revealing myself.

it is common knowledge as well as a common cliche that it is most important to make a living doing what you love even if it's not the most popular decision with your parents and/or won't make you a millionaire even when you have the potential to make millions. i love art and i love capturing life. i don't love transactions involving money or day planners or answering emails. i hate that doing what i love sometimes means i have to be a grown up about it. i'd rather just be an artist with no business involved. but i am learning that life isn't all about me and what i prefer from hour to hour but about what my purpose for my god is. and right now i believe i am on a journey and a path marked by god and what he has in store for me is not about what my purpose is but about what his purpose is for me.

and sometimes i take my sister's point and shoot camera and shoot my life just because. this is where i begin to reveal.

this is my husband. i love that he calls me wifey and that he might be the only person on the planet i can justify photographing from the world's most unflattering angle. this is his hungry hungry hippo face.

roaring fork. smoky mountain national park. along with my travel list comes a bit of a national park obsession. our 1 year anniversary gave us a good excuse to cross one off our list.
we like to take self portraits. on our trip to europe 2 years ago people would see us holding the camera out in front of us to take a picture of ourselves in front of something important and they would always offer to take our photo. no thanks, we prefer the ridiculous experience of trying to fit ourselves and said important background into one frame with 50 outtakes, thanks. p.s. i always end up smashing one of my eyes against matt's face in some subconscious effort to make room for the important background.
aside from living with the amish, i would enjoy living in a national park if they'd let me. more on living with the amish soon.
cades cove. i've read a few pages of "all the pretty horses" and i think if i actually read the whole book maybe this is what it would be like? maybe i'm completely off but i'll let myself think i'm right until i read otherwise.
the view from our cabin.
editor's note: this photo is fake. along with our european escapade of only taking our own photos i decided that if we wanted our whole bodies in a photo we would take precise steps to take 2 photos (each of us seperately) and i would simply photoshop us in together as if someone had taken our photo. why we went to all this work at the louvre in paris instead of just asking someone to take our picture together i have no idea. but it makes the photo so much more interesting to us :) so here is our 2nd attempt, this time at the smoky mountains. photo of kristyn taken by matt. photo of matt taken by kristyn. and whala, i swear i usually am a photojournalist!
after a horribly crappy stupid dumb hike up to the highest peak in the smoky mountains we got this view. and then had an equally ridiculous hike back down.

meet my husband. mountain man turned pilot.
i love light. i watch it all day.
drinking tea is hardcore.

if you haven't read the purpose driven life or only read it when or because it was on all the bestseller's list years ago, i highly recommend giving it a chance. i decided to open it up the other day for the first time in 5 years when rick warren was mentioned briefly in church on sunday and felt immediately that it was something i needed to read again. along with c.s. lewis' "problem of pain" and dickens "david copperfield" i have plenty of reading to do right now.