I enjoy photography and am trying to make a business out of it. I have done recreational ballet since I was five and tap dance since I was seven. I've been playing the piano for eleven years and have been classically trained for a year and a half. I'm a theology and music double major (I know, I know) and study at a tiny college in the midwest. I have a blog on my photography website, but I try to keep that strictly business related...portfolio photos and such. This blog will be about my personal life, crafts, decorating, cooking...pretty much everything else. Please stay a while and say hello! :)
What's your favorite book? I can't answer that! I love the Narnia books, the Little House on the Prairie series, and anything by Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgeson Burnett, or Regina Doman. I will read almost anything, though, especially books with pretty illustrations or sweet stories!
What's your favorite movie? I love the 1995 version of A Little Princess. Disney's Ratatouille and 2015 version of Cinderella are great. I like the movie adaption of Roald Dahl's Matilda, too.
Who's your favorite musician/songs? Being a music major, I LOVE classical music. I suppose that that's more of a stereotype than anything else, but I truly do love classical works. I grew up listening to them and never grew out of it (thankfully!). I have 10 years of recreational ballet background, so naturally, music from ballets ranks high in my list of classical favorites.
Another of my favorite genres of music is movie scores and I like anything that sounds similar to it. John Williams is a classic, but I like Mark Isham and Michael Giacchino quite a bit. I recently discovered a Russian piano trio called Bel Suono and I like a lot of their music. Emily Bear is another favorite of mine. She's a 13 year old composer, has six albums of original music, and has scored numerous short films. As for vocalists, I like Mumford and Sons, Sleeping at Last (and their instrumental music is fabulous), and other musicians with similar styles.
A little fun fact about me is that I love listening to classical music and music from the 20s, 30s, and 40s on vinyl records. A friend of mine once found me all of Mozart's solo piano works on vinyl records at a thrift store for a dollar and it was the best day of my life. I'm not a huge fan of current music on record; it just lacks the roughness and crackly-ness that older records have and sounds no different to me than a CD or an MP3.
Have you traveled? Sadly, I am not well-traveled for several reasons, lack of funds and time being chiefly among them. (Though the fact that I just turned 19 last September probably contributes its fair share.) I hope to make enough money to be able to travel to my heart's content...or maybe honeymoon in a foreign country (or two or three) if my future husband would be able to do that. At the top of my list right now are France, Italy, Russia, and England. If those are too cliche for you, Belize, Macedonia, Greece, and Scandinavia (Sweden and Norway in particular) are also on the list. I'd be happy traveling within the USA, as well; I have always wanted to go to New England - particularly Rhode Island, Vermont, and Maine - during the fall or winter.
What's your blogging history? I started a Blogspot blog when I was 13. It was a disaster. I stopped posting about two years in and returned last year to do a complete overhaul and re-do of the blog. I got rid of all of that and started a this blog and hope to updated it frequently from now on. I have also been on Tumblr since 2011, but I don't put a lot of original content there. And I also run the aforementioned portfolio blog on my photography website. I keep a WordPress as a personal journal of sorts. It's not private, but I don't generally publicize that I have and keep one.
I liked WordPress initially because you can tag your posts and people can search for them, making it easier to build an audience quickly (I think I may have posted 3 times and I had 15 followers by the time I switched), but the interface didn't work well for easy in-post photo organization and the templates were not very customizable unless you paid a fee. Tumblr is good for both text and photo, but I reblog so much material from other users that my blog isn't very personal. I've found that it's a bit difficult to build a good audience on Blogspot without paying for advertising or being promoted by blogs that are already popular, but it's really easy to organize and publish clean posts with both photos and text, which was what I was looking for.
I liked WordPress initially because you can tag your posts and people can search for them, making it easier to build an audience quickly (I think I may have posted 3 times and I had 15 followers by the time I switched), but the interface didn't work well for easy in-post photo organization and the templates were not very customizable unless you paid a fee. Tumblr is good for both text and photo, but I reblog so much material from other users that my blog isn't very personal. I've found that it's a bit difficult to build a good audience on Blogspot without paying for advertising or being promoted by blogs that are already popular, but it's really easy to organize and publish clean posts with both photos and text, which was what I was looking for.
