Tulips

I love Utah spring.  We always try to act shocked, but I remember that it snowed at least once during my winter finals every year I was at BYU.  Finals week is the last week of April or so, if you don't keep track of such things.  There is something about seeing the poor tulips get coated that always makes me giggle, though.

Here's hoping true spring comes soon!

Easter

We've had a good weekend!  Little kids sure make holidays fun.  First we dyed eggs.

Then, after a wonderful Easter program at church today, we hid eggs.  My mom sent us the most adorable set!

Then we found eggs.

My husband thought they were the silliest purchase ever, but our kids love the little egg grabbers.  Picking up eggs is much more fun that way!

Then we played with eggs.  Tyler loved that his eggs were cars.

Then we opened the eggs and ate the candy.  Hey, look, a picture of me!  I actually talked Christopher into taking some pictures too.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Panoramas, HDR and Photoshop

Well, I think I am happy with my trickier Moab shots now.  They took a bit of work because it was something I haven't done before in Photoshop - merging photos together to make a panorama.  I have done some HDR by hand, but never tried the automatic feature before either.  I learned a lot about the program, but also about what sort of shots work and don't work.  And since I always appreciate it when other people explain what they did, I think I might talk about them a bit.  If you don't care about photography, you can just skip it.

For example, this shot was a piece of cake.  It is actually three shots stitched together, but Photoshop did it automatically.  Everything exposed well, so all I had to do to take the shot was use a tripod and keep it level as I took overlapping shots.

But let me explain HDR for the non-photographer a bit here.  When out eyes see things, we can adapt to many levels of light.  But the camera can't.  For example, when I took this picture so that the rock came out clear, the sky was gone.  My eye could see the clouds and sunshine, but the camera can't.

So then I took a shot that made the sky crystal clear.  But the rock is now gone.

Photoshop merges those into an HDR shot, to make it more like what you normally see.  Now, what I learned this day is that the further the difference between sky and rock, the less . . . real the picture looks.  So while this shot worked, it isn't my favorite.

This picture, on the other hand, I LOVE.  I did my best mountain goat impression and set up my tripod up in the crevice inside an arch, aiming back out.  If you zoomed in enough, you could see that my footprints are the only ones there, coming out from our white truck in the parking lot.

 If I owned a wide angle lens, I could have done this in one shot.  But since those cost $900, I took four shots that overlapped.  I took one set exposed for the rock, one set exposed for the sky, and merged it all into this.  Since the sky wasn't actually that bad in the rock pictures, the merge looks much better.

And then we have this panorama.  This is actually only three pictures across, but took 7 shots to make it all merge together.  I wish you could see the whole shot in more detail, but this is as big as Blogger wants it to go.

I love digital photography!  I love that I can take as many shots as I want and then use Photoshop to make it all come together when I am done.



Busy Saturday

After getting back from Moab, we had a few hours to recover before Christopher headed to a bachelor party and I went to the ballet with my sister-in-law.  And then, the next morning started off bright and early with the annual neighborhood Easter Egg hunt.  Thankfully, it wasn't even snowing this time!

After that, we headed up to Salt Lake for the wedding.  Christopher's younger brother got married yesterday, and that means all of his siblings are now married!  They are a funny couple.  Jonathan is a very private person on emotions and affection.  So he wouldn't even admit they were dating until close to Christmas.  ("She's just a friend.  Who comes over a lot.")  He proposed at the end of February, and didn't even bother telling his mother (or the rest of the family) until a couple of weeks later.  And then they just decided to do a very casual wedding a month or so later.  My favorite moments of the day were when they were told to kiss over the alter and did so hesitantly (because they barely hold hands in public) - the sealer told them "don't worry.  That will get better with time."  And my second favorite moment was when everyone was congratulating the couple.  A very tall and stocky man from her side of the family walked up to him, said "I hear you're not a hugger", and then gave him a tight bear hug before he could protest.  Classic!

Her dress is the most casual dress I have ever seen - but it was perfect for them, and beautiful.

Speaking of dresses, I made this a week ago and have been bursting to take pictures ever since.  I made Kaitlyn this skirt.  And in my usual fashion, decided to make the leftovers into a bolero jacket.  And a hairbow.  And a bowtie for Tyler.

