meet meghan // organizing your adventure photos

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I’m really excited to introduce you to my friend Meghan today. First off, she’s got some great tips for organizing your photos {seeing as mine are scattered all over my desktop, I’m going to be using her system for sure}, and second, she is just such an awesome and inspiring person. Her photos are amazing, her heart is beautiful, and her story is a unique and important one— and she is living it so well. Meghan is one of those people I am incredibly thankful to have met here on the internet, and I’m so glad she’s taken the time to create this post for my little space today. ♥

Hello sweet dear friend readers! My name is Meghan and I write a little blog named eat.live.make  about living a creative, simple and healthy life. I am so excited to be over here today (thank you Anna!) to share with you guys how I organize my little family’s adventure photos.

After starting my own photography business  last year I realized I needed a better way to organize my photos than just putting them in folders on my computer. I started using this method for our personal travel photos as well, and it has made things so much easier! Each year I get an album printed out from Artifact Uprising of our year’s adventures, and this year it took me half the time as it did last year because I had everything organized and ready to go.

This system is super easy, and just takes a bit of forethought when you start to upload photos from your camera into your computer. Here’s how you do it:

ORGANIZINGphotos

Each year I create a yearly folder in our computer hard drive. You can see that I started the folders in 2011 above. In each of those folders I have a folder for each month of the year. You can see 2013’s folder’s contents on the far left of my finder screen shot.

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Each month of the year has sub-folders. For December’s sub folders I have several projects I did for my blog, along with our trip to the beach, our trip to the lake and some recipe pictures.

They KEY to this whole process is to create each folder BEFORE you upload your pictures so that your uploading photos will have a file to go into.

For example, if I was about to upload photos from our recent lake house trip, I would get on my computer go to>>meghan blog photos>>January>> then create a NEW folder that said “lake house”. Then in would import my photos into the “lake house” folder!

Pretty easy, huh? All it takes is a little forethought and then you will be able to organize and access your adventure photos much easier!

Looking for more photography tips and tricks? Check out my photography 101 series and follow along with eat.live.make on instagram, Facebook and Pinterest!

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THANK YOU, MEGHAN!

And I had to add this promo video of Meghan’s here, because her work is gorgeous, it helps you get to know her a little better, and it makes me smile every time I watch it. :)

shine on…

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“This is the year I will choose a word.”

That’s what I decided when 2104 rolled around. You know, the whole, choose a word, live the word, BE THE WORD. I liked the idea, this phenomenon. But you want to know what I did? When I first started this project, this idea of a word, I scoured the internet for hours. I googled “New Years Word”. I scrolled through all my instagram, pinterest, twitter. I looked at my friends’ words, I looked at strangers words. I looked to everyone else for my word, but you know what? I hardly even looked to myself.

So then I stopped and took a deep breath. Because I’d literally gotten myself in a tizzy over picking a word. Because this sort of thing— this sort of comparing, and measuring, and looking out into the world for the answers? This is the thing we do now. All of us. Definitely me. And this is the thing that I try so so hard not to do and not to be.

I am constantly telling myself and trying to believe in myself {succeeding in believing, and failing to believe}, that just being me is enough.

JUST DO YOU. BE YOU. YOU YOU YOU.

And so,

Shine.

That’s my word.

And I’m not sure exactly what it means for me just yet, but it’s the single word that I thought up myself, and it spoke to me, and I feel something for it, and best of all, it just seems right. I don’t want to overanalyze it, or beat it to the ground. I just want to bring the light to my life, keep the light, shine the light. That quote up above? That’s the kind of life I want to live this year. That’s the kind of person I want to be.

Shine in, Shine out, Shine on.

on the first real snow and cameras and instagram.

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One more week of school and then 12 whole days of footloose and fancy freeeeeeee.

