Kaitlyn and other stuff...

Our spotlight this week is on Ms. Kaitlyn. Although I would say Kaitlyn serves up the most sass out of our kids, she also is so kind and loving. She loves her brother and sister so much and would carry Owen around all day if we let her even though he weighs about the same as her. She is an amazing helper with a great work ethic. She also has endurance (like when she ran/walked an entire 5K with me last summer without complaining once). She is hard working and intelligent. She is learning to read, mostly because of her own self motivation. What would we do without our spunky little Kaitlyn? ~Angela


So Angela suckered me into painting the bathroom this weekend. She wanted to go for some sort of beach theme. Here are some pictures of how it turned out. The pictures don't really represent the color too well but it definitely looks much better.

Well I got a couple new lenses this week for the camera. I had a lens in mind but I talked to a guy at Ritz cameras and he persuaded me otherwise. I didn't really end up taking his advice either. I originally wanted a 18-200mm Nikon VR lens but I ended up getting the Sigma 10-20mm and the Nikon 50mm 1.8. The 50mm lens seems to work very nice. The first 3 pictures below were taken with this lens, at $110 this is a great value lens. I have been messing around with still shots and I have a lot to learn. You can see my attempt in the first picture below. The 1.8 is nice for shooting indoors, the 2nd and third pictures were taken without a flash. That third picture I was messing around in gimp for an effect that I have seen on dpchallenge. The 10-20 lens is great for landscape type shots. I am most excited about this lens as it opens up some possibilities that weren't available with my old lenses. You can see that it has a fish eye effect, the last shot in the series is using this lens adapted from a tutorial I found on dpchallenge. Kind of a different look but I kind of like it. ~Erik