How I See Life » Family

Ok, so maybe we got a bit carried away with the strawberry shortcake…

Kari — Wed, 26 May 2010 06:11:39 +0000

So my cousin Clara and her friend Kate were on their second to last leg of an epic road trip that began in New York and will finish in eastern Washington, and they stayed with us in Sacramento tonight (after driving from the Grand Canyon this morning!!) We dined on Chinese food and finished it up with strawberry shortcake for dessert, polishing off the rest of the strawberries I’d gotten at the farmer’s market on Sunday. OMG SO GOOD.

: This is what happens when I don’t use a recipe and start dumping in ingredients. It tasted great… but I don’t think any of us finished our shortcakes — waaay too much food!! Such a fun evening though!! :-D

My niece, amused by the other baby in the window (her reflection.) :-)

Kari — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 18:46:30 +0000

My niece, amused by the other baby in the window (her reflection.) :-), originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.

I took this yesterday on Christmas, when I was playing with my niece. I loved watching her fascination with the “other baby”–she was giving it big, sloppy kisses on the glass! I missed getting a picture of that, but at least I did get a nice reflection shot. I love how her hands look like they’re glowing–that’s just how the light was reflecting. So neat. :-)

Getting back into the swing of things

Kari — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 02:14:57 +0000

Graduation 007, originally uploaded by Kari_Marie.

I’ve neglected this blog far too long. Some of it’s been laziness, some of it’s been the sad demise of my old laptop and the fact that my new laptop is hideously slow at processing pictures. I have a desktop, but my setup right now really isn’t conducive to long periods of time photo-editing–it’s physically uncomfortable to do so. I need to come up with a better setup!

But in any case, those are still lousy excuses… so I’m going to make the effort to post more, since I really do enjoy this.

So here’s my first post in a few months–it’s my sister, brother, and me after my brother received his masters in teaching from University of Washington. He’s got a job now teaching math at a school in Renton, and couldn’t be more proud of him!! :-)

Easter trees

Kari — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 01:00:55 +0000

We’ve all heard of Christmas trees–anyone ever heard of an Easter tree? My grandma had a couple that were quite pretty. :-)

Easter egg, spotted with rain and backlit by the sun.

Charlie Brown's Easter tree, the "before" version.

Charlie Brown's Easter tree, the "after" version.

A couple more Easter pics

Kari — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 05:38:57 +0000

Adding yet still more Easter pictures of my niece. As always, there are more of this batch available on my Flickr. I’ll put the last bit on here tomorrow, I promise. :-)

Kristie loves this pensive look on her.

I absolutely love the lighting in this one.

Another favorite thing

Kari — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 14:00:36 +0000

So it’s pretty apparent from yesterday’s post that I have a slight issue with collecting books. I have a similar issue with only one other item–scarves. Someday when it’s sunny and I have decent lighting, I’ll get out my scarf collection and take some pictures of all of their loveliness, but that can wait for another day. This post is about the newest (and quite lovely!) addition to my collection. :-)

Yesterday in the mail I received a scarf and hat that my stepmom knitted for me. Thanks so much, Kathy–they are beautiful!!

Scarf and hat.

The hat--soft, fuzzy goodness!!

I love the ends on the scarf--they have this fluted sort of knit. I'm not sure what it's called, but it's really pretty.

Macro (extreme close-up) shot of the scarf yarn. Click the picture for a larger version--it's even neater when it's bigger! The yarn is so soft, and looking at this picture makes me want to dive into a big pile of it. :-)

Annie’s baptism pics

Kari — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:47:55 +0000

I hate to say it, but overall I’m really not thrilled with how these turned out – a lack of forethought as to how to set the shots up really came back to bite me in the butt. The main problem was that when I set up the shot beforehand (before church started) all the sanctuary lights were on, and the spotlights over the baptismal font were off… In fact, I didn’t even realize those spots were there. Whoops. So I put it on, ummm… I think ISO400, set the aperture wide open at f1.4, and stopped down by one, figuring I’d get a bit faster of a shot that way and could just push it up in post-processing (it had been metering at about 1/30.) This is more or less what I do for kickball, and those pics come out fairly well.

Well, when it came time for the baptism, the church lights were dimmed and the spots turned on over the font. Since I’d handed off the camera to Colin’s dad Roger to take the pics so that I could play godmom, I didn’t get a chance to adjust, and frankly, it didn’t occur to me to make adjustments. If I’d been taking the pics, I would have looked at the first one and known immediately what the problem was. However, even if I had, I don’t know that I would have been able to fix it. The shots during the baptism really needed a flash, and I don’t know if I would have wanted to use one at such a solemn moment. So… eh.

I took down the contrast on these as much as I could without graying them out (I also had to bump down the saturation quite a bit!) but they still are really shadowy and contrasty. All I can say is thank goodness for RAW, or these would have… Well, I can’t say for sure, but I have a hard time seeing how they would have been anything but a total loss.

After the service was over and we took more pictures, I still wasn’t thinking, and I didn’t use the flash until the very end, when it dawned on me that that would help. Go easy on me here, I’m still learning this stuff – aside from kickball, I rarely ever shoot indoors, and with kickball, not only is the lighting better, but I can’t use the flash anyway because of factors like distance and speed.

Anyway, enough berating myself for blowing the pictures – here are a few.

Sleeping girl

I baptize you in the name of the Father...

Time for bed again

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