Confession Explosion | Personal | Manhattan, KS | Rose Wheat Photography

It's confession time (apparently). Something about watching bombs explode in front of my face for entertainment has me feeling more open about things. 

So, here we go, and I hope we're still friends afterwards.

1. On Wednesday, July 3rd, I went to bed expecting this year's fourth of July to be freaking awesome.

2. That same night I tie-dyed shirts in the most patriotic way I knew how. Find the evidence below.

3. Additionally, I was ready to party (like all day), so appropriately I listened to MGMT for most of the day. Duh.

Scroll down for more confessions.

 4. I ate my fill of hamburgers, hot dogs, watermelon, and American pride. Oh yeah. You better believe that's what I had for lunch. AND dinner.

 5. Thursday afternoon I drove to Target and bought a tripod just so I could photograph fireworks this year. Driving to the fireworks display, I looked up a tutorial on my phone for photographing fireworks. It was procrastination and artfulness at their finest, and I've never been prouder of myself.

Most years, I'm all "meh" when it comes to holiday photos. You know what I mean right? The photos that I'll look back on when I have children and be all "yeah that was me." The proof that I existed, not just the people around me. Yeah, I'm normally blasé blasé about the whole thing.

"I'll just do it on a cell phone," I thought. Who doesn't like a good vintage filter right? It's automatically grainy, simply because it was taken on a cell phone. Total perk.

"No, I'll bring my big girl camera and take pictures of everyone having fun." It's just prettier. And heavier. But prettier. But I guess I did do my hair and tie-dye a t-shirt... AND put on make-up (with liquid eyeliner to boot). That's a lot of work for it not to be adequately documented.

Before I left the barn (did you know I live in a barn?) Thursday, I had grabbed three different lenses (only used two), a fully charged battery, and a freshly formatted memory card. 2 crash courses in "this is how you use my camera," 14 hours of running around, and 90 workable images later---and I had thoroughly documented a holiday while also including myself. This was monumental (seriously, I think Mt. Rushmore took less effort).

After dusting myself off (which I needed after the EPIC fireworks display in Wamego) (no really, there were firework chunks on me), I slept hard. Holiday hard. I experienced Christmas-morning joy at the prospect of seeing fireworks and enjoyed every last second of it. This holiday was freaking awesome, just as I had set out for it to be.

Amidst a like... super busy month of work, picking up my camera to document my favorite moments was so worth it. I'm excited to share more of my life with you soon! So thanks for listening today, and I hope we're still friends. :)