Welcome Back: Part Two

I hope everyone had a great holiday. We have been enjoying having my Mom visit.

This was her first Swissmas ( Swiss Christmas ). Here they like to celebrate on Christmas Eve so we made a cheese fondue dinner for everyone.

On Christmas we had the usual U.S. morning festivities of gathering under the tree to see what Santa brought. Ian really enjoyed the ripping of the paper more this year. It was hard work to keep him from ripping our gifts open..haha. Santy brought him a Kitchen and Lego Train set. From his grandparents a boy doll, build your own puppet, sweater, wood train toy, and stuffed lamb. He also got a nice cough…so we are working on getting that gone.

Stanta also treated me well; blessed me with a Macro 100mm f 2.8 Canon lens. I had to pop that sucker right on the camera to finish our Christmas pictures and let me tell you what..the macro is just AMAZING! My parents also got us a mini USB video camera, HD quality. I will have to get our video up soon. Thank you all for everything you have done for our family and lets not forget the reason for the Season :).

My mom wth the Flip camera.

I will finish you out with pictures of the past few days.

The rest of the pictures are located on flickr.

Welcome to all of my new readers!

Time To Up My Photography Skills

A few weeks ago a joined a photography group on flickr to help me learn more about the world of my Cannon Rebel XTI and photo editing. I am really enjoying it because it makes me pull out my creative side. I think I will start to post each weeks assignments on here to get all of your opinions. I want to be the very best I can be (and maybe fish for comments..hehee). So here are the past assignments and the one for this week:

My High Key shot: My sister at the beach.

We had to take a picture of anything to do with pills. I wasn't very proud of this picture. I took another one but never submitted it.

Anything to do with M, So M is for music. I was trying to work on my lighting and direction of focus on this one.

For this week:

For anything to do with The Beatles. I used my sisters Beatles figurines and recreated the "Let it Be" album cover. I am actually pretty proud of myself on this one.

This is for Diptych which basically is: two related photos presented side-by-side as a single entity.

I have one more due this week ut have not found the right thing to photograph for it. It is to do "HDR stands for "High Dynamic Range". HDR images can be pretty wild to look at. The basic idea of an HDR image is to take multiple images of the same scene using different exposures. For example, take one with correct exposure, one over-exposed, and one under-exposed. The images must otherwise be exactly the same (i.e. you need a tripod or some other strategy to keep the camera from moving). You then merge the photos together using a tool such as Photomatix (you can download a free trial from this site). www.hdrsoft.com/" -Taken from my photgraphy group assignments site.