Winter In Oregon

We spent the day at Benson Sno-Park on Sunday.

There were 2 full carloads of family!

We spent several hours there.

I usually watch everyone else ride their sleds down the hill.

And take photos.

I played with these at Picnik.

They look much more dramatic than the originals!

I hope you had a fun weekend too!

Oh, For Evan's Sake!

This is my grandson Evan.

We spent the day together.
Just him and I.

That doesn't happen very often.
(One of my New Year's Resolution's too)

I asked him if I could take his photo and he said "Sure".

He sounded much happier about it then he looked.

He's almost 4 and the middle grandchild.

He is adorable and

I LOVE his beautiful eyes.

 He's a sweetie too despite this evidence to the contrary!

And he's r.e.a.l.l.y good at making faces!

Photo Negatives Discovery: Before and After

As I was searching through my big box of photos, I came across an old negative envelope. I really don't know how I came to be in possession of it.  There were 7 negative sets with 2 square photos on each one.
I tried to look at them by holding them up to the light and I could make out the outline of several children.
I realized the children were myself, my brother and sister.
I have only seen a few of these photos previously so I am thrilled to have found the negatives!

I looked on-line to see where I could have them developed into photos and discovered that I probably couldn't!
Somewhere in the comments of others....a few had success scanning them and then inverting them with their photo software.
So I cut each negative apart, scanned each one separately and inverted the photos using Picnik.

I was laughing as I saw each photo go from a negative to a real photo!

We were such cute kids too!
I'm the older little girl.

These are from about 1967 or so.

My, how time flies......and

I see how much my grandchildren
resemble all of us as kids.

My New Lens and The Cute Boy

I love my Canon Rebel XT and I just got a new lens for it and I tried it out today! Here is my youngest grandson Ezra. He will be 1 year old next month. Isn't he adorable?

Picnik Photo Editing Fun!

I took this photo last summer about the same time I discovered the photo editing site Picnik. You can upload your photos and do all kinds of fun and creative things with them. The photo above is one I took in my back yard. I uploaded it to Picnik and decided to experiment with different text, etc. You can make your photos look like a sepia tone, black and white, holga style, ortinish and a lot more including many different frames and a large variety of collage styles. You can blur around the edges of your photos too for that "fuzzy" look that is so popular.

You can also edit, fix, crop and rotate your photos. You can add text, effects and embellishments. I love the collage feature, especially the fancy collages that you can use in scrapbooks and cards. You can even change eye color in your photos for fun!

It also links up to Picasa, Facebook, Flickr, MySpace, Photobucket and more.

It's free for most of the features or you can pay $24.95 for Premium Picnik to have unlimited use of all the features for a year. I'm paying for it because I wanted to be able to use everything. You can really do a lot for free! I have enjoyed it and it's helped when I've made some banners and avatars for my etsy shop (none that I am using right now) but I did use it to add the text to the banner on my other blog here. This sounds like an advertisement for Picnik! I swear I'm not getting paid! Just wanted to share. See it here: http://picnik.com

Fun Project: Make Your Own Pinhole Camera

I found this website using StumbleUpon the other day! Make these for World Pinhole Camera Day! Here is the link to the PDF patterns for making each of these colorful and unique cameras: http://www.corbis.readymech.com/en

I passed this on to my daughter, Kristina because she loves photography and I thought she'd enjoy making some of these. Even if you never use these for their intended purpose.....what a fun project to display! Each camera has printable patterns and directions.

I don't know much about pinhole cameras but thought this was a fun family project and it's a cheap one too! Give it a try!