First Day of Summer

Today is the official start of summer vacation! The weather, however, thinks it's still early spring (granted I think we got out extremely early this year). The kids are back in Iowa with their grandparents right now and the house is eerily quiet. I have high hopes of things to accomplish today: purging my closet, doing all the laundry, cleaning Annaliese's carpet, backing up our pictures online, and doing my quilt blocks for exchange. We'll see how much of that actually gets done.

Here's a glimpse at my first project while the kids have been gone. We had our family pictures taken over a month ago. Our photographer was Darrin's co-worker Chris Otwell, and instead of buying prints, we bought the digital RAW files. It's the first time I've ever edited files in the RAW format, and if they weren't such big files, I'd put that as the default on our camera now. I've had lots of fun editing them, but sometimes I think I have too much fun and then end up looking a bit alien like. There are so many pictures to choose from. That day we had trouble getting a decent family picture; trying to get both kids to look at the camera and smile is a heroic feat. And Ian, when you tell him to say "Cheese" launches into what he thinks is a smile, but is really something that just looks awkward. Annaliese doesn't yet understand that you're supposed to smile at a camera, so in some ways the outtakes are way more fun for me to look at than the actual images I edited for print. Here are a few of the edits (for family members, I'm working on putting up a whole gallery of them so you can tell us which ones you'd like in print form).






















There's still quite a few left to edit, and I may go back and play around with some of these just a bit more. Editing these sure made me miss my kiddos, but I know they're having a blast with Grandma and Grandpa.