Fun with New Camera

I got a new camera and have started to have fun with photography again.  When I started seminary I pretty much didn't do any more photos other than with my phone.  My favorite sister came to visit and we took the new camera with us to downtown Seattle.  We found a cool graffiti wall that the kids loved and shot some photos.

First off, the one thing that put me over the edge in upgrading from our old camera was the amazing low light capabilities.  I always felt like that was my biggest hindrance in getting the shots I wanted when I couldn't.   These two shots show it pretty well.  This is in a very dark place under a bridge at night.  The iso was 12800!  It was taken with an exposure of only 1/80 sec and an f stop of 4.  All the images in this post are low resolution, but it is amazing that the image isn't full of noise.  I haven't done any touchups to these two night shots.

The sports is a little better in auto focus.  I didn't get many shots because I coached Beckham's football team and was doing more video at his soccer games.

 As anyone with multiple kids knows, trying to take a family photo can strangely coincide with the biggest family fights of the year.  As soon as the camera came out the kids turn into pozers!

 

 

 

Proof of craziness, the photo organizer recognized the first version of Caeden's face, but not the second, what does that tell you....?

We finally got around to actually getting some decent shots.  I remembered a lot from back when I used to do this more frequently.  My sister snapped the family shots and she did great.  These turned out good, but if we could do it again I think we could make them perfect.

Marisa and I didn't do any single shots of us.  I didn't think of it and Marisa didn't want to with her braces and cold. This is a candid shot my sister took.

As usual, I think she looks absolutely amazing!

Caeden is actually our best smiler, so he gets two photos posted.

I tried to grab a couple of Aspen who was freezing and like a typical dad, I couldn't get her hair to look any better :-(

Trey Video

Here are the ones for Bex, Aspen, Family Intro.

Trey!


Trey 2010-2012 from Carson Calderwood on Vimeo.

Bex Video

The previous videos (Family Intro, Aspen & Caeden) are here.



Bex 2010-2012 from Carson Calderwood on Vimeo.

First part of 2010-12 family videos

Because the process takes a while I decided to put these first couple sections up now instead of waiting for the whole thing to be finished.

Intro

Intro 2010-2011 from Carson Calderwood on Vimeo.


Aspen part 1

Aspen 1 of 2 2010-2012 from Carson Calderwood on Vimeo.


Aspen part 2

Aspen 2 of 2 2010-2012 from Marisa Calderwood on Vimeo.


Caeden

Caeden 2010-2012 from Marisa Calderwood on Vimeo.

Start of summer

Here are some pix from the past few weeks.  We are getting lazier and lazier when it comes to taking pictures and not much better when it comes to posting them.  These are the noteworthy things we've actually taken pictures of lately.

 Aspen keeps getting in trouble for getting the chickens out to play with them.

 Caeden did his end of pre-school activity of making a pizza at one of the local pizzareas.

 We got the kids a bounce house to help with being active despite all the rainy weather we had this spring.

 Yes, that is a disco ball hanging from our ceiling, but that is a blog post for another day!

 Caeden and Beckham have been taking a lot of swimming lessons lately.  Aspen wants to do hers so she put on some floaties and did her "smimming wessons" in the tub.

We had a bunny decide to make our back yard its home.  We don't feed it or really do anything with it other than let the kids play with it this one time, but it stays and seems to be happy.

We got two quads before our trip to Oregon with the Calderwood family.  I had the boys practice in our circle for a bit.  They love them.

Aspen loves her motoX helmet so much she won't even wear her hello kitty one anymore to ride her scooter.

We previously had figured out via google maps that Baker City Oregon is the midway point between Salt Lake and Maple Valley when deciding where to stop for the night to break the drive up.  We decided to meet up with everyone around there and go camping.  We settled on a small town called Sumpter.  It was pretty cool and had a lot of interesting mining and Oregon trail things to check out.

My mom brought lots of fun games for the kids.  They liked rolling around in the dirt more I think though.

We did tons of motorbike and quad riding.  After Kristin/Chris and Cody/Lisa's family left we were down to few enough people to all go out on the quads.  We went on two long rides and it was a lot of fun.

This is me getting 2" of air and about 0 seconds of hang time!

Week of Surgery

Warning, there is some blood and open tissue shots in this blog post, so if you don't like seeing that, don't scroll down.  I had to place sutures in both Marisa and Bex this week!  That combined with breaking my finger a couple of weeks ago in the basketball tourney have made for more trauma in our family recently than the previous few years.  Hopefully we have hit our quota!

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I'll start with the second thing that happened because the pictures uploaded that way.  We have told our kids two things repeatedly.  Never use any knife other than a butter knife without our permission.  Also, never even think of asking us to use dad's super awesome cut through an airplane knife that mom gave him for his birthday or you will cut off your hand.  Well, Bex caught some bugs and wanted to put them in a cottage cheese container.  He decided to go against both of our warnings to put holes in the top of the container.  I heard a psycho scream coming from downstairs just as I got out of the shower.  I ran down and found the following....

I took him up to my office (after getting dressed!) and placed four sutures.  He did great for the numbing.  Although he is very sporty/athletic and tries the most to act tough, he can't handle the slightest amount of blood.  I brought up a ninja video clip in my phone and he watched that while I worked on him.  Fingers are so much easier to numb than mandibular teeth.  He did well with the initial poke and the rest was pretty painless.   I placed four sutures and during the entire process he kept saying things like, "is this going to be seen by people?" "Are you going to tell anyone about this," etc.  He was very embarrassed.  By the time I was done and he saw it he couldn't wait  to go show everyone his sweet war scar.  He kept asking to take off the bandage so he could show his stitches.

Much worse than that was Marisa's trauma.  She had bought some plants for the two hanging baskets on the front porch.  She came home right at nap time and she knows from previous experience that if she doesn't bring things in that are perishable that they most likely will be forgotten after putting a kid down for a nap.  So, she parked the car in the driveway, left the side door open so Aspen could see her as she walked up to the front porch and hung the two baskets.  During that 70 seconds (we watched it later on the security cameras) Caeden unbuckled himself, went to the front and somehow was able to get the car out of park and into neutral. The van started rolling down out sloped driveway to the circle and Aspen started screaming.  Marisa was just getting down from hanging the second basket and heard the scream.  She turned around and saw the van leaving the driveway and was afraid she wouldn't be able to get to it in time.  She was wearing flip flops and somehow flipped them off as she was sprinting toward the car.  Right before the car got to a neighbors driveway across the street she managed to jump in the front seat and slam on the break.  Somehow she cut her forehead, her arm and her leg.  She was too far away to see it with the camera very well, but must have hit the door on the way in.  Her head was cut pretty badly.  She came up to my office and I placed five sutures.  I contemplated doing a double suture technique, but the cut was exactly in line with her furrowed brow line.  Her stitches are out now and it looks better than I even expected.  There is still some residual swelling, but people don't notice it until she points it out and they can't believe it was only a week ago that it happened which is amazing because she heals so slowly most of the time.  I hope we are done with stitches for a while....Needless to say, Caeden has had some not so fun days trying to learn how to remember to listen to Mom and Dad.