Jammies

Tonight, Liam decided to wear fleece, footed pjs. The weather is relatively spring-like at the moment, so I asked Liam if he was sure he didn't want to wear some cooler pajamas. He answered, "No, I like these. They're snug."

Spring Break is Over

Okay, so the photo project isn't doing much, because a) it turns out there aren't as many old photos as I thought, and b) the weather hasn't been nice enough to get out and take new ones yet. There are only so many interesting photos that I can take inside our house. But spring is just around the corner! I can tell! Yeah, so we had a snowstorm a couple of nights ago, but still!

Here are a couple of shots from Spring break. There are more I'll get to, but these are the ones I started with. First up is a shot of Liam at Grandpa Phil's 60th birthday breakfast. It's a good shot because it captures perfectly Liam's response to having his photo taken, which is typically something like "NAAAAAAAHHHHHHHhhhhhhhh....."



The second is a great group shot of the boys with their cousins at...well, I don't know where this is, because I wasn't there. It appears to be Oz. Is it just me or are Tin Man and the Lion a little creepy looking?

As is clear in the photo, they're never all looking at the camera at once. Also, it looks like Liam might have a future as a professional tough-guy, maybe a bouncer or celebrity bodyguard.

It's An Off Week

I had hoped to get more new photos up by now, but the boys are off in KC on Spring Break vacation, and I don't have the new camera with me. But, I'm still working on retouching some of the older photos.

This is a fairly early photo we took of Liam, again at the botanical garden here in St. Louis. It's basically 50 acres of nothing but excellent photo opportunities. This photo is a little overexposed, as his clothes are almost washed out. Playing with the brightness helped a little bit, as did converting it to black and white. I like it because it's the only photo we took of him that day where he's actually looking at the camera.



This one I like just because the lighting and angle all worked out really well. There are a couple more where he's actually reading the books instead of throwing them around, even if he is reading them upside down.

Photo Project - March 10

This is one of my favorite photos of Logan, and it's not even a very good quality photo. This was taken back in 2004 in the middle of the English garden at the Missouri Botanical Garden down in Shaw Park. I love the composition and feeling of spring when I look at it, but it was taken with our first digital camera, and the overall quality of the photo itself is not that great. So, I used it as a guinea pig to explore some photo manipulation techniques. Added a vignette, and oversaturated the colors and contrast. I'm attempting to recreate a bit of a lomography effect, but given the source material (the photo is loaded with greens and blues, hardly any reds) the end result isn't quite what I'd like. But it's not too bad.



Interestingly, that day at the Botanical Garden really stands out in my memory. It was a perfect spring day, about 70 and ridiculously sunny. Logan was only about two and running around acres of garden for a couple of hours was still a source of wonder. I'm not sure he'd get the same enjoyment out of it now.

The Cobapple 2009 Photo Project

I've been thinking about ways to improve the frequency and content of this blog, since it appears you all are still coming here fairly frequently and we're not really doing much.  It also happens that we just got a new camera, a Nikon D40, thanks to Circuit City's bankruptcy and a sweet 30% off sale.  So I'm excited about exploring photography a little more in-depth, now that I have a DSLR camera that is quite a bit better than what we've been shooting with.

I'm also exploring my options for photo editing, since a lot of good photography these days is made in post-processing.  The perfect opportunity to use that lies in the thousands and thousands of photos we've shot over the last 7-8 years and hardly touched because we shoot a LOT of photos, dump them on the hard drive, and then forget about them.  So what I'm envisioning for the rest of the year is a combination of old, retouched photos that you may not have seen, plus new photos from the new camera.  Hopefully I can start to expand my photography skills and get away from the old standard bad-lighting, poor-focus, indoor snapshots of the boys.  

To get things kicked off, here are a couple of photos I took of Liam painting over the weekend.  I converted them to black and white to tone down a lot of the clashing colors in his pajamas, and to bring out the shape of his paintings instead of the primary colors.  I also experimented with a different shooting angle.  What do you think?

Updates Coming...

It's rather amusing that I believe we have updated the overall theme and color scheme of this blog about 3-4 times in the last two months, but not the actual content. I suspect readers would prefer the latter.

I have an idea for some upcoming photo content, so keep your eyes peeled...

(By the way honey, this green polka-dot thing is not doing it for me.)