Country Girl Photo Shoot

To anyone that lives around me, I will be doing a free photo shoot for a few country girls in the very near future! I will need a group of ladies to volunteer! Age, weight, height….none of that matters. I want to capture the essence of what it means to be a Northern country girl.

If you have a farm, ride horses, drive tractors, throw hay bales, raise chickens, milk goats….then this is the thing to get involved in.

If you have kids that love the country, fishing….then this is the shoot for them! And maybe even you too!

 

I would like GIRLS, LADIES, WOMEN, TEENAGERS, YOUNG ADULT GIRLS, FEMALES ONLY this time!

 

If you are interested: comment here, find me a http://www.facebook.com/farmgirlphotography, or hit me up on twitter @CNYfarmgirl.

 

YOU WILL BE ASKED TO SIGN A MODEL RELEASE FORM AND THESE IMAGES WILL BE MADE PUBLIC.

If you are interested in a personal photo shoot with a similar concept, I would be more than happy to assist for a small fee.

The Tomboy Within

Growing up, I always used to joke that I was my father’s only son. From as early in my life as I can remember, my daddy used to take me hunting and fishing. We spent so much time together as I grew up, he became my best friend. I love my daddy very much. I don’t get to see him anymore due to circumstances and choices that are out of my control but I will never forget our time together and all the lessons he taught me. Being my father’s “tomboy”, I learned to not only hunt and fish but to work on cars, get greasy and spin wrenches. Since my dad drove race cars for years, I learned the ins and outs of mechanics and car set ups. I know how to change my own oil, brake pads and even to change tires. These are life lessons that have helped me out on more than one occasion. Parts departments hate to see me coming. Service stations have threatened to have me thrown out of building when they couldn’t admit fault, especially to a girl. It’s actually kind of comical after the fact…but during situations like that, it makes my blood boil. I’ve had people try to fit me into a box of a proper, well-behaved lady. That box doesn’t fit…AT ALL! I am my father’s only son. I swear like a trucker. I like to drink beer. I hang with the “boys” more than I do the ladies. I don’t sit through gossip over morning tea. I work just as hard, if not harder than a lot of men I know. I like to go throw a little mud from the tires on my truck. I like going fishing and hunting. I like shooting guns and bows for competitive sport (and have even gotten myself a couple of trophies for it too). I like four-wheeling. I like being a grease monkey and fixing things. I go at my own pace. I like wearing blue jeans, t-shirts and baseball caps. I would rather be sitting on the tailgate of a pickup in the middle of a field looking up at the stars or watching a bonfire than sitting in some fancy restaurant enjoying a chef prepared meal. I am a burger and french fries kind of girl.

The “real” me in my ball cap in the pasture with cattle.

On another note, I do “clean-up” rather well. The difference is so startling that even my own neighbors and family members hardly know it’s me. Until I talk that is. I have a rather unique voice with strains of accents I have no idea the origination of. I was bred and born in upstate NY but I have a southern accent on some words while others have a Canadian accent. I’ve had lots of people ask me where I’m from…even when I grew up the next town over. I’m not really a traveler either. I’ve been to South Carolina once. The eastern sea board once. Canada once. It’s just the strange mess of who I am. A mix of a little bit of everything. It makes me that much more unique. Fishing has been a relative constant in my life. An obsession that I have carried on my shoulders, lacking a few short years here and there, that has given me so much peace in my life. I remember fishing with my daddy when I was really little and him showing me how to bait my own hook. After I became a pro at catching fish, he taught me how to take the fish off the hook too. I think it was more for him than me because he wasn’t getting a chance to fish himself. But, needless to say, I can do it myself. Something a ton of women I know refuse to do. Over the years, I have been so obsessed with fishing that when I worked as an account representative for a printing company, I would take lunch breaks in my long skirt and all to go fly fishing for trout along the banks of creek. You should have seen the looks I would get as I wrapped the back of my skirt up between my legs to tuck the hem into my waistband and proceed to done my hip waders. Many years ago, I discovered something that combines two loves of my life…fishing and art. I learned how to tie flies! I even had a small business for a while making and selling flies for fishing. I even did classes for local youths to learn to tie their own flies and then I would teach them how to fly fish too. It was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I haven’t tied flies in years and I am hoping to find some time soon. I still have some old ones in my box that I broke out on this last Sunday. Still managed to land me a bunch of panfish with the old standby. Life is good when I hear the gear whip of a fly line. Life is even better fighting a panfish on a nearly 8 ft. fly rod. Here’s my favorite image from Sunday…a flashback stonefly nymph in the mouth of a hand-sized panfish caught along the bank of the farm pond. Oh yes. Life was very good.

