Christmas

We had an awesome Christmas. It started with a wonderful Christmas Eve service at church and then led in to two days of the most relaxing fun we've had as a family in recent memory. A few pictures:

Beautiful table setting at my aunt's house. Her house had such a cozy vibe with a real Christmas tree too!

Moira with our cousin Sarah, a senior at Webster University.

"Mom, I got the BEST gift ever!!! A Toys R Us gift card!" LOL

So excited for Santa!!!

She loves her new baby doll!

Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and has a blessed New Year!

F stop and Holiday trains

F stop is how wide open your lens is. When it's wide open, you let a lot of light in, but it also only allows for a fairly shallow area of focus in the picture. Compared to shutter speed and ISO, F stop seems to be the most complex of the settings. A small adjustment can make a big diff in how the pic looks.

Today we went to the Missouri Botanical Gardens annual holiday train display. This has become a tradition for my family and this year I was particularly excited to bring my camera along and try out my skills. It ended up being way more difficult that I imagined. It is an inside exhibit but there are huge windows so the light was all over the place (meaning it was really dark in some parts but really light in others) so some of my pictures ended up way over exposed. And I also sped my shutter speed way up to try tp catch the moving trains. I did a fairly good job w/ this and I'm pretty proud of myself for that :)

Train looks good here, but way too much light.

I love the colors they used this year. And the flowers as always were gorgeous.

No clue what I was trying to capture in this one. Too much going on, too much light, it's like Christmas overload.

This is the only pic I got of the boys together. When we first got there I thought, I should bring them here every year to take a Christmas card pic (which I'm not even doing this year since life is so crazy). About 10 minutes into the visit it became obvious that I'd be lucky to even get one picture of them together. Josh was too busy chasing some random kid around and Ethan wanted to finish searching for all of the hidden items in the scenes first. And some of them were extremely well hidden this year!

So for the rest of the pictures I stuck with subjects that stayed still and didn't fight with their brother...



A few thoughts

I've been practicing alot (more than I thought I would have time for actually) and I am getting more comfortable with my camera. However, I do have a few things to share related to what I've experienced/learned the past week or so.
1) Natural light is way better than artificial light.
2) Right now daylight is scarce.
3) When it's cloudy, grey and dreary, there's hardly enough light, especially when you are indoors taking pictures by windows (because it's too cold to be outside w/kids).
In summary, I'm looking forward to taking pictures in SPRING!!!
Oh, and something else that's been an unexpected side effect of all of this picture-taking: I'm getting really critical of pictures I see i.e. pictures I spent lots of $$ on from a "professional" portrait studio aren't actually very good. Like the focus is off, weird shadows, etc. Am I becoming a picture-snob??? I hope so, LOL!
Here are a bunch of random pics that I've taken and I don't have much specifically to say about them except they are the best of a HUGE amount that I've taken. Be glad I'm not showing you all of the bad ones. And thank goodness there's a delete button...

Yeah, she's showing that pig who's boss!

This one's funny b/c it looks like she's telling Josh something like, "what's the deal with that guy over there...yeah, the one who's always screaming and throwing stuff..."

Ethan "teaching" Moira how to use the iPhone.

My favorite picture! It seriously took me 100 tries to get this shot. This photography stuff is tougher than it looks!

Moira with my aunt Pris.

Keep your fingers crossed for a sunny day!

Ethan and Josh Nov 26 2011

Josh: I wonder why it's so cold at Christmastime?
Ethan: Because that's the way God wanted to do it.

Thankful

We had a great Thanksgiving. And I got in lots and lots of practice taking pictures! Here are some of my favorites from the day:

This is my mom's table before the Thanksgiving feast. She does such a great job and her table was beautiful as always.

She also had this great idea of putting a bunch of branches in a vase to look like a tree and made various "ornaments" out of scrapbooking paper, stickers and twine. On one of the ornaments she made a pocket for us to put small pieces of paper listing what we were thankful for (yes, one of the items was my camera!).

This is the bottom part of the same "Thankful Tree". So cool!

The boys also made their gingerbread houses on Thanksgiving. They had a great time, although Ethan's house was already demolished by the evening. It's just so hard to resist all of that candy! Hope everyone's Thanksgiving was wonderful!

Lazy Day!

I've been so busy being busy, that I didn't realize we had absolutely nothing to do today. No work. No school. No choir. Just hanging out in our PJ's all day. What a gift! Of course that meant time to take some pictures. Here are a few of my favorites:

He is so sweet with her. I love when he focuses on her and makes sure she's doing OK.

This is pretty typical. Josh is trying to focus and E is going crazy.

Love that sweet face. And she's wearing my fave Alice in Wonderland PJ's.
Hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!

