Sunni Days

Little Cherub

I have been using my 50mm lens more when I shoot with my DSLR. The results are always interesting since they usually are with natural light only. They tend to have softer, more ethereal look to them. I probably should take more time to actually learn more about my camera rather than my hit and miss method. For now, it works for me although I do get frustrated when what I "expect" to happen doesn't happen. I have been downloading the photography course pdfs from Two Peas in a Bucket the last few weeks. Hopefully when I catch up on a few of my current projects, I'll find the time to go through them and try out the different tutorials to see what kind of results I get with my camera.

I used one of Misty Cato's Summer's End brag book pages (from SBE, of course) for one of my most favorite photos of Hayden. He not only looks so angelic, but he also looks so sweetly chubby! Love those baby rolls! This photo was taken just a couple of days before he was 6 months old.

History in the Making

On our recent trip to Las Vegas we were able to note the changes that are happening in the construction of the Hoover Dam Bypass. The dam itself is a monument to modern engineering. Adding a bridge over the chasm of the Colorado River is another amazing feat. Originally scheduled to be completed next year, the time table has been pushed back to 2010 because of problems with the 2 crane towers collapsing during high winds.

I used a couple of Christine Nash's Color Blocking Templates to do 2 facing layouts. I used Painted Desert by Jeri Ingalls. Every time I do any southwest area travel type of layouts I always end up with one of Jeri's sets. She just has captured the look and feel of the desert areas in her sets and I never can find anything better!

Viva Las Vegas!!

Ahhh the glitter of the lights of Vegas! We were there last week and out of the photos I took from the back seat of a moving car, I picked my favorites to do a couple of layouts. I have been burning to use Berna Datema's totally fun set called Best of Bollywood and finally had the right photos to use it! I took liberties with a couple of Alma's templates to create the pages. I had a lot of fun creating these 2 layouts!

I have been to Las Vegas so many times in my life that it becomes "old hat". I am finding a new excitement about the city though with the ability to take some fun photos of the things there. As we were having lunch at Cozymel's (a pretty good Mexican restaurant in Vegas that we discovered on our last trip there), I was reminiscing about the changes in Vegas over the many years that I have been going there since I turned 21. Living only about 400 miles away, I have made the trip more times than I want to remember! Many casinos and hotels are gone now, some replaced by new versions of the same and others gone completely. The photos we take of our family and friends are important in our lives but I think to create a complete history of our lives, we need to include the sights that are in our lives..even if we think they are every day things and will always be there. Time has a way of changing things in subtle ways and those sometimes are things we will can never see again but have a place in our history.

Another Las Vegas Pic

After sorting through my latest Las Vegas pics, I really didn't have that many that were decent. So I thought I would go ahead and post the other one that was my favorite that I caught from a moving car. As I find the time, I need to still download the ones I took at the Hoover Dam on our return trip. They are creating a dam bypass that is currently under construction that made for a pretty spectacular sight that I wanted to record. In the meantime..here's Lady Liberty in front of New York New York.

Natural Decorations

We have 3 heavenly bamboo bushes outside the corner of our living room, a portion of one being visible through one of the windows. These bushes have clusters of red berries in time for Christmas and make the bushes look quite festive and decorated for the holidays. I tried to create a layout using various sets and nothing seemed to work. The colors were wrong, the pattern was competing, and on and on. So I decided to let the photo take the center stage and just add an area of black to do a bit of journaling and and add an accent. I also used Terry' Maruca's Page Clips Corners because they just seemed to dress up the page and pull it all together. They really are a neat idea! Terry has really been hitting on all creative cylinders lately and has come up with some awesome new things! The embroidered embellishments comes from Ake Pangestuti's It's Party Time Doodles & Buttons set.

Christmas Decorations

My 50mm lens that was a Christmas gift arrived the day after Christmas. So one of the first things I tried it on was the Christmas decorations that were around our home. Every home has a different look at Christmas as we all have different decorations that we display as part of the holiday ambiance. Even our Christmas trees vary greatly in the way we decorate them to get the "just right" effect.

