Biltmore Estate

Feast your eyes on the carpet of flowers at the Biltmore Estate. My good friend Ashley, from ships, is on land and came for a visit. Ashley and I worked on the MS Rotterdam together about two years ago and yesterday we went to see the Biltmore on the busiest weekend of the summer. Despite be packed chin deep with guests, we had a blast and I got in some nice shots of the estate. I love the gargoyles and I don’t know about you, but the spookiest statue for me is the cherub. Those chubby baby statues have always creeped me out. I don’t know what it is, there’s just something not right about them.

Katie

Brie's Cats

These cats belong to my friend Brie. When I stayed over at her place on the weekend we went to Cherokee, her cats decided it was time for me to get up at some ungodly hour of the morning which for me is really any hour of the morning. They wouldn’t stop mewing and rubbing against the door, so I got out of bed and decided to pester them with my camera in return. I quickly discovered that they are a couple of hams, in as much as cats can be. I don’t know if they were attracted to the clicking of my shutter, or simply liked to see their own reflections in my lens, but whatever it was, they loved the camera, and the camera loved them.

The new job is going well. I’ve been teased and had pranks played on me at work, which means of course that my coworkers like me. I’m enjoying my new video editing job and I am quickly learning not to stay logged into my computer when I’m not around it.

Katie

Cherokee, North Carolina

This weekend I went to Cherokee, North Carolina. I stayed with my friends Brie and Andrew, who incidentally are both beautiful people. That should make photographing them easy, but it never is on account of they are both goofballs and don’t ever seem to want to simply sit still for a camera. I’ve shot Brie a couple of times and it seems I always end up with a little series, since one shot never seems to be enough to encompass it all.

I had been to Cherokee once before and I didn’t care for the town. It reminded me of the downtown areas in major ports in Alaska, and still does. Everything was tourist centered and not in a nice way. For example there were shops shaped like giant teepees, even thought the Cherokee people never lived in teepees. Most of the places sold products made in china, and some even had a man in giant headdress outside waving people in. With that said, there are some redeeming qualities to the place. It’s in a beautiful area and there’s a nice village where they have people working at crafts. We were even lucky enough to see a war reenactment in the village. I haven’t seen the show they do at night yet so I can’t comment on that, maybe next time.

Katie

Summer in Somerset

Near the smallish town called Somerset in Pennsylvania, my grandparents have a cabin. They have had this cabin since my mother was a child. Summers at “the cabin” are a long standing tradition in the family, and though I have not made it every summer of my life, it’s something I start thinking about every time summer rolls around.

I was able to visit grama and papa at the cabin for a couple of weeks and spend fourth of July there. The swirly light image is of grama. You can’t see her, but she’s the one painting with a flashlight. There have been few changes to the place since I was a kid. The mountain the cabin is on is privately owned so there is a chance the owners might sell, but that hasn’t happened yet. The question I get asked most often, when people discover I’ve done a bit of traveling, is what was my favorite place. Well, this is it.