Think way back, back to February. In February I won a giveaway. It was kinda funny because I enter a fair amount of giveaways. Not to the point where I seek these contests out or anything, but if I follow a person or a blog consistently, I enter many of their giveaways (if it's not spam). It's one click. Why not?! ...but I never win.

Well, guess what?! I won!!!

I'm a big fan of

Chase Jarvis

. I so admire his (perceived) fearlessness and tenacity. I mean, this guy knows how to dream big and get shit done. Anyway, one day, I saw that he tweeted me. It said that I won his giveaway for a "dream camera kit". Cue the skies parting and the hallelujah chorus.

So what exactly did I win you are all asking? Chase Jarvis paired up with

BorrowedLenses

to put together a 30-day free rental of one amazing camera body and 5 equally amazing lenses. Seriously!! It really was 30 days of awesome! Buying gear is crazy expensive, but renting gear isn't cheap either, especially this kind of quality gear. A few of these lenses I rent regularly, so I was familiar with how to use them, but there were two that I hadn't even touched yet. It was an opportunity that I quickly decided to take FULL advantage of.

Incase all you gear heads are chomping at the bit, here is a list of the insanely awesome Canon gear that I was able to play with for a month:

5d Miii camera body

16-35 2.8 L II

24-70 2.8L II

85mm f1.2L II

70-200 2.8L II

200-400 f4L Extender1.4x

I wanted to use this as an opportunity for a short glimpse into my future life. I gave myself some time so that I could use all the gear during peek wedding season, but also to plan and set up some projects that have been bobbling around in my head for a while (more on MeetPDX another time). It really was just the kick in the pants that I needed.

Take this long story as an intro into

30 Days of Awesomeness

(...it was actually 32 because I'm sneaky and chose to have my 30th day fall on a weekend so I couldn't possibly ship it all back until Monday). As part of this month long adventure, I wanted to make sure that I did something to use the gear everyday, so I decided to shoot, edit, and post at least one photo a day for the whole time I had the gear. Obviously most days I took many more than one photo, but for the purposes of not overloading my audience, I will just use one per day.

If you follow me on Facebook, you have already seen all of these photos, and if you don't, take a moment to click on that "f" in the upper right hand corner of the blog and go like my page so you don't miss out on more fun photo projects like this (shameless plug).

And now, without further ado, here are the first 16 days of my

30

32 Days of Awesomeness

. Since I was focusing a lot of my attention on exploring all of the gear, I also posted a brief description of the image and how the image was shot below each image.

Day

description

camera body, camera lens

focal length, ISO, shutter speed, aperture

flash (if used)