Are you ready for the best part?  The skirt took ten minutes.  That's because it was originally a curtain valance.  From the clearance bin at Wal-mart - for $1.  All I had to do was cut off the top part so it was the right length, sew in casing for elastic at the waist, and join the edges together.

Sew . . . a needle pulling thread . . . (Sorry, I had to throw that joke out.  I'm not the first person to make kid's clothes out of curtains by a long shot.)

In case you want to do anything similar, I got inspiration for the skirt here and the bolero jacket here and the bowtie here.  The jacket was by far the most work.  The skirt and the bowtie are so easy that I plan to make more soon.

Kaitlyn is easily distracted by flowers.

And so am I.

And Tyler got a flower too!

While we were at the reception, this flower came loose from the bride's bouquet as she was passing us, so she gave it to Tyler.  And he adored that thing for at least an hour.  He showed to everyone - "my beautiful flower!" - he played with it, he admired it.  Such a funny little guy!

Moab

Christopher has been going to Moab a few times a year ever since we were dating.  He has some friends that love to mountain bike down there, and they have a lot of fun.  He has offered a few times that I could go with him - but most of the time there are no other wives there, and trips like that with infants are less fun than they are worth sometimes.  So I usually just let him have his guy's weekend off.

But this time, I decided the kids were old enough that they would actually enjoy hiking and exploring. I'm so glad we went! It was a quick trip, since we have a wedding in the family this weekend we had to get back for, but we had a blast.

First up was a trip to Arches.  While we thought the actual hike to Delicate arch might wear the kids out, the hike to the lookout point left us with energy for more hikes.

Of course, once we got up there, I had to set up the tripod for a family picture.  But while I got things ready, the kids made their own fun.

First attempt at family picture for the day.  Tyler had no intention of looking anywhere near the camera, no matter how hard we tried.  He's smiling at the game, if you can't tell.

At least Kaitlyn was happy to pose for me!  (Oh, and no - this shot isn't tilted.  Delicate Arch is.)

Second attempt at getting a picture of Tyler.  I went to the spot he was looking at - and he looked away and smiled some more.

Then we saw a cool snake.  Highlight of the kid's morning, of course!

Second attempt at a family picture.  We gave Tyler the only sunglasses we had in the truck, despite the fact that they were Kaitlyn's girly ones.  So now he is looking at the camera . . . but I guess Kaitlyn didn't feel in the mood to smile.

Until she got her own session to pose in.

Meanwhile, I was enjoying my camera.  The whole park is a landscape photographer's dream!  I'm no expert, but it is my favorite type of photography.  This arch is called Landscape arch, and is huge!  They say that this one could fall down further at any time, so I'm glad we got to see it.  (Of course, to a geologist, "any time" means in the next 1-150 years.)

Attempt #3.  I think it was the best try, though the bush covers more of the kids than I was hoping it would.

And this is how Tyler got everybody to play while I took the tripod down.

On the hike back from Landscape, the kids decided to climb up this sand dune.  In fact, I think every kid who passes this decides to climb up the sand dune.

At the top, the two sides met in this little crevice that Kaitlyn loved.  When Tyler tried to leave just before I took the picture, she was really helpful and grabbed him for me.

My other fun hobby for the day was pulling out my Macro lens.  What a fun toy that one is!

After that, we met up with an old friend from my home ward.  This, to me, was Facebook at it's best.  I hadn't had any contact with her in years, but I knew from Facebook updates that she lived in Moab.  So a couple of messages back and forth later, she had given us tons of ideas on things to do in Moab, and we met up with her and her little boys in the park.  Perfect!

Unfortunately, Kaitlyn did not feel perfect.  She hadn't had enough nap to counter the 3 miles of hiking that morning, and was CRANKY.  We were going to ride our bikes around with Ashley, but Kaitlyn flipped out and we had to give up.  At least we were at a park, so there was an easy backup plan.

The next morning, I got up at 5am like a crazy person and headed into Arches.  Landscape photography is always done at sunrise and sunset hours, and while I'm not able to do that very often with little kiddos, it was an fun experience.  Arches actually puts a list in their brochure of the best spots for morning or evening pictures, so I picked one on the morning list not far from the entrance and headed in.  There were two spots right next to each other - one was on the morning list, one on the evening list.

