This is a card Joey and I worked on for his teacher. He picked out the striped print for the suit. I looked at a few templates online and then drew and cut the pieces out. Joey used double sided tape to put him together and then decorated the inside and back of the card plus the envelope using some rubber stamps and ink and some markers.
Another shot from the tree in the fog location. This time a close-up of the tree with the swing. Processed the same as the original wider angle view shot.
Here is an alternate processing. Both done with Color Efex Pro.
Each day on the way to and from the boys' school, I admire these trees. With a pretty heavy fog yesterday afternoon, it seemed like the right day to finally stop and take some pics of them. I love the swing on the rightmost tree. How classic. I've enhanced the details and contrast and then applied a B&W conversion. I hope in the next few days to catch a sunset behind the trees. This shot is looking west!
The boys, Donnie, and I went to the Museum of Life and Science in Durham. Joey just couldn't wait any longer to see Steve Gerberich's Springs, Sprockets, and Pulleys exhibit which is on display through February 23rd. Steve has installed an exhibit at the museum many times before around the holiday, and we've had the pleasure over the years of seeing several of those too. Here is a link to a gallery with photos of his 2009 exhibit and link to a gallery with photos from his 2011 exhibit.
My daily photo is a collage of a group of musicians. The violin player is on the right. I could just kick myself for not thinking V and getting a better shot of him! However, the whole group and head shots that I got are pretty fascinating anyway.
My favorite part of the exhibit was The Time Machine.
We entered Johnny's Halloween robot costume in a contest that they have going on right now to win a workshop with Steve. We sure hope we win. We went to one of his paid for workshops several years ago and made interesting flying creatures that you could pull the strings and make the wings flap. It was a lot of fun!
The elf tradition continues in our home this year. Some of you may remember that we have quite a large collection of elves and that during the month of December the elves report back to the North Pole each night therefore upon their return end up in a new location in the house. This year, one elf each night moves to the kitchen table and leaves some sort of helpful note. The boys are mostly pleased with this change, but there are a few requests for all the elves to spin to new locations one night. Maybe on Christmas;-)
We had the pleasure of watching Joey perform at his school on Tuesday night after a PTA meeting. The theme of the production was Way Out West, and the kids sang a series of songs about America's westward expansion including Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea.
Here is a collage showing several pictures I took during the performance.
Joey is also an AM Panther Ambassador for the next three weeks. That means he wears a safety vest and stands to greet kids in the carpool drop-off line. There are 6 spots for drop-off, Panther Paw, and they usually have 4 kids and 2 teachers out there. There is another group of kids that do PM. Johnny and I have to go through the line while he's out there, and we were lucky enough to get him Thursday morning. He was proud and embarrassed at the same time:-) especially with mom taking pics.
That's Johnny with his green book bag in the background.
It's been a real family effort this week to get out the door an extra 20 minutes early each morning. Definitely worth it to give Joey this opportunity but nothing relaxed about the morning rush right now.
This is a follow-up post to the one I posted earlier this week showing star-shaped bokeh on my Christmas tree. However, this tree-shaped bokeh was created using totally different process as described here.
I bought three hole punches at ACMoore and Michael's this past week. This tree shape and a butterfly shape were very inexpensive (<$1) and created very small holes about 1/8 inch diameter. The third was a heart shape and a bit bigger, about 1/4" diameter, and it didn't work for my lens (Canon EF 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM Standard Zoom Lens for Canon SLR Cameras) and equipment (Canon 40D).
This picture shows you the type of punch that I think works best.
There is a bit of an art to getting the punch in the right spot on the paper. Don't be afraid to fold. As the article points out, you can also buy a set of lens hoods.
I had to crop my shot, and I was a bit frustrated that the bokeh filled such a small part of the image size. I think this would be improved shooting with an aperature less than the 3.5 I used. Needless to say, I was in manual mode and using manual focus.
Donnie's wife. Mom to Joey 14 and Johnny 13. Trying to do all sorts of cool stuff with life. Taking 1000's of pictures a month to preserve the memories.