This weekend we got our first real snow fall. By first real snow, I mean it was the first time we had to go out and shovel the driveway. Do I love it? No, but kind of yes. I get in this ho ho ho spirit when I’m out there and just power through it while singing Christmas music quietly under my breath. I would sing them louder, but sometimes wonder what the neighbors might think. The shoveling gives me a back-ache and I seriously get SO hot and sweaty, but the coming inside after to hot chocolate part makes it all worth it. Oh, joy. It snowed a little bit early last week, and certainly stuck in most places because of the cold, but the storm this weekend was the real deal– the white all over, magic kind of morning. Today I didn’t even make it outside except to wrestle with the mounds of heavy white fluff in the driveway. Other than that it was present wrapping, and movie watching, and a stay-in-your-pajamas all day sort of Sunday. And I didn’t feel guilty one bit and that is the best part of all.

On Saturday my sister and I went to Harvard Square and had a full day shopping and eating and loving that little gem of a place that is part of our city. Before we were leaving the house I grabbed my camera and discovered that {what I thought was the lens} was cracked! The lens cap was on, but it seemed that I had jammed it on improperly and when I took the cap off I discovered THIS. Oh, no. I thought to myself. No no no no no. So I did get sad, but I didn’t panic. I looked up the lens and found that it wasn’t too expensive should I have to get another one, and then I looked up a camera store in Harvard Square and I grabbed my small lens {50 mm} to use that for the day and off we went. LUCKILY I discovered at the camera shop that the lens of the camera was actually fine and that it was just the filter that had cracked. HUNTS PHOTO SAVED THE DAY. And my heart. Also, the plus side was that I got to play a little more with my 50 mm lens, which I haven’t done as often as I’d like. I still find it a little tricky for me to focus and I often find later that my pictures aren’t perfectly crisp. Any advice from the photographers out there? I’ll post some of my photos later this week, but that’s going to be one of my goals for 2014, which is an ongoing goal for me in general. Keep on keeping on.

Besides being excited about Christmas soon, and snowfalls lately, and giving gifts to people I love, I’ve also been really excited about my instagram following growing rapidly these last few weeks. Instagram has always been my favorite– I love how it is an extension of this blog, how truly it reflects me and my life, and my love of photography, and more than anything I love the connections it gives me to friends near and far. I spend a lot of time curating my feed, not to make it seem perfect, no not that at all, but to make it feel real. Be YOU, I always hear people saying, and this is me being me absolutely. And I know that having lots of followers doesn’t matter in the bigger picture of life, but I do like the idea of a community, a community of friends and nice people that feel connected and so hooray for growing a following– for people appreciating my photos and my words and just all around for KINDNESS and LOVE and LIFE. Amen.

I hope YOU had a happy weekend and warm wishes for a quick work week!

9 DAYS TIL CHRISTMAS! JOY TO THE WORLD!

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P.S. for those of you that have asked, I edit my instagram photos with VSCO cam.
I’d been thinking of doing a tutorial, except for that I recently found one by Mary Beth that is AMAZING. So just go visit her post and she wonderfully explains it all.

Happy picture taking!

it’s here.

exciting!-3!

It’s here! It’s finally here! The long awaited redesign is HERE.

Welcome, welcome all, to the new Dear Friend. :)

I am giddy with excitement. LIKE A KID ON CHRISTMAS MORNING.

I would love it if you took some time to look around. Grab a cup of coffee! Stay awhile! There’s a new about page, and some most-often blogged about “feature” pages, too. Though not 100% done, I’ve started to curate my best and favorite posts in those pages. They are filled with most loved photographs and topics near and dear to my heart.

This new look has been in the works for months and I can’t stop smiling about the way it all turned out. I knew I wanted it to look just so— I had a vision, but not the skill to carry it through. I am no artist and know next to nothing about web design, and so I went out looking for help and I feel like I found THE BEST.  I wanted a fresh, clean look and with the hard work and stellar skills of Kate {web development} and Jolie {logo and lettering}, we made it happen. I sent over the messy sketches and mock-ups, and it all turned into THIS! I cannot speak highly enough about these two creatives. THEY. ARE. AMAZING.

I hope you like it!

And I don’t think I say it enough, but really, honestly, truly, THANK YOU for coming here and thank you for reading. It means so much to me and I want you to know.

ALL THE HUGS. FOREVER. XO, Me.