It occurred to me after the fact that I didn't actually post a pic of the finished Christmas Tree. I looked through a bunch of the tree pics and finally settled on this one. I've decided it's really hard to take a good tree picture. Since it's pretty difficult to get the lighting and coloring right without having the flash whitewash the scene. I think for this shot I used -1 ev on the flash, still didn't help too much. Anyway, Ginger's family took off mid day Saturday (after checking the traffic cameras online and seeing it was clear, they figured they should leave in case it got worse later). Not much of note really happened Saturday. Quinn played his Uncle's Nintendo DS right up until he left, Catherine was more socialable.If we didn't do anything of note on Saturday, we more than made up for it on Sunday. After getting back from church, we fired up the grill for hamburgers (temperature around here was low 50's, so we figured it would be good to get in what may end up being the last grilling of the year). While the food was cooking, I actually worked on the gazebo some and managed to get one section screened (removed old screen, put up new). A co-worker (Rex) has chastised me for calling it a gazebo, since it's not detached from the house, although I can't really call it a screened in porch either since there's no door from inside the house into the structure. However, this is the same co-worker that once got into an bitter dispute with some other folks from work about whether a flight of stairs was landing to landing vs floor to floor (his position was there were 2 flights of stairs between the floors in our building). Yes, I know, you're wondering with stuff like this, how do we ever get any actual work done. Anyway, I've deviated a bit from my train of thought. With the gazebo / screened in porch I'm getting close to where soon I'll just have tons and wood laying around that I have to put back up (really not looking forward to that since that means removing all the nails and staples from the pieces before putting them back up). This all started because I initially balked at the twelve hundred dollar estimate we got for having a contractor do it. At this point, I'm thinking that would have been money well spent.
After lunch, we put up lights outside the house and we put up and took down the inflatable snowman (we didn't have enough plugs for him and the lights). After the kids went down for their nap, Ginger and I ran by Home Depot and picked up plugs, and some supplies (in case you're thinking we abandoned the kids, my Mom is still up). Then we went over to Target and finally back home. Tomorrow it's back to work for me and back to school for Quinn. Wheeee.
3 comments:
Quinn and Catherine are growing up so fast! They are just adorable in these pictures. Did you save some gingerbread for me :)
Oh, and the secret to good tree pictures? Longer exposures to let the lights really twinkle.
Yea, I tried the longer exposure, without a tripod (I was too lazy to set it up) it was a bit blurry. But even when resting the camera on a surface for the prolonged exposure it still ended up looking yellowish (probably because we use the cheap indoor lighting vs the expensive 'pure white' light bulbs).
Well, one trick I use in those situations is to hold a white piece of paper next to the light source and manually set the white balance. That process has eliminated some of the post-processing I do to balance color especially inside and in shadows.
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