Yack!

Yeah....Great way to spend a three-day weekend....cleaning up the kids barf for the first part of the weekend, and then getting the stomach virus myself right at the end of the weekend. It started Wednesday night with Bre. By Friday, Jack had come down with it. By Friday night, it had spread to Ginger. Wait....not done yet.... Come Saturday morning at three AM, Hannah was jumping off her top bunk, puking in mid-flight on her way down (graphic, I know....so was the clean-up!). We managed to have a decent day on Sunday....actually got everyone out of the house for a little shopping, even though it was nasty and rainy. It looked at that point like I'd escaped the worst of it. I went to bed feeling just fine, but sure enough it hit me about 1 AM and I spent the rest of Monday racked out. So yeah, didn't quite get as much done this weekend as we'd hoped to. Such is life, I guess. I took an additional day off of work this week, in hopes that I wouldn't infect anyone at the office with it.

Despite all the viral yacking, I managed to get out earlier today and snap a couple of photos of Jack and one of the neighbor boys, Mossimo. I took a couple

of minutes tonight and played around with a few of them using several different software programs I'm currently trying out. Here's a few....

(Playing around a bit here with some textures and stuff found online)

(Jack...getting so big...needs a haircut!)

(There's the hair going sideways!)

(This is Mossimo. He and his two brothers all have hair like this)

(Only had one or two moments of sunshine out there today...this was my favorite color shot...was able to bring out the blues in the sky a little with help from Photoshop and a filter or two.)

Nothing earth shattering, but I really wanted to keep up with the blog posts (in hopes of putting something new up once a week, at least!).

More later.

Some recent works....

Been playing around with Photoshop and Lightroom a bunch lately....here's some recent projects using the photos we took this past fall.

Oh geez....

What have I gotten myself into now? A blog?!? Ginger already says I spend too much time on the darn computer as it is! Hehehe...

As I think most are aware, I recently treated the Benson family to a computer upgrade. I replaced our rickety old Windows machine with a sleek, shiny new iMac from Apple. Never mind that two days later, Apple announced bigger, better iMacs that made mine look paltry by comparison...but I digress....

So we're now officially Mac users, and I can't say I miss the old Windows machine....not a lick! The iMac is an absolute pleasure to use in every way and having it has caused me to spend much more time surfing the Internet. I've been spending a bunch of time doing tons of reading on dGrin, Strobist, and my latest favorite, The CoffeeShop. All of that reading has been fueling my creativity for photography and digital imaging so I'm looking for a new outlet to share what I've been working on (and what I hope to continue working on in the future). I guess in the end I see this blog as a more wordy extension of my smugmug site (which is also in need of some attention...hang in there smugy). Hopefully I can use both to better share the happenings of the Haymarket Bensons.