If there is anything we can learn from our children, it is that perspective makes a world of difference. Isn’t it amazing how different a given situation can appear between observing it from the outside and actually experiencing it? This concept has taken on a new level of application in our household with the adoption of our youngest child’s “Happy Face”.

This representation of jubilation is quite accurately portrayed in the picture above, but it typically comes only after a prompting of, “Where is your Happy Face?” Interestingly enough, the perspective of which I speak is well suited to this very expression of joy. You see, as a two year old, she has not yet come to grips with the fact that simply announcing her happiness or pasting a smile on her face does not convince mom and dad that she is indeed happy.
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While the post may be a little delayed in coming, the sentiment is still the same. What reminds us of those things for which we have to be thankful more than spending time with friends and family? Over the holiday weekend, my family was blessed to have been inundated with friends and family – and more turkey than one should eat in a year. On Thursday, after a rather hectic morning I won’t get into at this time, we had the privilege of spending the afternoon and evening at our pastor’s house with several other families from the church. We ate, talked, laughed, ate, played some games and ate some more. All in all, it was your typical Thanksgiving day, but this was only the start to our weekend.
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So, this week, I decided to get an updated portrait of each of our kids, and I was pretty pleased with how they came out. I’ve been reading on a few more techniques to clean up images and make portraits more appealing, so here’s what I’ve come up with this go around. One of the reasons I like these so much is that each really seems to show the personality of the child:

Sarah is the sweet, tenderhearted one of the crew

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Well, it has been far too long since I was comfortably seated behind this desk, writing periodic updates to the site. I suppose that one could classify this post as still fitting the “periodic” tag, though somewhat extended in definition. Suffice to say that it is good to be writing a short blurb once again, and I thought it only fitting to write regarding the past several weeks of absence.

Seldom is absence by choice, and this is no exception to that rule. Work began getting a bit hectic, causing me to lack the time needed to play with some of my AS3 projects, and then I had a 2 week business trip. During the second week of my trip, my wife’s grandfather passed away, so I returned home for a single night before heading out once again – this time towards Alberta, CA. Our family spent the next week traveling through BC and AB, attending his funeral and visiting with family before finally arriving back home. That arrival was a mere two days ago.
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OK, so I’m posting some pictures after all. These pictures of my youngest, taken the other day, turned out so well, I had to share them. She absolutely loves the water, and this bath time was no exception. Ever the ham, she poured it on when the camera came out, and though she’s getting a little big for the sink, she definitely had a grand time splashing about:

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Well, I suppose one might say this is long overdue — after all, I am a web developer, right? No matter how much work I’m able to get done, I seldom have time to actually add to my personal sites, so when I found out just how easily zenPhoto could be added to my site, I jumped. In a matter of an hour (give or take), I had this new section up and running, primed with many of the photos I’ve had sitting around just waiting to be posted somewhere. Needless to say, I won’t have to blog as many of my pictures anymore, since I’ll be able to link directly to their galleries now. So, when you have a moment, follow the link at the top of this page, or just go here to see the new gallery. As time allows, I will be working on a theme for both the blog and photo gallery that is more uniform and unique — but who knows when that will actually be completed…

Enjoy!

While flash photography to some may simply be that which causes red-eye, I have been trying to read and learn some of the nuances of lighting and flash usage in my pictures. My biggest difficulty has been the lack of a “real” flash, but I am happy to say that I was able to get one for my birthday over the weekend. The Nikkon SB-600 Speedlight is pretty much the base model in good flashes for my D90, and I’ve been waiting to find a good sale. Pricing doesn’t vary much on them, apparently, so I jumped on the chance to get one from the Circuit City liquidation pricing at almost half off retail.

As with so many other things in life, I had seen and understood a part of the difference a good flash can make, but until you actually use one, it’s hard to really grasp the significant difference in the shots. I thought I would share my first comparison with you. Keep in mind that one of the biggest differences (besides the obvious brightness difference) between using the on-board flash and the hot shoe one is the ability to be able to direct the light and reflect it off different surfaces to keep from the harsh direct lighting typical to home photography. The following two photos show this poignant difference illustrated.
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Well, once again the holiday season brings an extra measure of business to our family with two of our children celebrating birthdays during the month of December. Our youngest celebrated her first birthday on Sunday, so it was an even more special occasion than the traditional birthday party, and our son turned four today. We had the combined party for their friends last week and had 50 (yes, you read right: 50) guests at the house, and this week we did the individual parties and family gifts for them.

A new thing this year is that I am going to try to get a good birthday portrait of them myself instead of spending the money to have it done. I got one of my son yesterday that I am very pleased with, and while I have yet to get one of my daughter, I thought I would at least share one from her birthday so those who know us can see how much she has grown.
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Those of you who either know me or have ready my previous photography blog entries know that I have recently purchased a very nice DSLR camera. After using this camera for about three weeks, I began noticing some issues that were somewhat disconcerting. I realized that from time to time, I would fire up the camera, frame my shot, focus and listen to the camera and lens make a strange clicking and whirring sound, almost as if the gears of the body and lens weren’t focusing properly. Then, when I would shoot the picture, the camera would error out on me (yes, I mean actually blank out the user display panel with -Err- and screech at me), and I would have to shut everything down, remount the battery to get things to fully reset and fire it back up again.

After this type of treatment, things would usually go back into place and work for a while, so I didn’t think much of the issue, but when you spend this much on a tool, you don’t want to have to “make do” with it. So, when a friend informed me that another retail store had the exact same camera kit I had purchased with an added 75-200mm lens and a bag to boot for only $100 more, I saw my signal to return the one that was having a few issues and try again. Since I was still well within my 60 day return time, I simply took the kit back to the store and purchased the nicer kit from the other store, and boy, am I ever glad that I did.
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So, I’ve been struggling with getting my laptop (a custom Dell Inspiron 9400) to read my new SDHC card that I picked up for my camera. It’s nothing fancy: just a 4GB SanDisk card. During my fitful attempts and multiple reboots, I seemed to recall a friend having the same issue with her computer reading her new card as well. I thought that surely since she was using an older reader and I had a fairly new integrated reader that I wouldn’t run into the same issue. After spending a good bit of time researching and looking for firmware updates for my reader, I began to get hints that it may not be the reader itself at all, but rather it was good ol’ Microsoft Windows XP Pro rearing it’s incompatibility head again.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of MS, and I don’t know what I would do without them, but when my system doesn’t support what seems to be a common thing, I get a bit testy. Thankfully, though, this story has an ending — and a solution — that was both complete and easy. If you follow this link, you will find a Microsoft hotfix just waiting to be installed. Apparently, typical card readers simply care about the physical size of the card and rely on the OS to interpret the file structure and formatting of the data, so I suppose it makes sense that the OS has to be upgraded in order to read the larger cards.

Hope this fix will help a few others out there as well!