One of my favorite things…fly fishing for panfish!

I’ll leave you for now. I’ll update more soon. Until then, I want to leave you with one small thing. NEVER under estimate a female, woman or girl. You don’t know what kind of background they may have. 🙂

Exciting Week

Lots has been going on around the farm. I’ve been spending some time working on the stuff for my “life transition” but have also taken some time out with friends to do the things I love to do. On the 1st, it was opening morning of turkey season, and one of the people I enjoy spending time with on a regular basis came up to go hunting. I don’t hunt with a gun anymore…but I take my camera instead.

Chris got himself all set up in a blind in an area the two of us have been seeing three big tom turkeys every morning between 7 and 7:30 am. I worked on farm chores and did a little reading for a bit. He was texting messages back and forth. He was impatiently waiting for the turkeys to come in. Encouraging him to just sit tight was almost comical.

I decided to go for a little walk. Suddenly I heard a boom shortly followed by another boom. Not a minute later a text comes through. Where are you? Get up here with your camera! He’s beautiful.

I managed to make it to the top of the hill to where he was, finding a bunch of feathers on the ground about 50 yards from his blind and an empty blind. No bird. No Chris. He had carried the thing across 20 acres to his truck. Must be he didn’t want it to get away.

When he pulls up with his truck, he has the biggest smile on his face and is bouncing around like Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh cartoon. His smile and excitement was contagious. I couldn’t stop grinning as I listened to him recall the tail of a bird coming in from the wrong direction. Aiming and knocking the bird down and upon retrieval, it jumping up and trying to run away. I am sitting here with a dopy grin recalling how excited he was.

By the way, this was his first tom turkey and it was a beautiful bird. I remember how awesome that feels and what kind of adrenaline rush it is to get something like that. It’s a major sense of a job well done. I love that feeling but I think being able to just share it meant more to me than it would have if I had shot the bird myself.

My friend Chris with his first tom turkey

I am so thankful that I got to be here and share the experience. It means more to me than words can describe. Being around Chris has shown me that there are so many things in life that I really enjoy doing and have let go of them to try to be something I’m not. I am a country girl who likes hunting with the “boys”, fishing, shooting, bow hunting, spending time in the woods, and I am an all around Outdoors Woman. I can’t change that. It’s stitched into the fiber of my being.

A word of advise to everyone: Don’t ever try to fit into a box someone else has built for you. It rarely fits and is suffocating. Break free, be yourself and someday the right one will come along and fully understand who YOU are, not what they want you to be. I am so fortunate to have awesome friends who are there for me and have supported me 110%, no matter what I have chosen to do or be. And friends like Chris, who know without saying, all the things that really make me the person I am and kick me in the butt when I try to be something different.

Sounds kind of strange doesn’t it? My 31 year old male friend kicking a 38 year old female’s ass into shape to be who she really is. Damn kids anyhow! All joking aside, he is special and it means so much that he has been my friend through one of the most difficult things in my life. For that, I will be forever grateful.

Now….time for me to do some fishing! Something I have done in three years! But time to get back to it…cause it’s just who I am!

You got it…that’s me from about 3 years ago! Bass fishing with a flyrod, earbuds in, rocking out the fishing experience!