South Carolina - AKC Retreat Day One

As I dumped the contents of my purse on my desk to get things organized again, a flurry of business cards poured out of my purse. It made me smile. It was a reminder that I had just gotten home from a business trip. As I mentioned on my previous post, last Monday I headed to South Carolina for a week long photography trip with 8 other photographers from across the U.S. This was a super fun experience as most of us only knew each other from the internet.
Now who starts their business trip with a morning stroll on the beach? These snapshots are from Joanna's point and shoot camera:

Later that day we got all serious and headed to downtown Charleston for some picture taking.

The girls taking care of business (or maybe they were twittering about how much fun we were having).

Yes, all three of them had the same shootsac cover! Jessica Claire would be proud

It was so good to see Trina again! We met last year in Ireland during Melissa Jill's Zero to 60 Workshop.
I think Joanna snapped this photo of Lisette and I. Lisette was my roommate for the week and I had sooo much fun with her. It's not always easy to share a bed with someone you've never met before but within a few hours of being there I felt like we had been friends for years and we have so much in common.

This is Shea. Can't you just tell how awesome she is?! She is just one of those rare people that has it all together. I know from the photo you can tell that she's beautiful, has some serious style going on and you can maybe even tell how much fun she is. But, she also has the most easy-going personality and is incredibly generous. Not to mention, she brought along 3 very cool film cameras for everyone to play with.

So I had this vision of a really cheesy photo, beauty pageant style of all of us with cheesy smiles all the way up the stairs. Unfortunately the other girls were already ahead of us on the way to dinner, so you get half the group - super cheese style:

When we were walking around downtown we came across a couple in the midst of their engagement session. We had the brilliant idea to act like papparazi so their photographer could capture it as part of their engagement photos. Thanks to Amelia, we have some photos of us in action.

And some photos I got of the cute couple:

We had a great dinner at a super charming place called 82 Queen - which happens to be the address of the restaurant as well. I tried grits and fried green tomatoes for the first time. After dinner we went to a rooftop bar with a great view of the city. A really great first day.