Wednesday, June 27, 2012

In the Middle

We are alternating between days of being busy and days of being lazy, finding ourselves in the middle most days. My parents came into town last week, just a couple of days after we arrived home from vacation. Mostly we sit and visit and play with the kids, but on Friday night, we headed to a park downtown, by the river, for a picnic.
We hung around at the playground after we ate. B was on a mission to try to do everything his big sis could do.
We brought home two very tired kids and proceeded to have a fairly lazy rest of the weekend. One Ordinary Dad and I headed out on a date on Sunday night, taking full advantage of free babysitting from my parents. Our goal was to be cheap, so we used a BOGO coupon for the new berry almond chicken salad at Wendy's (delicious by the way), picked up a hardbound copy of The Annotated Charlotte's Web at Half Price Books (I love, LOVE, love Charlotte's Web) for $8, and then used free tickets to a local comedy club, where we did enjoy quite a bit of laughter.

Monday was another lazy day. Yesterday brought the exciting news that two of my friends had babies (one had twins), so there are now three new babies to snuggle in my life. And then, we spent the majority of yesterday evening at a friend's house for a small group pool party.
One of our friends enjoys fireworks, so we lit some bottle rockets and the kids played with sparklers.
Back when I first got my camera, when C was just over a year old, I tried to shoot in Manual mode as much as I could and to use natural light to my advantage. As she got busier and I had to be quicker, I began to rely on Auto mode more and more. I rarely went back to "M" unless we were doing a family photo shoot or something.

One of my goals this summer is to spend some of my lazy time learning more about the many wonderful things my camera can do. I've started shooting in RAW, which I never did before, and am trying hard to do all of my settings manually and to play with light. Our house has a ton of huge windows (an advantage to a nearly 100 year old home) that allow in a lot of natural light.
One of our small group friends is a photographer (like has his own studio photographer). He helped me get most of my settings right for the fun sparkler pictures. Between now and July 4th though, I'm going to try to learn how to get my flash to go off at the end of my exposure instead of the beginning as he said that would enhance these pictures quite a bit. If anyone knows how to do this on a Canon Digital Rebel xSi, please let me know. There's definitely a lot to learn, but armed with some guide books, a notebook for note-taking, and the ever-informative Internet, I'm confident I can get better and more comfortable on the Manual setting.
Enjoy your week friends. I'm off to go daydream about snuggly, newborn babies. And no, I am not pregnant and not planning to be anytime soon, lest you think all this baby daydreaming is a hint.

~One Ordinary Mom

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