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!" :)