But when I got there, there were already 10 cars there.  At 6am.  In the parking lot for the "evening" spot.  In the parking lot for the one I picked, there was no one else there.  That was one of those great moments where you stop to ponder whether they know something you don't or the other way around, but I shrugged and headed in.  I haven't finished editing these pictures yet, so I only have a couple right now.  And the sunrise wasn't the best one, due to cloud cover, but it was still great light.

After taking pictures at my spot, it was still only 7am, so I figured I would head over to where the other cars were and see what they knew.  Sure enough, there were photographers spilling all over that hill.  It was quickly apparent that they all knew each other - and that they were a level above me.  Every single piece of equipment I saw, from the tripod to the lens to the camera, was 4 times the price of mine.  But the funniest part to me was that they were all at least 55 - 75 years old!  I was setting up a shot nearby a couple of them at one point, and a woman my age was instructing one of them on her shot.  I've been studying a lot on photography, but I could barely keep up with the jargon. 

I don't know what class that was, but I wanted in.  What an amazing way to learn landscape photography!

Well, anyway, I eavsdropped as much as I could, and wandered around for a while.  One of my favorites was on the "primative trail", when I came across this.  A "Trail" sign pointing to a "This is not a Trail!" sign.

After that, I headed back and we all went to hang out with the friends Christopher usually comes down with.  They headed out to do Slickrock in the afternoon, and the kids and I just relaxed all day.  And that night, we roasted some hot dogs in the campground.

What a great trip!



Well, that was odd.

One of the reasons Christopher cited for why we "needed" to get TV signal at our cabin was that he wanted to watch LDS General Conference up there.  (The other one was BYU sports.)  I wasn't really sure why this appealed to him, but we headed up for the weekend anyway.  And the weather was certainly odd.

First up is the picture sure to nominate me for some "Mother of the Year" award.

Yup.  That's my daughter, with no pants or socks, and that's 3 feet of snow behind her.  But for the record, it was 60 degrees outside when this shot was taken.  We thought that we would be able to drive the truck up for sure with that warm weather, but lo and behold it was still snomobile only.  Our deck was bone dry, and it felt wonderful outside, but the snow just sat there. 

So how did this picture happen?  Well, while we were watching conference downstairs, the kids were playing upstairs.  When Daddy went to check on them, Kaitlyn had taken off her pants, put on snow pants, snow boots, and her jacket, and gone outside.  On her own.  Tyler had followed her in his socks and jeans.  So Daddy got them off the deck and back inside, and made Kaitlyn take off the snow gear.  I guess she didn't see any reason to put her jeans back on though.  And later, when Daddy went out to grill dinner, she followed him out.  And then I laughed, took a picture, and tried to come up with a reason why this was not okay.

Then Daddy snowmobiled out to go and watch the Priesthood session.  I taught the kids one of my favorite childhood games while he was gone.  Avalanche!  Seriously, I wish they still made this game, because I have great memories of playing this at my Grandma's house.  Instead, I just got one off Ebay. 

On a sidenote, games have been a new victory in our house.  This might sound silly, but . . . I honestly hadn't even thought of trying to play board games with my kids yet!  I had no idea they were grown up enough to take turns and learn the rules of a game.  But Tyler's teacher taught them to play Memory!  It took her months.  It might not sound like much for most kids, but for them, it was impressive.  They learned to flip over two and only two cards, keep them if they match, flip them back over if they don't, and wait until it was their turn to try again.  So we play Memory at home now, and both kids love it.  So I dug out a shapes and colors Bingo game - no problem.  With Avalanche, I had to adapt the rules to make it a bit simpler, but they loved putting the marbles in and seeing how many they could get to fall all the way down! 

Anyway, by the time Daddy came back up, it was pouring rain.  I felt rather bad actually - he only had to go one mile, but he was soaked all the way through by the time he made it up to us. 

And the next morning, we woke up to this.

About a foot had fallen overnight, and it was still below freezing when we left.  It was so crazy!  Beautiful, but still odd.

What a beautiful weekend!