Birthday Pics

Some photos from Liam's birthday yesterday. My learning with the camera continues. I got some good shots yesterday, but almost all of them have a pretty heavy warm orange cast to them, and somewhere along the line I seem to have deactivated the auto flash option on the camera. I'm getting better at understanding what the camera settings do, just not so good at actually USING them. Still, nothing a little post-processing can't fix.

It's tough to catch in a photo, but the Hungry Hungry Hippos action was fast and furious.

Liam's prolonged "I Won Hungry Hungry Hippos Happy Dance"

His 'cake' was actually one ginormous chocolate chip cookie.

Liam is FOUR!

In honor of our sweet little boy's fourth birthday, here are four of my favorite pictures of him (and you realize that it is an impossible task to select only four pictures, but I did it somehow).

And I'll include a couple of great recent comments from Liam as well:

Mom, when I grow up, I’m going to be a football player. And when I next grow up, I’m going to be a baseball player. And when I third grow up, I’m going to be a soccer player.

Wow! How many times are you going to grow up?

Four.

* * * * *

Mom, when Dad took us to get donuts, I got a Papa John Long with sprinkles, and Logan got a Papa John Long with sprinkles.

Happy Birthday, Liam! We love you!

Baby Love: Liam's Affection for Cousin Carter

While I was looking at the updated photos of my nephew on Lisa's blog, Liam came over to take a peek...

"Oh, this is Carter! I just LOVE Carter!"

The Rocketeers

Finally, FINALLY, the weather has been a)warm and b)sunny enough to get outside with the camera and do some shooting. The boys and I spent a good portion of yesterday outside braving the wind to have some fun with Logan's rocket launch pad. Thanks to the Lennings for this entirely awesome birthday present for Logan, with which we were able to clear the huge locust tree in the back. You step/stomp/sit heavily on a rubber airbag to send the rocket skyward, and the boys had great fun trying to jump on it as hard as they could and see how high the rockets would go. With a little more space and a little less restraint, I'm thinking that FAA or NASA notification may be needed for future flights.

At any rate, the photos turned out fairly well. I've been experimenting with fast f-stops and fairly shallow depths of field, mostly because it tends to blur and de-emphasize the backgrounds which, let's face it, tend to be a lot of subdivision goings-on which aren't always the best backdrop. Unfortunately, using a fast f-stop with auto-focus means that the thing you're trying to get sharp and in-focus isn't always what the camera thinks, so sometimes I get a shot of a fuzzy Liam and a nice, crisp sidewalk in the background. I need to get a little better with the manual focus, I think.






Those fuzzy white blobs in this shot are actually very close and out-of-focus flower petals from the pear trees in the yard.



I think that at some point I'm probably just going to have to take the camera outside with the manual and a couple of hours to kill and work through all of the options. It's a vast improvement over our last camera but I know that I'm still not getting the full potential out of it.