped at the incredible unusual junction

we had a snack in the totally insane diner

we bought some delicious ohio wine at raven's glenn winery

we collected food at the different shops along the way, and made one final stop at walmart that night so we'd have everything we needed for the next day. which was xmas day.

and it was so beautiful i may have cried a little.

each day, this herd of horses grazed their way across a stream and over to the pasture behind our suite.

we turned on the fireplace and were lucky enough to catch a marathon of local high school choirs singing holiday songs on tv. we exchanged a few gifts, started a pot roast in the crock pot, and got to work on that awesome gift we bought ourselves at the lego store in rockefeller center.

this will be one of our family holiday traditions - putting together (and hopefully adding to) the lego xmas village

xmas was perfect, except for missing our fuzzy babies.

thanks to this fabulous holiday, holmes county is now our go-to day trip (sorry, erie. you're just ok.) it is relaxing and delicious and full of nice people and cute farm animals. yay.

nyc again

2011-07-13T22:43:00.007-04:00

after thanksgiving, we ended up in new york again.

we wandered around rockefeller center, watching ice skaters and taking photos of holiday decorations

and we bought ourselves an awesome xmas gift.

ej attended to business while i had my traditional nyc panic attack. the next morning i decided i had to get out of the city for a bit, and took us for a peaceful drive along this lovely beach with deer

not realizing it was the beach dead bodies were turning up on. good thing we didn't get out of the car.
the rest of the trip isn't really worth writing about - ej had some meetings, we ate a bunch of filipino food, and (i think it was the filthy queens hotel and not the dinuguan, but you never know, i am not exactly used to that stuff...) i got really sick and we had to spend a night in parsippany before i could make it home :P the next catch-up post (xmas in amishland!) will be better.

honeymoon pt. 7 - gatlinburg/pigeon forge

2011-07-13T14:05:00.026-04:00

what's cuter than one baby? twins! after pensacola beach, we headed to cleveland for dinner at ryan's (ej loves the steak window - you just ask for steak, and they give it to you! as many times as you want!) and a visit with these guys...
before heading on through the smoky mountains. hey! bear! hay bear!

soon we arrived at our favorite place in the world -- gatlinburg, tn. the combination of beautiful nature scenes

and utter tackiness

really suits us. there is always something new to see. this time our first stop was parrot mountain. it was pretty much what it said on the label - a mountain, with lots of exotic birds.

it was steep and noisy and christian themed and a pretty good time overall. if you happen to really like parrots, you can have a photo taken with birds all over you. we opted not to experience that, but we did feed some nice birds.

if it weren't for the screeches echoing through the woods, the gardens would have been quite peaceful

and if you REALLY like parrots, they had some babies available for sale at the end.

cute. then we went to ober gatlinburg wildlife encounter to see some more animals. they have a nice pit full of cuddly black bears

and our favorite - otters!

this time we stayed in a sparkly clean suite in the holiday inn vacation club and had a view of the space needle and sky lift.

after some time wandering gatlinburg and sitting by the fire, the honeymoon was over

(awwwwwww) and we headed home.

we made it just in time to gather supplies for our first thanksgiving dinner as a married couple. yum.

after all that, we were very sleepy.