I (heart) my camera...

I finally broke down and bought what Jason calls my "professional" camera. I've been longing over a digital SLR camera and after lots of input from others (thank you Tara!) and lots of research, I finally bought the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi from Wolf Camera.

I highly suggest that if you don't know much about these type of cameras to go to a place where that is what the specialize in, instead of the Big Box retailers that pay some kid minimum wage to sit behind a counter and repeat a script. I got a lot of help from my local Wolf Camera store AND with my purchase, I got 18 FREE photography courses (yeah!) which I'm VERY excited about.

Anyhow, my camera has approximately 10 megapixels which is almost double what an average point-and-shoot camera has. What this means, in my terms, that when I take a picture with my new camera, it is much more crisp, clean and detailed, especially when I blow up the image, than the grainy, pixelated look I get with my point-and-shoot. I love my new Canon camera (sigh)!

Here's a picture I took the first day I got my camera of my beloved Red Bud tree in my backyard. I love this tree and since it was sprouting out the most beautiful, purplish-pink buds, I had to make it one of my first pictures. I like the picture, it captures what I wanted.

And here's the picture when I did some photo-editing. I cleaned up the digital noise (graininess), sharpened it a bit, saturated the color and then messed with the hue to get this out-there combination of caribbean blue and magenta. This image speaks to me, in fact, I'm blowing this picture up to be about a 4'x4' image to go on my yellow-green walls in my office. I'll post a picture of it once it's done.

Anyhow, I can't wait to share photos that I've taken. And in case you were in the dark...I love my camera!

Rain, Rain, Go Away!

Dear Rain,

I really like it when you show up but today, you are being a tad overbearing. Could you back off a little...please? It's Lawyer's spring break and we want to play in the sand box and build tents in the backyard. I want to sit under the umbrella and read a book. But you, you have decided to stay for an extended visit and you're really getting on my nerves.

Have you seen what you have done to my poor flooded backyard? And my beautiful blooming red bud tree isn't feeling so beautiful...more like wet dog. So please, can you come again another day?

Love,
Amii

Screaming for Ice Cream!

Well, last week brought typical bizarre Texas weather. We received the whole gammut in weather: wind, snow, sleet, sun, freezing temps, 80 degree weather, and lots of rain.


On one of the 80 degree days last week (this was between snow on Monday and snow on Thursday) the ice cream man stopped directly in front of our house and Lawyer could not stand that that all the other kids were swarming the ice cream truck like bees. So we grabbed some change and he got an ice cream. He was enjoying the sun, his ice cream and the fact that we got to be outside and he didn't have to have much clothes on.

I'll post pictures soon of our "snow day" we had. We got to build our first snowman here and we all had a great time. Enjoy your weather wherever you are!

Fun, Fun, Fun!

We had a great weekend full of nothing and something. Saturday was absolutely beautiful and it was a perfect day to do what else but rent a stump grinder and get busy on the 10+ tree stumps we were needing to remove from our backyard. We all got in on the action and Lawyer was busy at work.
Apparently we haven't heard of child labor laws!

We spent a lot of time at Granny & Papaw's eating lots of good food. Lawyer finally decided to take his new bike from Santa out for a spin too...he had a lot of fun and was very proud of himself that he had a bike just like daddy's. Hope everyone has a great week!