Day 157

Today was the Duvall Days parade, which literally ran down the street from our house. The boys had never been to a parade before, and since we could walk down to see it, there seemed to be no reason to miss the parade. Towards the end, there were some prancing horses and gals dancing. I thought the flow of their dresses was so fun to capture.

Day 154

I was playing around with the new lens again at grandma's after dinner and got some fun shots of the boys playing. I liked this one because I managed to catch the ball in the air after Matt threw it.

Day 153

More playing around with the macro lens today. I thought I'd try to see what motion I could capture, and decided to play around with water. My little one was in the bath, and it didn't take much encouragement to get him splashing. I like the results, but I'm not thrilled with them. I'll have to do some more experimenting.

Day 151

Before church this morning, I finished another book. This one was for our book group that met on the 15th, but I really liked this book and wanted to finish it. The book was Broken for You by Stephanie Kallos. It's taken me forever to get through because I've been unusually busy lately, but I'm glad that I did.

I also wanted to take this picture to play around some more with focus with my "new" lens.

Day 147

For Christmas a couple of years ago, I asked for and was so excited to receive a specialized lens for my DSLR. The reading I did on it explained that it was a macro lens and was good for portrait photography. I put it on the camera for about a month, and for the life of me, I could not get it to do what I wanted. It has sat in my camera bag for over two years, and it's been bugging me.

Recently, I read a blog post about how to get blurry backgrounds. I was so excited to read about this because it's one of those things that's really nice to be able to do when you photograph children. They have this uncanny ability to be running in front of your unfolded laundry, their toys, and all sorts of other distracting things in their pictures.

As I read the post, I realized that I had this lens sitting around that would be perfect for this particular desire of blurry backgrounds. To practice my technique, I took the DSLR out to Paul's t-ball practice this afternoon and just played around with taking pictures. I'm really, really happy with the results.

Day 146

For about four years now, I've been kind of looking for a new toothbrush holder. The one we received as a wedding gift does not have openings large enough to accommodate the wide handles of little toothbrushes. Now that we need to fit two little toothbrushes, I figured it was time to really look for one.

I was lucky today when I went to the store because I found a holder that coordinates really well with our newer cup and soap dispenser. The best part was that it was on clearance, so I paid about $3 for a ceramic toothbrush holder.

I also used this as an opportunity to play around a little bit with my "new" macro lens.