Allie’s new classic soccer team

Allie tried  out for the Northeast United U11 girls team and made the squad. She will be playing with 5th graders in the fall. She has a busy summer of soccer planned, she is doing 3 soccer camps (U of P, Concordia, and Bernie Fagan) and she is practicing 3 days a week with the NEU Mystics. We also practice with a bunch of her friends from her old teams (Alameda Soccer Club) on Wednesday nights. She also has 4 tournaments planned over the summer. Her Alameda team took best in state for their age group and they were honored at a Timbers game.

Soccer pictures

Finally got around to updating some of Allie’s soccer pictures. She played on the Revolution for Fall Rec and played for the Force for fall/winter indoor Futsal. She really enjoyed getting to know all the girls. She is currently playing on a different Futsal team with a group of new girls and practices Classic Soccer on Sundays. I have posted some images from both the Revolution and the Force teams. You can view them here.

Christmas at the cabin

Due to the snow and power failure, we barely made it in, and after two days of snowfall, we almost didn’t make it out. What a great weekend, we will never forget this Christmas. Huge snowball fights and sledding were the highlights for the kids.
More pics coming……check back soon

Audrey in from Arizona

Audrey flew in for a few days last week, the stay was short but sweet. Alyssa made a sign for Allie to hold while we waited at the airport. Grandma and Grandpa met us at the airport for a quick dinner, Marko joined us later, then we all waited for her arrival. From the airport we took her home and her and Allie stayed up late building a Fairy house. We got up and cooked breakfast, Alyssa, Jenny and Ian came over about 10:30, and G&G a bit later. The girls perfomed a sweet little dance number and the rest of the day was spent lounging and playing. Wendi cooked dinner and we all ate spaghetti and salad. Grandma took the girls to Markos to spend the night. Allie took Monday off to spend with the day downtown, lunch at Jakes and shopping. Audrey left on Tuesday. Rumor is Marko will post some images on his Flickr account, here is the link to his portfolio. Great to see Audrey!

The rest of the photos can be seen here.

Historic Daymusic Pictures

Nathan was just over with Nick’s first guitar lesson. He said he had posted a bunch of old historic Daymusic pictures. Looks like there was alot of work finding, scanning and posting the images, its great to have these! Sounds like exciting things happening with the building and the theater…….. You can check them out on Nathan’s Flickr page.

Abbie Turns 2

Well a little bit late, but I posted a few pictures of Abbie’s second birthday party at the house. Grandma and Grandpa came, Abbie really took a liking to ripping into her presents. She also likes to sing ‘Happy Birthday to me’.

Thanksgiving 2007 at the Cabin

Well Thanksgiving at the cabin went by fast. We arrived Wednesday afternoon, there was a few inches of snow outside, Grandma and Grandpa had the inside toasty warm for our arrival. Mark, Jenny and the kids came Thursday morning with some fancy doughnuts for breakfast. Many walks through the woods, alot of great meals, including a huge 27 lb turkey and a couple of silly hacky sack games were shared. Some of the images are ready to view here. You can post comments and memories on here if you would like. I was really happy with how the pictures turned out. I browsed through Nicks pics and he has some great ones too, I will post those as soon as we get through them. I think we took about 400 images combined. We won’t post them all, but will sort through them and post a few from each event. Hey Nick is starting to post some of his own pictures of Thanksgiving on his blog, you can view them here.

Halloween 2007

Halloween was a great night for the kids, weather was warm and fairly dry. Nick spent his night with buddies and Allie was with her friends cross town, we all hooked up later in the evening and finished the night together. We stayed out until 9:30 and the kids both had huge bags of candy to show for it. I only took a few images before we left the house. Nick dressed as Darth Vader and the girls were both Fairies.  The rest of the images can be seen here.

HDR and Draganizer

     Here is another example of HDR, but with a twist. After converting multimple images in Photomatix, the image was then Draganized. This is an action in photoshop that is easily installed, you can download the action here.

The procedure seems to be sharpening, creating an overall color tone, “light painting” for shading, and adding “grunge” or dark details (depending on the subject of course). The action walks you through all these steps, and provides many opportunities for making your own chosen adjustments along the way. The Dragan technique (and the action) seem to work best on images that are sharp and detailed.

 Shot this in Tillamook with the 5D and a cheap kit lens (bad vignetting). I wasn’t happy with the bottom part of the image, the burning of the forground looks like an actual fire burn. I think I over did that. But I was real happy with how I took an image that from the camera looked worthless and turned it into something somewhat attractive.

Portland’s Union Train Station HDR

         This image of Portland’s Union Train Station was taken at night, I combined 3 images (different exposures) from RAW. Left is straight from camera, on the right is the HDR conversion.  I used Photmatix to combine the images and then tweaked the master file with CS2. Below is the definition of HDR:

high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques. The intention of HDRI is to accurately represent the wide range of intensity levels found in real scenes ranging from direct sunlight to shadows.

HDRI was originally developed for use with purely computer-generated images. Later, methods were developed to produce a high dynamic range image from a set of photographs taken with a range of exposures. With the rising popularity of digital cameras and easy-to-use desktop software, the term “HDR” is now popularly used to refer to the process of tone mapping together with bracketed exposures of normal digital images, giving the end result a high, often exaggerated dynamic range. This composite technique is different from, and generally of lower quality than, the production of an image from a single exposure of a sensor that has a native high dynamic range. Tone mapping is also used to display HDR images on devices with a low native dynamic range, such as a computer screen.