Christmas Tree '13

I went a little camera crazy when we cut down our tree this year. I hadn't really taken pics of my kids doing anything fun for awhile so I just snapped away.  Oh how I need to do this more!!! These pictures remind me that I need to keep my old camera sitting out and bring it along when we go places....

A day in the life!

girl steals phone

girl is caught with phone

girl is sad to be in trouble for throwing said phone against the wall

girl is still sad

happy! girl is playing on the stairs

girl spends a lot of time here

girl looking out window

girl looking super effing cute looking out window

big girl eating cereal

girl trying hard not to make a mess

girl making a mess

girl winds up on mom's back from excessive clinginess

brother is home

brother is hiding

girl is dancing

 day is done.

Happy New Year!

I like blogging. I like taking pictures of my kids. I love that I have this as a crazy detailed baby book for them, so I feel bad that I've sucked so horribly at it for the past several month. Damn new career! Haha. Career. I don't know if we can call it that yet, but it feels fitting enough for now :) Anyway! I'm going to try to really change that.

The only way to do that is to remember that I. Don't. Need. To. Edit. Pictures. Of. My. Kids!!!!!! Right? Okay so I can't not edit them a tiny bit, like if they turned out too dark or something, but I'm going to try to ignore a bad crop or a booger or something. It will be great practice to get it right in the camera in the first place anyway :) 

So we need to go back to Halloween. 

I didn't really get Cecilia a costume this year. And by "didn't really" I actually just mean "didn't." You may recall that Simon went through a bit of a costume phase and we have so many leftover. I knew she wouldn't care at all so we stuck her in a burger costume and called it a day :) We did a few Halloweeny things, including going to an old park, trick or treating downtown and actual trick or treating in our neighborhood. I only have pictures of 2nd event. The first one was way too dark and the last one was rainy and we got soaked!

I was unsure about the Power Rangers thing because he punched one of my friends in the junk "to protect himself" because my friend was pretending to be a vampire, but he did his "time" and I gave him a second chance. So here are my burger and my Power Ranger....

A new language.

When I was going through all the infertility mess I realized that I learned a new language. I blogged about it here. Now I have a new language full of words that might look more recognizable than those in the infertility world, but they meant nothing to me at one time and now I could talk in depth about any of them. 

Still so much to learn, but here's a list of some of the photography words that meant next to nothing to me at this time last year...

Lightroom

Actions

Presets

Sliders

Layer Masks

Gaussian Blur

Light meter

Culling

Edit in vs edit out

35mm vs 50mm vs 85mm

1.4 vs 1.8 vs 2.0

60D vs 6D vs 5D

ISO 200 vs 1000

Fast lens

Wide open

Feathering

Catchlights

Taco

Diffusing

Softbox vs umbrella vs umbrella softbox

Lustre

Shootproof

Wix

Full frame vs crop sensor

Bokeh

Custom white balance

Sort of fun to think about! I wonder what I will all be able to add to this list at this time next year. Surely a ton of things I haven't even thought of yet. This is one reason I foresee sticking with photography for a long time to come (provided people hire me!), the fact that there is always something new to learn. How could you ever get bored? 

Anyway, I've really sucked at blogging about my kids lately and maybe all of the above sheds some light onto why! There is only so much time in the day and clearly I spend a lot of my minutes devoted to learning about and working on photography. It's safe to say it's taken over my life for now, but it's getting slow so I can spend the winter here :)