Guess who's back??? Me...and I brought along Gabe - from a year ago. He's walking now! Things have been pretty busy at work so photography has a taken a back seat. Look at this good lookin guy! These were taken at the beautiful Japanese gardens here.

Meet Alessandra!

Mateus is lookin mighty handsome these days. Look at that smile!

Karen, Anand, Mateus, and now, Alessandra - turning out to be quite a handsome family going on here! If you look back at the archives I have a few pics of them when Mateus was a baby. Look at him now with his smile that brightens up the room. I'm doing my photo rounds in SoCal. Next up: a guest that's new to the world (hopefully).

Guess Who's Pregnant (again)?!!

Guess who's pregnant again?!

This was Sienna's idea to sit at a bench

Someone was extremely excited about feeding ducks

Today is the last SoCal day, sniff. The weather was perfect, roughly 79 degrees, sunny and clear. Let's see...DFW, 39. Ouch. I took some doggie pics the other day too but I haven't had a chance to get to the pictures yet. So I think I'll work on a few on the plane. This is it for Sienna for the next few months.

First Post of the New Decade!

This is how Sienna feeds ducks

Happy "twenty-ten" everyone! How better off to start off the new year than in sunny SoCal (73 degrees) taking pictures. And of course Sienna gets to be first...but she's about to share the attention in a few months ;) I'll post more soon. Later today I'm going to take some doggie pics. Speaking of doggie pics, you guys ever watch Dog Whisperer? Cesar Millan is awesome.

My only new years photo resolution is to take a photo trip somewhere where I round up my picture-lovin friends and head to a scenic place. That's going to be a tough task though getting everyone together. I'll try to take more pictures and be more active posting pics too.

World, Meet Gabe!

Mom, Dad, and Brother Ben

Move over Silas and Sienna, here comes the newest cute sensation to hit this blog, Gabe! He's only 7 weeks old and learning to smile. I wasn't going to post any pictures because I've been swamped lately but I couldn't help taking some time off for this. I'll be posting more pictures soon.

Also, this is the first time I've shot RAW (NEF) format and so far I really like it. I do notice the pictures are coming out crisp if I've done everything right. The bad news is that I don't think this lappy can hang with the 10MB pictures. I'll eventually need to get a more powerful machine with giant monitor. But that's later. Anyway, back to cute overload.

Put Your Own Captions

"What? Pictures, noooo I'm much too shy."


"You see, bees are important by pollinating ..."

"You talkin to me? Are you talkin to me???!!"

"See, in modeling school I learned that if I pull the flowers down to my head and smile I look cuter."

I'm back in the heat of Texas. I go in my apartment and look at the termostat and it's 90 degrees (f). I head out to Singapore and Hong Kong in July, then Vegas. Busy summer, but it's for both work and play. I'll try to bring my D3 but man, lugging that thing around is a pain. It's like carrying a 7 lb bag everywhere. I still need to buy a little camera to take everywhere.

Sienna + Me (+ Susy)

Sienna was all business -- until we tickled her.

These poses were all Sienna's idea

Sienna hugged my (fat) head - that's how she does it

I finally got a chance to visit Susy, Kris and Sienna yesterday before I head back to the oven. Sienna is a ball of fun and I rarely get in front of the camera but she was just too cute. When we took out the camera, she immediately went on a supermodel pose-down all over the yard. She even started directing everything and everyone, including Opus (the dog). Haha ! she is growing up way fast! I wish I were around more.

I'm going to do some international travel in July so I'll try to bring my camera.

Test Post Using Windows Live Writer

I’m trying out Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer that can edit and format an the major blogs including blogger.  So far I have to say that I’m impressed at the ease.  I don’t need to do a 2 stage process of first uploading a pic to flickr and then embedding it using html editor on blogger.  This is just a one step process that even has some cool special effects like this reflection…even a watermark.  How cool is that?  Thank Khiemy for the recommendation.

This picture is of Lily, my friend Chip’s daughter I took on Halloween.  It’s not the most technically the best photo due to the wrong focus area.  It was done on my old pal the D70s.  Speaking of which, that’s the same camera Jeff got.  So yup, that was really easy…so easy I almost want to post another picture.  You know what, I think I will actually!Me @ the Modern Art Museum | Ft. Worth, TX Summer, 2008

*Presses the Easy button.  Bam!  How you like that?!  Very cool.  I can even crop, resize, and add some effects like sepia ton.  If I didn’t have so many archived pics on Flickr I’d cancel it.  But oh well… This thing can even embed video too but only low res.  I’m still looking a WMV to MP4 or other HD res file compatible with Youtube’s High Quality mode.  Doh!  Where are the Blogger tags?  I guess you can’t do it all here.  Oh well still impressed….OH WAIT…they show it right before you publish.  Ok this thing rules.

UPdate:  ok the first picture is pixelated and I can't get it to be not pixelated.  So much for being cool.  Boooo!!!

Retouching

Someone's mom was asking where her picture was so I had to throw one in there. But to make things interesting, this is a little before and after action. What I did was a little cross processing, added a border, and sharpened a little. I was going for a cooler look. There are many ways to make a picture have that special look. Images coming out of Nikon cameras tend to underexpose a little bit and under-sharpen. This allows me to tweak these things and bring out the detail. For variety, I like to do some photos in black and white, with a bluish tint, sepia etc. Lots of photo purists don't appreciate the photoshop work but I definitely support it as long as it's not overdone.  

Anyway, I'm back at the ranch and I noticed that I'm constantly missing being at the other place.  When I was back in Socal I missed Texas believe it or not and vice versa.  I really need to make some time to get the photo stuff started here...that'll be my project for the next month.

A Trip to the P-A-R-K with Sienna

Someone has been taking a lot of pictures while I was away.  

Sienna has grown quite a bit since I last took some pics of her.  This time she's running around, jibba jabba'in away, climbing on stuff and just being all around hyper.  We took a quick trip to the park to play and she was workin the camera by smiling on que.  Looks like back to Texas in a couple days which shows a freezing rain advisory right now :(  But I do miss the folks over there so it'll be nice to get back.

Notice Something Different?

I know I said no more Sienna pics for a while but this young lady was scouted by a TriStar rep and has a meeting in a few weeks!! So she needs some more current headshots so I was happy to oblige. Plus it game me a chance to give my new camera a test run. What do you think? The best way I describe the images from the new camera is creamy goodness The colors are just incredible, sharp and the blur is crazy good. Unfortunately, I was trying to save some memory and shoot at jpg normal when I should've shot at fine mode. Regardless, it's safe to say it blows away my old camera.

I'm blogging this on my ooooold PC - all I gotta say is processing a 12 megapixel image in photoshop CS2 on a Pentium III 500Mhz machine is like watching videos using a 56k modem. I'll have a big camera review post coming soon - that's why I don't want to say which camera I got yet.