As I get older, I realize how much these things are a part of who we are and are something that should be recorded. I came across some old sheet music that I had purchased when I was in junior high or high school and was playing the piano. I also have a book of Christmas carols that I have enjoyed over the years and it has a very "period" cover on it. It's hard to think of the things that I had when I was a teenager as vintage though but I guess it just is so.

Credits for the layouts: Christmas Blessings Page Set by Christina Bartholomew, Jiffy Stax Vol. 6 by Rina Kroes, Jiffy Stax Vol. 3 by Rina Kroes

Winter Berries

My desk sits in the corner next to a window on an outer corner of our house. Just outside the window on each side of the corner are a couple of tall bushes called Heavenly Bamboo. Each summer there are clusters of very small white flowers. These turn into green berries after the flowers drop off. Just in time for Christmas each year these berries are nice clusters of red berries that look very festive. I thought since they are a part of my every day since I can see part of this bush from the window next to my desk that they deserved a special photo..and may as time as warrants to be included in a layout at some point.

Welcome to 2007

The first day of 2007 and things are good. We took a little drive last night to see some of the Christmas lights that we hadn't had a chance to see yet. The night before we had a very nice dinner at Black Angus and decided to stop at a local Mexican restaurant for dinner last night while we were out. We returned home to spend the rest of a quiet evening here. We had a nice fire going all evening and I thought it was a good chance to play a bit with my new lens. Minnie was sitting on the floor in front of the fireplace and this is probably one of the best shots I got of her bathed in the firelight. It's not that great of a shot since much of it is out of focus but her little face is pretty much in focus and I love the pose with her in the firelight. It still is a real experiment to figure out how to set the camera settings to get anything decent and I am learning that you have to be further away from your subject to get a picture that the entire subject is in focus. Thank goodness for digital! I would either go broke if it were film or never practice with it at all.

We spent time today with our daughter and her husband. We played Price is Right and Clue DVD games. It was fun and each of them won one of the Clue games.  I imagine it may have been the only Clue game Sean will ever win so I hope he is able to enjoy it for a while. :) It was a very pleasant way to start out the new year.

Baby, It's Cold Outside!

Well, it's cold for us at least! Our heater actually was running all morning and even early afternoon. The sky was overcast and we had some light rain on and off throughout the early afternoon. It's cold and crisp outside right now..only low 40s now at 7pm but for Phoenix, that's pretty chilly. I don't think we'll have a hope of a White Christmas though! Today was in the mid 50s but it's expected to be in the 60s again for Christmas Day.

Here's some great tips for taking photographs on Christmas or any other time.

16 Digital Photography Tips for Christmas

Christmas Decorations

I took a bit of time tonight to do a little playing with my camera. Using the tripod, I did some shots using the manual and aperture priority settings. It was interesting to see the result when I pulled them off the card. I used the 2 second timer setting so there was no movement so they are really pretty clear although they are also fairly grainy as I had set the ISO to 800 and 1600 to test it that way. Both manual and aperture priority used a setting to 5.6 which is the lowest my lens will go. I also tried a few shots with the telephoto from across the room. All of them still seem rather dark out of the camera and I didn't seem to capture that star effect to the lights that many people get. I might need to actually look at some directions to figure this thing out! Since I see that the exposure time on the dark ones is 1/20 sec. and the brighter ones is 1/3 second, I think I need to figure out how to set the shutter speed in manual mode. The aperture priority setting sets it automatically. I have a fabulous guide I purchased a while back but it's still sitting on my hard drive about 1/10th read at this point. However, I did end up with a couple of shots that I really liked. I had the tripod much closer to the tree so much more light got in. In fact my last shot really was bright..it actually seemed to have a colorful mardi gras look to it that was really funky. This was the shot that I liked the best out of my experiments tonight. I sure have a LOT to learn.