The Black Dog

There's a sweet black dog that comes around our backyard every so often and appeared yesterday and ran around for a little while. Ethan saw the dog out the window and said, "I think that dog wants to OWN US!" :)

Staying Up Late

Josh went with his Sunday School class to the City Streets Shelter and to the Humane Society on Sunday (thanks Tara, Angie, Allison and Rachael for the experience!). Per Angie, Josh wanted to know when the people arrived at the shelter and what they did. He was also very curious about when they went to bed. They told him that they could go to sleep when they wanted. So, he wanted to know if he could come and stay there sometime. Imagine being able to go to bed whenever you want! :)

Lesson Learned

I am really proud of myself for taking pictures each day since the class. Even tonight when I have a million loads of laundry to fold, I made sure to take some time to work with my camera. I don't have any pictures to show you tonight because mostly what I did was take random pictures inside the house but practiced trying to memorize where the buttons/settings were without looking. Including moving the focus point around the screen without looking, which is the hardest part for me. Now I'm heading off to fold laundry and hopefully go to bed soon. Looking forward to taking pics of the kids and family this week!

White Sheet Cake

Yesterday when I was talking with Kim during my class, she was talking about the light meter on the camera and how it actually worked, as far as reading the greyscale of the focus point. Sometimes, depending on the color of what you are focusing on, the meter might read lighter/darker, even though the real amount of light in the pciture is different. Confused yet? Let me show you an example:

So, when I had my focus point on the tire (really black) the light meter kept telling me it was too dark. But guess, what? When I adjusted to allow more light, the picture looked overexposed.

Obviously focusing on something really light will give the opposite effect. So let me show you what I challenged myself with for today: a White Sheet Cake (from a Farewell Celebration for my friend Pamela, a priest who is leaving my church to be the new rector at a different church).

So the thing about the white sheet cake is when you look at the light meter, it says there's too much light because the meter is reading the level of grey (or lack thereof) at the focus point (on the white cake). So, when I adjusted my settings the pictures were still kinda dark. I finally got the hang of it and ended up with a fairly good picture (I honestly can't tell you which one I thought was the good picture b/c I took about 100 pictures of the cake). But I'm including the two pics above to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. As Kim said, you can start with the light meter, but you also have to trust your gut and go with what your eyes are telling you too.

Josh is a great kid

Got the sweetest note from a mom of a classmate/friend of Josh's yesterday. She told me how much she appreciated Josh being a good friend to her son and what a great kid he is. I agree!

More Smiles to Come

So I took a photography class today. I got a new camera for my bday a few weeks ago and I really had no idea what I was doing. Seriously I was impressed with myself for realizing that holding the button halfway down autofocuses it.

SO,  this class was great. Really great. It was taught by Jodie and Kim of Fresh Art Photography. And during the class they mentioned that one of their students blogged her whole experience of learning to take pictures and documenting her practice. And that's what I'd like to do here. I don't think anyone ever reads this thing, but at least it's a place to track my progress and keep myself honest. Hopefully I'll have some pictures up here in the next day or so, and maybe some of those will be smiles from my kids.

Ethan after preschool at KECC in August 2011

Ethan had a picture in his cubby that said "Ethan" and "Emma". Ethan said, "That's Emma's! Why was it in my cubby? I think she loves me! Or maybe she just put it in the wrong cubby..."

Moira's birth

-The sound of the bassinet (the wheels on the tile crossing the threshhold) coming back from the nursery during the night when she was hungry and she was all bundled up with that tiny sweet little face.
-Josh and Ethan giving Moira a new hat and pacifier toy when the came to visit her the first time.

May 2005

I came back late at night from a trip to Las Vegas for my cousin's wedding. In the morning when Josh woke up, Scot brought him in to the bedroom and Josh gave me the biggest smile and longest, most awesome hug I've ever gotten.

Ethan Spring 2010

I came home from church and Ethan matter-of-factly told me that there was an angel on my shoulder and it had  been there since I came home. A year or so later, he told me that the angel was blue.

Ethan's "Other Mother"

From before age 2, Ethan would point at the same house in Webster Groves and tell us that's where his other mother lived.

Josh 7/28/11

The next door neighbors were getting a new roof on one of the hottest days of the summer. When Josh got home from Boy Scout camp he said, "Wow! Their roof looks great!" And then gave the roofers a double thumbs up :)

Josh ~age 2

Josh kept saying (what we thought we heard) Medicator. What he was really saying: Mail Carrier.

Ethan 7/4/2011

Tim and Jessica brought Oreos as a baby gift. Tricia told Ethan he could eat the Oreos in the kitchen, but not in Moira's room. As he was heading to the kitchen he responded, "Awkward!"

Ethan 7/2/2011

On the way home from the hospital with our new baby, Moira, Ethan said he knew what Moira would say about her new room. He said, "She'll say, 'My new room is so adorable'". *Using his best baby girl voice*

Josh Spring 2011 to his unborn sister

Josh (age 7) wanted to talk to his unborn sister, Moira. He told her to 1) Make sure you listen 2) Make sure you love mom and 3) Always believe in God.

Ethan 7/24/11

Ethan (age 4) and I were walking up to bed and he was kind of hobbling along and looked like his leg hurt. I asked him what was wrong and he said, "I'm just an old man...from an old town"