Sakura Matsuri

The Hanami (celebration of spring) and the Sakura Matsuri Japanese festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden are our annual family tradition. The crowds were insane this year, so we barely got to see the exhibits/performances. But we still had a great picnic, and Mom the Photographer had a field day. :)

Fascinated by all the colors and sounds

Our little tree hugger

Oliver enjoyed playing in the grass for the first time

Off to explore

Some weird (but cool) metal robot sculpture thingie.
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Some wallpapers
(click on each one to view a 1024x768 version):

Cherry blossoms

Japanese Pond And Garden

Magnolia

Some greenery overlooking a stream

Look What I Can Do!

Oliver is learning to sit up.

No More!

James in one of his moods.

Enjoying A Saturday In Central Park

I'm not too happy with these (except for the birdie one). I opted for no flash, in hindsight a bad idea. Too much sunlight, too many hard shadows... live and learn.

Red Shirt Ollie

Experimenting with the color accent feature in my camera.

Vintage Boys - fun with Photoshop filters

Enhanced

Original

A few people have asked me for some tips on photo editing. I'm hardly a pro, to be honest, and when I edit my photos I usually do it by trial and error, trusting my gut rather than specific insturctions. But I certainly don't mind sharing what I know. :) So here's a side-by-side of the same photo, one it its original state and the other put through some treatment in Photoshop 5. I wanted a soft, low-key "vintage" look for this one. Here's what I did to get it:

1. Image ---> Adjust ---> Hue/saturation ---> Saturation -30
2. Duplicate the layer and set it to 30% opacity
3. Filters ---> Blur ---> Gaussian Blur (pixels radius 4.6) on top layer
4. Use paintbrush eraser (20% diameter, 100% opacity) to erase parts of top layer (eyes, noses, mouths) to bring them out
5. Merge the layers
6. Filters ---> Distort ---> Diffuse Glow (0% graininess, 5% glow amount, 15% clear amount)
7. Filters ---> Fade Diffuse Glow (60%)
8. Finish by creating a border (Image ---> Canvas size ---> insert desired measurements, rinse and repeat).

James Being James

Upon taking pictures of James wearing sunglasses, I couldn't figure out why parts of the pictures were out of focus. It took me a while to realize that one of the kids had somehow put a nice fat fingerprint on my lense. Arghhh.

I'm five months old today!