My first photo shoot.

My friend, Sheryl, agreed to let me practice taking pictures of her daughter, her and her mother. It was a beautiful day, we found a nice shady tree at the park and let Maya play away! It was fun, and it tuned out better than I had thought. I just need a little more practice, but you gotta start somewhere right? Here are a few.



































I just LOVE her face in this last one!!!







Thanks for reading!

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Week Numero Dos!

Here is my second week of Y27 (Project 365).

Dad & Kyle: My dad was visiting for the weekend. This day we went to Mall of America and watched all the action going on in the amusement park.

Kyle & Harpo Bridge: I talked about this photo in this blog.

Old Chicago: We finished a leinenkugel's mini tour at one of our favorite drinking places - Old Chicago. We have just a few beers left before we finish the whole World Beer Tour of 110 beers. We will get our name engraved on the 'wall of foam' once we complete them all. We started almost two years ago :-)

Dinner and movie: We grilled out burgers and had the usual with it: tomatoes and cottage cheese!

Tums: I bought this bottle for my wedding day 'bathroom basket'. I have never really had tums before, except as a candy when I was a kid. A few days before I took this picture I had a terrible stomach ache and remembered I had tums in my cupboard from the wedding (4 months ago) I decided to try them! Not sure if they helped because my gut still ended up hurting into the next day, but I do say I LOVE these! I take one everyday - for calicum - yeah right, mainly because they taste good, but also it says on the back you can take 1-2 a day for calcium :-)

Hydrangea: I came home one day and noticed a BLUE bloom! All my other hydrangea blooms have been pink, so I was pretty excited. I didn't even add anything to the soil.

Lighthouse: If you've been following my blog you know all about this shot. We went camping at Split Rock Lighthouse State Park and got to see the 'out of commission' light house, light up for one hour. I don't have a long zoom lens on my DSLR yet, so I pulled out my point and shoot to snap this shot. I was pretty impressed with it.


Thanks for reading!
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Driving home...

On the way home from camping up on the north shore, we stopped at Betty's Pies.  We had heard great things about this place and decided to see for ourselves.  This is also a place Andrew Zimmerman has stopped. They had a long list of pies:


And mmmm the Apple Crunch was so good! So good I forgot to take a picture until I was almost finished, hee hee.


The only thing we had wished was different... we were hoping that the pies were going to be warm, which makes it taste better with the ice cream.

We then proceeded on and stopped in Duluth to stretch our legs and walk harpo a little bit:




And the joys of summer also bring along road work... we were stuck in stand still traffic for about 10 miles. But I was able to get a nice corn field picture out of it :-)



Thanks for reading!
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Superior Hiking Trail = SHT (Part 5)

August 29 & 30th, we went camping up on the north shore of Lake Superior at Split Rock Lighthouse State Park. Here's Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.


Sunday we took a hike along four miles of the Superior Hiking Trail.  The SHT is a 205 mile trail that runs from Two Harbors to the Canadian border, along the edge of Lake Superior. Here is a map of the whole trail. Now this was REAL hiking, not the state park kind we usually do.  People backpack along these trails and camp. There is a shuttle schedule so you can choose to do as much or as little as you want. Since part of it runs through the various state parks along Lake Superior, we just did what was near the state park we were staying at. The trails looked like this:
   
(Harpo might actually be peeing on a shrub in that last shot, lol)

It was pretty rocky and rough terrain, but boy was it fun. And since we were out of a state park, Harpo got to get off his leash for a while, which he loved!


The part that we took went up along the southwest side of the Split Rock River (which runs into lake superior), then crossed the river and went back down on the north east side. It was pretty being able to follow the river up and see some of the pretty falls along the way:




1.5 miles into the trail we came to THE split rock. The river runs right behind it.


The bridge to cross was about 1.8 miles up the river (or maybe 2.05 miles ahead, not sure if our map was reading from the first bridge that was no longer there or the second bridge):


While stopping to eat lunch here:


I had eaten an apple. I asked Kyle if he thought he could throw it to the other side of the river. Sure enough when we were coming back down the other side (probably 45 min to an hour later) we found it, RIGHT in the middle of the trail!!!


The Panorama that is at the top of this post was taken at the top lookout area of the SHT, over looking Lake Superior, pretty breath taking - not only the hike up there, but the view too ;-)

Overall it was some of the funnest hiking we have done, but boy did our feet hurt after that!!!
Thanks for reading!
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Good Morning Lake Superior (Part 4)

August 29 & 30th, we went camping up on the north shore of Lake Superior at Split Rock Lighthouse State Park. Here's Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.


We got up early Sunday morning to watch the sunrise on the lake. I wasn't sure if Kyle was going to get up with me, but he did. And he said how glad he was, besides we went to bed right afterwards again :-)

I had a friend ask how I got such amazing shots, and really it is just a combination of shutter speed (how fast the opening of the camera opens and closes to let light in) and aperture setting (the diameter of the hole that is inside the lens which also controls how much light enters the sensor). Like I mentioned before I took a LOT of pictures this weekend and one way I get such cool shots is trial and error.  There are a LOT of photos I took this morning that don't look very good at all, but out of all of those, I did manage to get some pretty amazing sunrise shots.  I'm still learning, I hope that the more I practice the less 'practice' shots I have to take :-)

Really I have nothing else to say because I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.






We found a red rock, so I decided to be a little artsy with this one:


This is probably my favorite one of the morning: (and my daily pick for my project Y27) -this one is also SOOC (straight-out-of-camera)


Yeah we look a little tired here, it's funny how it almost looks like I photoshopped us in, but I didn't. I used a fill flash so our faces would expose properly but had my camera settings exposed for the sky.


This last one is actually three shots at different exposures combined into one. That way I was able to get the rocks exposed nicely along with the sky exposed.


Thanks for reading, I just have a few more parts left! ;-)
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