An evening out taking pictures

When the full, rich yesterday was winding up, I got together with Keith to have fun with some off camera flash shots. We started off at his house and then spent a few hours downtown incorporating some lights and textures of the big city into our flash pictures. OK, it may sound boring, but it was a good time. It was great to get out and shoot at an unusual time and place for no other reason than to get some interesting shots. Our only downfall was that we had to serve as each others models. Were it not for this short coming, we may have gotten some more pleasant images. At least Keith would have anyway...

Brownsville parade and fun

What full and rich day! We kicked things off watching the annual Brownsville parade, moved on to the Brownsville park to take in the boothes, food, and obligotory inflatable bounce castles, catepillars, etc..., and ended up riding "Guy" the horse at Poppy and Gigi's house. This was the first year I have attended the Brownsville parade. In a prior years I was working at HP and sleeping off the previous night of work during the parade. I'll chalk this up as yet another good reason to not be working there.

It also turned out to be a good day to take pictures. By the time the dust settled, I had knocked out 460 frames. For those scoring at home, that would be a smidge more than a 19 second film if viewed as such. This phenomena is made possible with digital images. With our old film camera I would have considered myself too shutter happy to have popped off this many frames in a year.

This pictures really demonstrates how Sophia tends to shut down her vision when she using her sense of touch. More on that in a future post...

Tadpole graduation

What can you say? For a whole week we knew them as our adorable tadpole friends and then one day, you look in on them and front legs have been added to back legs and the first forays onto dry land have been made. Before we know it, they will be dropping out of college, moving back to the terrarium, and mooching flightless fruit flies off of us.

On a more serious note, it has been really interesting watching these little guys transform from tadpoles to frogs-- going from herbivores to carnivores and breathing underwater and out of it. Call me sadistic, but I actually enjoy watching them sit stone-like, "hunting" their fruit fly prey before they spring into action and wolf them down in a single bite. They often will obviously be pretending to not look at the fly before the attack. It's the classic no-look scarf. This is pretty slick behaviour coming from an animal that, just last week, knew no greater challenge than grazing on boiled lettuce as it floated by. The behavioural metamorphosis is at least as fascinating as the physical.

Great Wolf Lodge group picture

I had a request to include this group picture from a trip we took in April to the Great Wolf Lodge in Washington. This is a pretty slick outfit. For about a grand you can get a couple of rooms for a night and about a day and a half of access to the indoor water park. It's not something I would recommend to anyone without kids, but it makes a nice treat for the kids every once in a great while.

For fun I have also included an action shot of the huge bucket of water that is periodically dumped on the heads of water park patrons. It is interesting what we will pay large bags of cash to subject ourselves to.