Christmas Pictures

Christmas pictures of the girls.

Taken with our Nikon D-40 with the 55-200mm lens and SB-400 flash.

Elise's Date With Daddy

We got the idea of doing "Dates with Daddy" with our girls from Brad's parenting series. I haven't been the best at being consistent with these, but this past weekend Elise & I went on a date.

Ever since Labor Day when she saw the planes flying around with advertisements in tow, she's been asking to see "planes go fast". So we went to Lunken Airport. We couldn't find a great view there, so we headed up to Alms Park, which overlooks the airport.

Elise liked to wave at the planes and say hi to them. Apparently "Hi" in plane language is a high-pitched shriek.

In between yelling at planes, she enjoyed walking around, and I enjoyed taking pictures.

It was pretty, but not that pretty. (I made the sky a little bluer and the grass a little greener.)

After looking at planes we walked over to the park and she played on the playground.

After that we went to UDF for some ice cream, then headed home for a much-needed nap. I think Elise slept too.

Michigan: Part 3

While on the lake I had some fun with fire and long exposures.

We built a fire on the beach one night.

When you throw balsam branches on the fire, you get a lot of sparks.

Here's a shot of those sparks flying through the air.
1.6 second exposure

More flying sparks. Click on the picture to get a closer look and you can see large "ribbons" of light from some larger pieces of ash that flew from the fire.
1 second exposure

My brother waving a burning branch in the air. (don't blame him, I told him to do it)
5 second esposure

This is a shot of the dock illuminated by the fire. I used a tripod and did a 10 second exposure. I used automatic ISO so it was taken at ISO-560. I should have manually set it to 200 (the lowest setting on the D40) which would have resulted in less noise in the image.

Picture of the sky. Click on it to see the large version, and you'll be able to see the stars.
30 second exposure

Michigan: Part 2

Here are some pictures from our trip to Michigan.
I'll try not to post any that Katie's already posted.


This is the view of Wilderness Bay from the end of the dock.
You can see the Sheppard's dock that I mentioned in my last post.

The view of the bay from the base of our dock.

Thought this was a cool picture of the sun glistening across the water.

The american flag at the base of our dock.
This is an un-retouched photo. The sky really was that blue.

The sun setting across the bay.

Another shot of the sunset from the end of the dock.

The afterglow.

Michigan: Part 1

These are the Les Cheneaux Islands, where we went on vacation last week. It's a group of islands on Lake Huron in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, part of the towns of Hessel & Cedarville. I've been going up there since I was six months old (and lived there for a year and a half then). The biggest island is Marquette, which is where we stayed. If you look real close you'll see a white box drawn around part of the island - the next picture is a close-up of that area.

As you can see from the satellite images, there's not a lot of development on the island, which is really nice if you like natural stuff. There are no roads, just walking trails through the woods You may be able to make out a few lines running through the island that look like roads, but those are the clearings cut for the electrical power lines. Again, we're going to zoom into the liitle white box to have a closer look.

The only access is by boat, so most every cabin has a dock. In this picture you can see our cabin, named Foxfire after the glowing wood that can be found in the surrounding woods. In the upper left of the image is the Sheppard's dock & boathouse, which can be seen in a lot of the sunset pictures I'll post later. As a point of reference, the docks are roughly 400 ft apart. It this image you can also clearly see the distinct drop-off in the water. So that's the background info, soon I'll post some more interesting pictures.

Fun with Photoshop

About a year and a half ago, we took this cute picture of Elise sitting on our bed. When she got excited she would wave her arms about wildly and yell.


Although it was a pretty cute picture to begin with, I thought it could use a little something.

Pictures of the Kids

Last year, after having mixed results taking Elise to the portrait studio, we decided to buy a better camera and do photos ourselves. After using Kara & Ben's Nikon, we bought a Nikon D40 from B&H. We also got the Nikon SB-400 flash, both of which are absolutely wonderful. We've gotten a ton of great candid photos of the kids, but we also wanted to get some posed shots too.

So last week Katie & I went outside to take some pictures of the girls. It was a nice sunny day, and I had the flash one the camera to provide some fill light. We started out with Elise in the sun, until a helpful neighbor (who happened to be a professional photographer) suggested we put her in the shade. This turned out to be very good advice. Below is one of the pictures of Elise.

That's the original image as captured by the camera without any processing. Nice, but a little flat and washed out. Below is the same picture with the default processing by the camera. Better, but still leavs a little to be desired.

I shot the photos in RAW mode, which means the file is a .NEF instead of a .JPG. It's sort of like shooting on film and having access to the the negative - it has more detail than a print.
I opened the RAW file in Adobe Camera Raw, part of Photoshop. This gave me all kinds of tools for correcting exposure & white balance, boosting saturation, and adjusting individual colors. This let me do things like fix the blue ribbons on her dress that had previously been washed out. Anyway, below is the finished picture. Isn't she cute?

And here's a split of all three pictures:

Go Get Some Friends

Katie is working at Grace's VBS this week, so the girls will be spending the week in the nursery. Last night at dinner we were telling Elise about it, mentioning the fact that she would be spending a lot of time this week playing with other little boys & girls, which she refers to as: "Go get some friends."

Knowing that it would be a big day, we put her to bed early. Katie got stuff ready for the next morning and I did some work, and three hours later she still wasn't asleep - we could hear her in her room talking and singing and making noise. Katie got a sippie-cup of milk, hoping that would help her go to sleep. The moment I opened the door to go in and give it to her, out of the dark I hear her tiny, excited and very awake little voice: "Go get some friends?" Like a kid on Christmas morning, at 10pm she was hoping it was time to get up and play with friends.

Tickle, Tickle.

"Evie likes a tickle from Elise"

Building a Playhouse

Some of you may remember Katie's post a few months ago about our search for a playhouse, then finally buying one, but now you finally get to see the construction process. As a video geek, I of course insisted that we document the entire process, and our camcorder (a Sony DCR-HC90 for the other video geeks out there) has a very nice time lapse function.

You'll notice that we were almost done with the roof when we stopped for the night, then there's a slight pause before the video resumes. That's because we realized that we were putting the roof on upside down, and at that point it was about 11:30pm so we decided to stop and finish it the next evening.

For those of you interested in the Woodridge Playhouse Leisure Time Products (Item #1150), it was fairly easy to assemble, and the instructions were actually fairly good. The materials seem to be of fairly decent quality, so hopefully it will hold up for quite a while.